Beat Generation and Postmodernism: Deconstructing the Narratives of America

Home , Beat Generation, Howl, Kaddish (poem)

2015

Nicolas Deskos

10623272

MA Literary Studies: English Literature and Culture Supervisor: Dr Roger Eaton University of Amsterdam

Contents Introduction 3 The American Dream 3 The Beat Generation 5 Postmodernism 8 Outline 9 Chapter 1: On the Road to a Postmodern Identity 11 Promise of the Road and Its Reality 12 What it Means to Be American 15 Searching for a Transcendent Identity 17 Chapter 2: Deconstructing Burroughs’ ‘Meaningless Mosaic’ 22 Language as a System of Control 23 Metafiction in Naked Lunch 27 Chapter 3: Ginsberg’s Mythical Heroes 32 Fragmentation of the Self 34 Heroes of the Past 39 Conclusion 43 Works Cited 47

Introduction

This research aims to reinterpret and recontextualise the principal Beat writers – Jack

Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs – from the theoretical perspective of postmodernism. I aim to go beyond the traditional interpretation of the Beat Generation as a countercultural, counterhegemonic movement and challenge the “binary opposition between the establishment culture and a dissenting counterculture” (Martinez 7). Through the interpretative paradigm of postmodernism, I want to show that the Beat writers were concerned with the tension between the myths of America and its reality, appropriating one’s identity in the face of a dominant culture, and questions surrounding being, existence and reality. In doing so, I will locate their texts within the discourses of the mainstream as opposed to at its margins. Thus, I will argue that Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg deconstruct, in their own ways, the official and mythical narratives of America, particularly the narrative on which the country is built: the American Dream. I have chosen Burroughs’

Naked Lunch, Ginsberg’s Howl and Kerouac’s On the Road as the texts in this thesis, not only because they best represent the Beat Generation as a whole, but also because they all concern the issue of appropriating identity in the face of a dominant culture.

The American Dream

The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, the ideals of freedom, equality, and opportunity traditionally held to be available to every American. However, the universality of the American Dream is inherently problematic. American writers are interested in the social and cultural implications of disillusionment and inequality associated with the

American ideal. As a recurring theme in literature, the American Dream is frequently examined, challenged and deconstructed. Moreover, the American Dream has maintained unique relevance across the historical, regional, and cultural diversity of the American nation. The concept of the American Dream is still relevant today in popular culture with critically acclaimed television series such as Breaking Bad and Mad Men which both portray

the failure of the American Dream to satisfy. Historian James Truslow Adams popularized the phrase the ‘American Dream’ in his 1931 book, Epic of America:

But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be

better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or

achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately,

and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of

motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each

woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be

recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or

position (404).

For Adams, the American Dream contains the ideals of freedom, equality, and opportunity which are held to be available to every American citizen, regardless of social class.

However, in post-war America the American Dream was redefined as a life of personal happiness and material comfort as sought by individuals.

The decade following World War II is often described as one of the most prosperous economic times in American history. The immediate years unfolding after World War II were generally ones of stability and prosperity for Americans. The nation reconverted its war machine back into a consumer culture and found jobs for 12 million returning veterans.

Increasing numbers of American citizens enjoyed high wages, larger houses, better schools, more cars and home comforts such as vacuum cleaners, washing machines, etc. As a result, with money in their pockets and the constantly growing consumer culture, Americans in the 1950s could optimistically pursue the American Dream. Thus, following the Second

World War, the American Dream is no longer an individual pursuit. The consumer society that rapidly emerged in the years during and following the war placed emphasis on the nation. For example, the American consumer was praised as a patriotic citizen in the 1950s, contributing to the ultimate success of the American way of life. Historian, Lizabeth Cohen in

her book, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, describes this new phenomenon:

In the post-war Consumers' Republic, a new ideal emerged -- the purchaser as citizen -- as

an alluring compromise. Now the consumer satisfying personal material wants actually served

the national interest, since economic recovery after a decade and a half of depression and

war depended on a dynamic mass consumption economy (8).

According to Cohen, in post-war consumer culture the desire for material gain was, in fact, a way in which one could serve the national interest. In terms of the American Dream, the emphasis was now on material gain and stability as opposed to opportunity and self- development. Luxuries and unnecessary consumer products acted as a social mechanism allowing people to identify socio-economic status and social stratification. As a result, the

American Dream is no longer the measure of the quality of one’s individual character but more the measure of the value of the material goods that one has accumulated.

The Beat Generation

During this time, fiction was “populated by juvenile offenders, wildly rebellious young men, young men victimized by American society, hipsters travelling in constellations disconnected from mainstream society young and old people suffering from some sort of mental illness”

(Yannella 70). A group of disillusioned writers, who looked to escape from these socio- cultural conditions, emerged and would later become known as the Beat Generation. Feeling subordinated and controlled by a world of monotonous consumption, the Beat Generation writers struggled to find a place in this prized American Dream. In response to this commodity-driven society, the Beats began to question and deconstruct the “social given”

(Tytell 9). As a result, they became “a crystallization of a sweeping discontent with American virtues of progress and power” (Tytell 4). According to Eric Monstram, the Beat ‘philosophy’ included an escape from social conventions and the rejection of middle class values:

The Beats were a criticism of American complacency under the Ike-Nixon regime, an

expression of new forms of prose, and poetry and an exploration of consciousness, which

joined the dissent of existing Bohemias . . . to produce a distinct style of literature and living,

based on disaffiliation, poverty, anarchic individualism and communal living. A relaxation of

'square' (puritan, middle-class, respectable) attitudes towards sex, drugs, religion and art

became the opposing uniformity of 'beat' (28).

Thus, the Beat Generation questioned the validity of the so-called 'American Dream' by trespassing both legal and moral boundaries in the search of personal freedom and exuberant means of living and being. Emerging in the late 1940s in the aftermath of the

Second World War, the Beat Generation is viewed as an influential cultural and literary movement.

Bill Morgan, on the other hand, believes that we should “think of the Beat Generation as a social circle created by Allen Ginsberg and his friends instead of a literary movement”

(131). While this may be true, the cultural phenomenon that derived from Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking novel, On The Road, and the cultural legacy of the generation as a whole, suggests that the Beat Generation was more than just a small group of friends. In an interview shortly before his death, Ginsberg concurred that even though the “Beats lacked a specific philosophy, they shared ‘an ethos’ of themes and preoccupations representing a move towards spiritual liberation and away from "the last centuries of mechanization and homogenization of cultures, the mechanical assault on human nature and all nature culminating in the bomb" (qtd. in Stiles 67). It is important to note, however, that the literary movement was the result, not the aim, of the spiritual quest in which the Beats were engaged.

In the 1950s, the Beat Generation was more and more preoccupied with the need for a global faith in humanity and nature which they believed was missing in an increasingly materialistic and conformist American society. Bill Morgan writes: “At a time when the

average American was content and wanted to enjoy postwar prosperity quietly, the Beats sensed that an essential spiritual element was missing” (248). Moreover, according to John

Tytell, “the Fifties were times of extra-ordinary insecurity, of profound powerlessness as far as individual effort was concerned” (qtd. in George-Warren 59). The Cold War political landscape only exacerbated the consumerist conformity and the standardisation of individuality in 1950s and 1960s America. In response to this:

Ginsberg and Kerouac made personality the center and subject of their work. In the

Fifties, when the voice of personality seemed so endangered by anonymity of

sameness, the Beats discovered a natural counter for the silence of the day in a new

sense of self, a renaissance of the romantic impulse to combat unbelievably superior

forces (qtd. in George-Warren 62).

As Tytell explains, Beat literature attempted to inscribe an identity and subvert the dominant culture in society. They wanted to make their fellow Americans aware of the dominating discourses of society and encourage them to stop accepting this one-sided narrative. Their writings were therefore important in deconstructing the social given and advocating freedom of action.

This thesis aims to go beyond the traditional countercultural reading of the Beats as a movement that rejected “the glut of postwar materialism and an obsessive national conformism” (qtd. in George-Warren 57). While the aftermath of their works did herald a change of consciousness in the country, we can still locate their writings within the discourses of the mainstream as opposed to at its margins. Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956),

William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), the canonical examples of Beat Literature, are all concerned with the tension between the myths of America and its reality, appropriating one’s identity in the face of a dominant culture and questions surrounding being, existence and reality. Therefore, at the heart of Beat writing there is a deconstructive tendency which is commonly found in later postmodern literature. It

is for this reason why this thesis aims to reinterpret the three most important writings from the Beat Generation by situating them in postmodern theory. Seeing Beat Literature through the lens of postmodernism opens up new interpretations when it comes to the relationships of these texts with the dominating discourses of post-war America.

Postmodernism

As explained above, this thesis takes a theoretical approach to the writings of the Beat

Generation by situating them within the theory of postmodernism. Linda Hutcheon claims that:

the postmodern’s initial concern is to de-naturalize some of the dominant features of our way

of life; to point out that those entities that we unthinkingly experience as natural (they might

even include capitalism, patriarchy, liberal humanism) are in fact ‘cultural’; made by us, not

given to us (2).

According to Hutcheon, postmodernism’s first concern is questioning and challenging our established ideas and our acceptance of conventions and institutions. For Christopher

Butler, postmodernism is a response to the fact that populations are unaware of being controlling by discourses of power. He writes:

The analysis of the relation between discourse and power had a further and important consequence for postmodernists. It led to a distinctive view of the nature of the self which was a challenge to the individualist rationalism, and the emphasis on personal autonomy, of most liberals. Indeed, the term preferred by postmodernists to apply to individuals is not so much ‘self’ as ‘subject’, because the latter term implicitly draws attention to the ‘subject-ed’ condition of persons who are, whether they know it or not, ‘controlled’ (if you are on the left) or ‘constituted’ (if you are in the middle) by the ideologically motivated discourses of power which predominate in the society they inhabit (Butler 50).

Thus, by raising questions about the reality of fictional worlds, postmodern writers engage themselves politically (Malpas 25).

Jean-François Lyotard writes that the “the role of postmodernism is thus to perform an immanent critique of the day-to-day structures or realism” (qtd. in Malpas 30). According to Lyotard, the postmodern author breaks down norms and challenges beliefs “by showing the contradictions the culture contains, what it represses, refuses to recognise or makes unpresentable” (30). From this perspective, Beat Generation literature poses a challenge to the established society by revealing its cultural contradictions. To expose this, Beat literature transgresses, in the postmodern sense, the “borders between high art and mass or popular culture and those between discourses of art and discourses of the world (especially history)”

(Hutcheon 35). Using postmodernism as theoretical approach, this thesis focuses on how

Howl, Naked Lunch and On the Road all respond to the dominant discourses of the time and in doing so, how they open up questions about identity, society and language.

Outline

The first chapter will focus on Jack Kerouac’s generation-defining novel, On the Road. This essay aims to go beyond a countercultural reading of Kerouac’s novel and reinterpret it through the paradigm of postmodernism. Brian McHale’s ontological structures become in my analysis the key to understanding Kerouac’s novel. According to McHale the ontological dominant in postmodern fiction concerns problems of modes of being. In other words, the world itself comes into question. Using this as the basis of my analysis, this chapter points out that the myths of America are called into question by Kerouac’s protagonist as he travels across the continent in search for a mythical American identity. When we connect McHale’s ontological dominant with Kerouac’s novel, it becomes clear that On the Road is not about rebellion, it is about appropriating one’s identity in a new cultural moment. In Sal’s case, what it means to be a white, middle-class man in post-war America. Sal’s failure to find an authentic identity in his journey portrays the problems of the American romantic notion of identity and the individual in 1950s America. Thus, when situated within McHale’s

postmodern theory, On the Road becomes a novel concerned with ontological questions surrounding being, existence and reality in the face of a dominant culture.

The second chapter responds to the interpretative challenges of William S.

Burroughs’ Naked Lunch by applying a postmodern reading in order to deconstruct and make sense of Burroughs’ fragmented narrative. Naked Lunch’s nonlinear narrative structure has continued to distract readers and more importantly, critics from a comprehensive appreciation of Burroughs’ seminal work. However, when situated within the theory of postmodernism, we can read Burroughs’ novel as deconstructing the falsity of the dominating American cultural order. In this chapter, I will argue that Burroughs uncovers and subsequently mocks the controlling and hypocritical impulses inherent in American culture and the country’s collective psyche. This chapter focuses on the dehumanizing rhetoric of Cold War America to show how Naked Lunch echoes the postmodern claim that we cannot rely on our so-called reality because language systems are inherently unreliable cultural constructs. Finally, through an analysis of the novel’s own narrative technique, I will point out that Naked Lunch exhibits how language can construct reality and contaminate it at the same time.

The third chapter attempts to reinterpret and go beyond the widely accepted critical reading of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl as purely countercultural. Using Jean-François Lyotard’s theory on postmodern critique, I argue that Ginsberg’s poem shows the “contradictions [that

American] culture contains, what it represses, refuses to recognize or makes unpresentable”

(qtd. in Malpas, 30).Therefore, I approach the text as a product of, not an emancipation from, the national discourses of the time. This chapter focuses on Ginsberg’s rebellious heroes in the first part of the poem and points out that the blurring of identities in Howl has the effect of destabilising the depersonalisation and anonymity of the individual in post-war America. I argue that this allows Ginsberg brings into question the dominant discourses of society.

Thus, I read Ginsberg’s poem as a tension between the myths of America and its reality.

Chapter 1

On the Road to a Postmodern Identity

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is quintessentially about the American Dream. Sal and Dean seek to rediscover the original American Dream by chasing a parallel dream based on the pursuit of kicks and escape from convention. At a time when people were closing themselves off from one another, Kerouac’s characters in On the Road look to escape the conformity and isolation associated with the post-war consumer culture. According to Ann

Charters, Kerouac’s first biographer, “Challenging the complacency and prosperity of post- war America hadn't been Kerouac's intent when he wrote his novel but he had created a book that heralded a change of consciousness in the country” (Kerouac 28). However, in spite of this, the “writings of the beat generation have long been seen as a space of cultural and political contestation” (Haslam 444). This essay aims to go beyond a countercultural reading of Kerouac’s novel and reinterpret it through the paradigm of postmodernism. Brian

McHale’s ontological structures become in this analysis the key to understanding On the

Road while simultaneously suggesting an alternative perspective from which to approach

Kerouac’s seminal novel.

Brian McHale in Postmodern Fiction argues that postmodernism is a transition from problems of knowing to problems of modes of being. In other words, the world itself comes into question. On the Road is “informed by Depression-era anxieties of what American represents as opposed to what it might and should represent” (Spangler 308). The myths of

America are called into question by Kerouac’s protagonist as he travels across the continent in search for an authentic American identity. When we connect McHale’s ontological dominant with Kerouac’s novel, it becomes clear that On the Road is not about rebellion, it is about appropriating one’s identity in a new cultural moment. In Sal’s case, what it means to be a white, middle-class man in post-war America. Sal’s failure to find an authentic identity in his journey portrays the problems of the American romantic notion of identity and the individual in 1950s America. Thus, when situated within McHale’s postmodern theory, On

the Road becomes a novel concerned with ontological questions surrounding being, existence and reality in the face of a dominant culture.

Promise of the Road and Its Reality

The iterant version of the American Dream which Sal and Dean follow appears to be

“conceived out of boundless space accessible to all”, allowing both pioneers and latecomers to “progressively appropriate an entire virgin continent” (Anctil xviii). The myth of America

“includes the idea that when present circumstances become intolerable, one needs only to start fresh – by taking to the road – to create a new Eden in a new corner of land” (Spangler

316). For Kerouac’s characters, the road is an escape route from the repressive cultural conditions of post-war America. While the mass media and the majority of the population agreed that America was in a time of prosperity, the Beats wanted to show fellow Americans that the nation was in a cultural lockdown (Spangler 316). The novel’s cultural dissent, then, derives from the search for a more authentic experience: “This is the story of America.

Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do. So what if a bunch of men talk in loud voices and drink in the night?” (Kerouac 61). Sal and Dean travel across the continent trespassing both legal and moral boundaries in the search of personal freedom and exuberant means of living and being.

Life on the road, Sal believes, will satisfy his quest for spiritual enlightenment, authentic experience and sexual liberation. At the start of his journey, anticipating the adventures ahead and the ultimate fulfilment of his spiritual aspirations, the narrator states:

“Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me” (Kerouac 10). As Jason Haslam claims, Sal’s journey elaborates on a “romantic quest narrative”, Kerouac’s protagonist can only reach such ideals when is he is moving and therefore transcending the spatial and temporal specifics of his own life and surroundings (Haslam 449). On the road, Sal can therefore break away from the ideological structures of middle class whiteness in which he finds himself, in search of the

‘real’ American Dream. Recalling existing road narratives, Sal invokes a sense of nostalgia for an idealised America:

I'd been pouring over maps of the United States in Paterson for months, even reading books

about the pioneers and savoring names like Platte and Cimarron and so on, and on the

roadmap was one long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely

(11).

However, on the first day of his quest, he recognizes the futility of taking a single road to the heart of the country: “It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes” (12). Here, Kerouac sets up the tension between representation and reality which continues throughout On the Road and accounts for a destabilising of the myth of America.

As Regina Weinreich has pointed out, Kerouac’s road is “less a physical place and more a conceit or poetic map of an interior landscape, an America that exists only in a dream vision” (196). The tension between the dreamscape Sal follows and the reality he observes results in the obsolescence of the master narrative of America. As “ideology gives us a dream of the world rather a ‘direct’ or unmediated experience of it”, Sal soon becomes disillusioned with the promise of America (Richardson 214). At the end of part one of On the

Road, Sal, desperately bored and mildly depressed, sets off from New York City in search of adventure and inspiration in the West of the country. After weeks of dreamy anticipation, the narrator writes: “I looked greedily out the window: stucco houses and palms and drive-ins, the whole mad thing, the ragged promise land, the fantastic end of America” (Kerouac 74).

However, the promise and escape symbolised by the west is unfulfilled, the “cultural and economic evils of the day do not evaporate into the realization of the American Dream”

(Spangler 319). Sal soon realizes that the country’s exuberant propaganda does not fit the reality: “LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold

in the winter but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle” (Kerouac 77). He continues:

Handsome queer boys who had come to Hollywood to be cowboys walked around, wetting

their eyebrows with hincty fingertip. The most beautiful little gone gals in the world cut by in

slacks; they came to be starlets; they ended up in drive-ins (78).

Here, Kerouac sets up the opposite between the American Dream and its crushing reality while at the same time, revealing the power of national fiction to inspire belief. Sal, and those he observes, are nostalgic for a place that never existed which accounts for, as Mark

Richardson describes, “[On the Road’s] distinctive and very American mood of elegiac optimism: a mixture of regret for what is missing, and fond anticipation of what, according to our covenant with the gods, is supposed to lie ahead” (230).

Mark Richardson wonders whether or not On the Road believes in the mythology of

America on which it depends, claiming that Kerouac seems openly to question the faith his narrator Sal Paradise has in Dean Moriarty and what he represents. That is, “a peculiarly intense and charismatic masculinity, a vital relation to the body, cultural and spiritual authenticity, the promise of America itself” (Richardson 218). Indeed, the novel's melancholy stems from Dean's, and America's, failure to enact fully Sal's idealisation. In California, Sal laments: “Where is Dean and why isn’t he concerned about our welfare? I lost faith in him that year” (Kerouac 155). Sal cannot appropriate the land in the same way that Dean does, and as a result, Sal loses faith in the master narrative of America. Ellen G. Friedman claims that the master narratives are the “contexts of the beats’ rebellion. The beats, in their very opposition, legitimate master narratives and thus position themselves, in some ways, outside modernity” (250). However, Kerouac modifies canonical narratives in On the Road in an attempt to redefine and reconfigure existing mythologies. While his approach does

“legitimate master narratives”, he also deconstructs them, delineating Jean-Francois

Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern condition as the obsolescence of master narratives.

Thus, the promise of the road and its disappointing reality brings the master narrative of

America into question.

What it Means to Be American

Sal’s experience on the road not only contests the master narrative of America, it also leads him to question his own American identity. Dean, unlike Sal, never loses faith in the ideology of America. He embodies the nation’s exuberant optimism: “we know America, we’re at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it’s the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do” (Kerouac 109). Sal, on the other hand, unable to find a place in American consumer society, epitomises the alienation, disillusionment and depression of the post-war generation. When Sal arrives back in New

York, he observes the stationary urban life that defines commercial America:

Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around the

American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour,

too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New

York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad

dream – grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful

cemetery cities beyond Long Island City, the high towers of the land – the other end of the

land, the place where Paper America is born (96).

Sal, constantly looking to transcend death and temporality, cannot find a place in the financial America’s financial capital, associating the suburban ideal with the image of burial.

Nor can he identify with the lost souls in the West:

We wandered around, carrying our bundles of rags in the narrow romantic streets. Everybody

looked like a broken-down movie extra, a withered starlet; disenchanted stunt-men, midget

auto-racers, poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness,

handsome, decadent, Casanova-ish men, puffy-eyed motel blondes, hustlers, pimps, whores,

masseurs, bellhops – a lemon lot, and how’s a man going to make a living with a gang like

that? (Kerouac 154).

In both cases, disillusion and perception are inextricably linked, complicating Sal’s own sense of identity and ultimately, what it means to be American.

Robert Holton argues that On the Road “contributed significantly to the alteration of post-war culture's universe of possibilities by making an image of white male subjectivity defined in terms of alienation, rebelliousness, intensity and spontaneity widely accessible- qualities” (266). Throughout the novel, Sal sense of identity is always associated with the geography of America:

I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen

. . . I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen

strange seconds. I wasn’t really scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my

whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing

line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it

happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon (15).

As Jason Haslam writes, “Opposed to this very modernist feeling of death and alienation sits

Dean, who seems to find a new sense of authenticity and identity beyond tradition and beyond the structures of the dominant society” (454). What the road does offer is an escape from temporal boundaries and, in turn, an escape from one’s own identity. Sal and Dean’s

“desire to transcend time is ultimately a desire to escape the ideological structures around them and to escape their own "dreary" life as white men” (Haslam 455). Therefore,

Kerouac’s characters reject the fixed notion of identity in their search for a more authentic, transcendent identity.

Searching for a Transcendent Identity

Kerouac’s characters become Deleuzian nomads, temporarily deterritorialized from the

American space. Defined by French postmodern philosophers, Giles Deleuze and Felix

Guattari, deterritorialization is the eradication of social, political, or cultural practices from their native places and populations. ‘Nomadism’ is a lifestyle that exists outside of the organizational ‘State’. As explained by Deleuze and Guattari, the nomadic way of life is characterized by movement across space, conflicting with the rigid boundaries of the State:

The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he

is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question

is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although

the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the

reverse happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left

behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points,

but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a

direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo (380).

The nomad is unrestrained by dominant systems and characterized by constant movement and change, constantly in the middle or between points. Dean and Sal’s “rejection of fixed place is emblematic of Beat attempts to escape a spatial control that becomes intertwined with temporal constraint” (Mortenson 55).

However, Sal is unable to escape the ideological structures of middle-class whiteness, despite his efforts to escape time and deterritorialize himself. As a result, he turns to America’s marginalized racial others. According to Robert Holton, the “postmodern desire for a heterogeneous, fellahin world, while scandalous at the time, offered the Beats a sense of renewed possibility, of release from conventional white middle-class desires” (268). When walking in the Denver coloured section, Sal wishes he “were a Negro, feeling that the best white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks,

darkness, music, not enough night” (Kerouac 163). He wishes he could be “a Denver

Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap”, or he ‘‘could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America” (Kerouac 164). As a ‘white man’ disillusioned, he

“idealizes the lives of visible minorities because he believes they know who they are, and they are comfortable with who they are – a comfort he has not quite found” (Skinazi 95).

While Kerouac, as Friedman and Holton claim, legitimises master narratives by reproducing racist stereotypes that are embedded in America’s cultural discourse, from a postmodern perspective, they portray the problems of the American romantic notion of identity and the individual. The representational clash between the narrator’s historical and mythical projections and the geographical America he discovers results in his fluid, shifting self.

Mikhail Bakhtin writes that, on the road, “the spatial and temporal paths of the most varied people – representatives of all social classes, estates, religions, nationalities, ages – intersect at one spatial and temporal point” (243). He continues: “On the road the spatial and temporal series defining human fates and lives combine with one another in distinctive ways, even as they become more complex and concrete by the collapse of social distances” (244).

According to Bakhtin, the historically specific divisions between people break down because of the movement in space and time on the road. As Jason Haslam has noted, Kerouac’s

“chronotopic resistance to dominant visions of the United States brings with it a problematic identity politics (or at least baggage) of its own, specifically, in terms of the racialization of the spatial and temporal representation of transcendent identity” (446). Sal’s idealisation of

America’s marginalized others, and desire for transcendent identity beyond cultural and hierarchical structures, indicates that his ‘membership’ in “white masculinity and therefore, synecdochically, his connection to the dominant culture is, at best, unstable” (Haslam 455).

Jean Baudrillard, in Simulations, writes about a postmodern sense of “mourning for the real” which, for Sal, is a nostalgia for the vanishing American ‘real’.

The fellahin thus becomes the sign of the real, a “device which allows him, a white male, a means of reflecting on himself-at times even deflecting the difficulties of selfhood- more than it provides insight into the experience of the marginalized other” (Holton 227). As

Sal and Dean drive through Mexico towards the end of the novel, Sal observes the fellahin world:

They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for

something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the

poor broken delusion of it. They didn’t know that a bomb had come that could crack all our

bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday,

and stretching our hands in the same, same way (Kerouac 273).

Sal’s observation reveals more about the problems of white identity than it does about the fellahin people he encounters. Full of restless anxiety and depression, this passage is permeated by Cold War tensions with its allusions to destruction and the end of mankind. He sees, in the apparent innocence of the fellahin people, a fantasy of freedom and an escape from white bourgeois life.

However, in the end, Sal recognizes the futility of finding transcendence beyond and disconnected from historical and cultural contexts. He states:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching

the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable

huge bulge over to the West coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the

immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they

let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?

the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just

before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks

and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody

besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean

Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty (280).

On the Road ends with its narrator recognizing the impossibility of escaping the boundaries of time and space. Ending with a sense of loss inflicted with hope, Sal expresses a nostalgic desire for Dean’s, and America’s, original promise: the possibility of something new. As

Spangler correctly points out, America cannot forget its past and the mythology on which it is based, as to “break ties with history is to resort to living in a compromised present – one whose meaning and value is tenuous and mutable” (315). The novel’s hopeful ending nods to the power of national fiction to inspire belief, even when its realities are unattainable. In the end, On the Road portrays the problems with American romantic notion of identity and the individual in 1950s America.

In conclusion, Kerouac’s objective in On the Road is to find and discover America.

He takes an outside in look at Americans of all forms from across the country. The book

“unfolds as poem in prose to the cowboys of the West and the intellectuals of the East and

. . . the romance of the road in between” (Skinazi 91). Embracing the “vague ideologies of

American exceptionalism along with the disconcerting consequences of manifest destiny”, the road is a highly symbolic space where future and history intersect (Spangler 315).The representational clash between the narrator’s historical and mythical projections and the geographical America he discovers results in his fluid, shifting self. The myths of America are called into question by Kerouac’s protagonist as he travels across the continent in search for an authentic American identity. When we connect McHale’s ontological dominant with Kerouac’s novel, it becomes clear that On the Road is not about rebellion, it is about appropriating one’s identity in a new cultural moment. In Sal’s case, what it means to be a white, middle-class man in post-war America.

Sal, unable to find a place in American consumer society, epitomises the alienation, disillusionment and depression of the post-war generation. As he cannot appropriate the land in the same way that Dean does, Sal loses faith in the master narrative of America and looks to create his own in his idealisation of the Fellahin people. However, his idealisation of the America’s marginalised others reveal more about his own unstable identity as it does about the people he encounters. Kerouac’s novel is countercultural, in the postmodern

sense, because we are forced to reconsider our place in society and question how we appropriate our identity in a contradictory society. Thus, when situated within McHale’s postmodern theory, On the Road becomes a novel concerned with ontological questions surrounding being, existence and reality in the face of a dominant culture.

Chapter 2 Deconstructing Burroughs’ ‘meaningless mosaic’

At the heart of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, there is a pervasive uncertainty about the reliability of what is being shown or told. The reader follows Burroughs’ alter-ego William

Lee and a shifting cast of protagonists through a series of hallucinogenic visons, scenes of sexual control and degradation, bizarre political plots and disturbing medical experiments.

Naked Lunch’s nonlinear narrative structure has continued to distract readers and more importantly, critics from a comprehensive appreciation of Burroughs’ seminal work. His narratives present numerous problems for literary criticism as they "eschew narrative stability, and thus, identifiable structures”, resisting “placement within exterior theoretical frames” (Bolton 15). This essay responds to the novel’s interpretative challenges by applying a postmodern reading to Naked Lunch to deconstruct and make sense of Burroughs’ fragmented narrative. While Kerouac’s road novel implicitly raises ontological questions about being, existence and reality in his protagonist’s search for an authentic American identity, William S. Burroughs’ controversial Naked Lunch explicitly deconstructs the falsity of the dominating American cultural order.

Defined by Jeremy Green as “one of the great progenitors of postmodernism”,

Burroughs uncovers and subsequently mocks the controlling and hypocritical impulses inherent in American culture and the country’s collective psyche (214). In line with

Christopher Butler’s definition of postmodernism, Burroughs’ novel responds to the fact that the American population is oblivious to being subjected and controlled “by the ideologically motivated discourses of power” in their own society (Butler 50). More specifically, the dehumanizing rhetoric of Cold War America which “set up a rigid opposition between

American and un-American, and into the category 'un-American' fell not only political but also ethnic and sexual difference” (Paton 51). The novel echoes the postmodern claim that we cannot rely on our so-called reality because language systems are inherently unreliable cultural constructs. Through its own narrative technique, Naked Lunch exhibits how language can construct reality and contaminate it at the same time. Ultimately, when

situated within the theory of postmodernism, Burroughs’ decentralised narrative subverts the dominate discourses of the time while at the same time liberating his readers from its constraints.

Language as System of Control

Burroughs’ taboo-breaking novel is characterised by its use of obscene language. Passages of sexual depravity and sadistic medical experiments are awash with the language of disease, monstrosity and death. As many critics have stated, in Naked Lunch, “addiction to drugs serves as the master metaphor for addiction in general – to sex, to power, and to security” (Loewinsohn 564). The concept of addiction is developed further to include ‘control addicts’: people who are accustomed to controlling others, be it sexually, politically or socially. While this metaphor serves as a “compelling commentary of 1950s America”, when situated within the theory of postmodernism, the central theme of the novel becomes the power of language as an instrument of control (Paton 49). According to Mikhail Bakhtin, meaning in a literary text must be understood “against the background of other concrete utterances on the same theme, a background made up of contradictory opinions, points of view, and value judgments” (281). Historian Geoffrey Smiths views America’s sense of anxiety during the 1950s as an inevitable result from the country’s sudden shift from isolationism to world dominance (310). At the same time when Burroughs was writing Naked

Lunch, a national security state was emerging in America. Domestic issues were just as dangerous as external threats: “Americans with divergent sexual lifestyles were pictured by security planners and most psychiatrists as slaves to their own overheated sexual appetites”

(Smith 314).

The result was a national ideology and discourse which often connected social difference and disease. Homosexuality was regarded as a national disease and as a result, homosexuals were enslaved by this ideology. In the ‘The Examination’, Doctor Benway echoes this national discourse, equating sexual preference with a life-threatening disease:

“We regard it [homosexuality] as a misfortune . . . a sickness . . . certainly nothing to be

censured or uh sanctioned any more than, say tuberculosis” (Burroughs 157). Burroughs continues to mock this rhetoric of homophobia through the voice of Benway:

On the other hand you can readily see that any illness imposes certain, should we say,

obligations, certain necessities of a prophylactic nature on the authorities concerned with

public health, such necessities to be imposed, needless to say, with a minimum of

inconvenience and hardship to the unfortunate individual who has, through no fault of his

own, become uh infected (Burroughs157).

The ‘unfortunate individual’ in this passage is Carl who is being compelled by Benway, a public health authority, to recognise his so-called abnormality and the state’s ‘obligation’ to cure him. Burroughs subtlety draws the reader’s attention to the power of scientific terminology to construct a national image of normality and a subsequent system of morality.

Linda Hutcheon writes that postmodernism is an “even-handed process” because it

“ultimately manages to install and reinforce as much as undermine and subvert the conventions and presuppositions it appears to challenge” (1). Throughout Naked Lunch,

Burroughs subversively turns the vocabulary of disease against itself by equating processes of law and government with cancer. In the following example, the body politic is depicted at the mercy of the bureaucratic state:

The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and

bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the

Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it

chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true

parasitic organism . . . Bureaucracy is wrong as cancer, a turning away from the human

evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous

action to the complete parasitism of a virus (Burroughs 112).

It is no coincidence that Burroughs chooses Benway, a “manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control”, to utter a savagely, critical commentary on the state of democracy (Burroughs 19). By doing so,

Burroughs successfully points out that those “entities that we unthinkingly experience as

'natural' . . . are in fact 'cultural'; made by us, not given to us” (Hutcheon 2). Thus, Burroughs is able to reveal that “some of the dominant features of our way of life”, including discourses on purity and innocence are in fact constructs of our own society (Hutcheon 2).

Burroughs continues to deploy the tropes of disease and monstrosity against the political parties that attempt to “homogenize society through a legislated ‘normality’” (Paton

54). As Andrew Ross notes, abnormality was at the heart of national and cultural discourses concerning the figure of the ‘Other’:

Cold War culture is rich with the demonology of the ‘alien’, especially in the genre of the

science fiction film, where a pan-social fear of the Other – communism, feminism, and

other egalitarianisms foreign to the American social body – is reproduced through

images drawn from the popular fringe of biological or genetic engineering gone wrong (45).

Therefore, in response to this, Burroughs delves into the realm of science fiction in the novel’s discussion of Interzone’s three parties, explaining how they “attempt to eliminate difference and impose absolute uniformity upon society by scientifically manipulating the human body (Murphy 94). According to the narrator, the top Senders are the “most dangerous and evil men in the world” (Burroughs 136). The Senders “represent those states that dominate others much more subtly but much more pervasively by insinuating their own values, definitions, and assumptions into the fabric of their victims’ culture” (Loewinsohn

572). In Naked Lunch, sending poses a serious threat to individuality; it is described as

“biocontrol; that is control of physical movement, mental processes, emotional reactions and apparent sensory impressions by means of bioelectric signals . . . the subject controlled from

State-controlled transmitters” (Burroughs 136). As Ron Loewinsohn has noted, Senders

reflect the state of post-World War II America which “dominates others by manipulating language and iconography until the locals act on these imported values as if they were their own” (572).

With his discussion of the Sender, Burroughs opens up a new discourse, which again controls the reader. Ultimately, through the text, Burroughs himself becomes a Sender:

The Sender is not a human individual . . . It is The Human Virus. (All viruses are deteriorated

cells leading a parasitic existence . . . They have specific affinity for the Mother Cell; thus

deteriorated liver cells seek the home place of hepatitis, etc. So every species has a Master

Virus: Deteriorated Image of that species.) The broken image of man moves minute by minute

and cell by cell . . . Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms

of The Human Virus (Burroughs 141).

Here, Burroughs assumes an air of authority and control with his inclusion of scientific vocabulary, recalling earlier passages with Doctor Benway. Through the ‘Human Virus’ of language, he employs his own version of telepathy on the reader which is no different from the one used by the systems of control. For Jean-François Lyotard, postmodern critique

“operates within the realist context of a given culture to shatter its norms and challenge its assumptions, not with a new criteria set drawn from outside of that culture” but “rather by showing the contradictions the culture contains, what it represses, refuses to recognize or makes unpresentable” (qtd. in Malpas 30). Burroughs “deploys highly inventive monstrosity against the paranoid discourse of nationhood” in Naked Lunch by installing and reproducing the same controlling discourses (Paton 52). At the end of the chapter, Burroughs writes “The

Human Virus can now be isolated and treated” (141). In other words, once the reader recognises that they are controlled by Burroughs’ narrative they can liberate themselves from its constraints and ultimately from being imprisoned by national discourses.

Metafiction in Naked Lunch

Burroughs’ Naked Lunch therefore goes beyond undermining the suppressive dominance of national discourses. The fact that we can construct and reinterpret every text anew in ‘Naked

Lunch’ gives the reader an opportunity to liberate him or herself from social and political discourses. In the novel’s ‘Atrophied Preface’, Burroughs suggests that ‘the Word’ or language is one of the most powerful instruments of control. He writes:

Gentle Reader, The Word will leap on you with leopard man iron claws, it will cut off fingers

and toes like an opportunist land crab, it will hang you and catch your jissom like a scrutable

dog, it will coil round your thighs like a bushmaster and inject a shot glass of rancid ectoplasm

(192).

In order to be free from the ‘iron claws’, we must first reconsider our relationship to language. Speaking in an interview in 1969, Burroughs states that human beings have

“possibilities of development, but they aren’t going to realize them unless they can get rid of the factors and the individuals who are suppressing them and deliberately keeping them right where they are” (“The Job” 98). He continues: “you must learn to see what is in front of you with no preconception by leaving the “old verbal garbage behind: God talk, priest talk, mother talk, family talk, love talk, party talk, and country talk. You must learn to exist with no religion no country no allies” (100). Throughout Naked Lunch, Burroughs emphasises the fictionality of his text in order to help the reader with this new way of ‘seeing’.

Malpas argues that postmodern writing is “a self-conscious mode of writing, a writing that ‘meta-fictionally’ comments on and investigates its own status as fiction as well as questioning our ideas of the relation between fiction, reality and truth” (26). In other words, metafiction raises questions about the fictionality of reality by highlighting the fictionality of the text. Burroughs establishes a new world in Naked Lunch that “emphasizes its own artifice in order to liberate readers from imprisonment within the constructs . . . of the ‘real’ world” (Bolton 54). The novel itself is an amalgamation of different genres of literature,

shifting from “first person to omniscient third person to sci-fi to play or film script, to legal or scientific treatise, from conventional hard-boiled detective fiction to parodies of pornography, lyric poetry, and spy adventures” (Lowensohn 561). Burroughs transgresses the boundary between fiction and reality further with dialogues, streams of consciousness, hallucinations, and diary entries and encyclopaedic information. The fictional text is often interrupted by factual information: “‘Grassed on me he did,’ I said morosely. (Note: Grass is English thief slang for inform” (Burroughs 4). Blending both fact and fiction complicates the reader’s perception of what is based on the truth and what is entirely fictional. Just as postmodern authors transgress the “borders between high art and mass or popular culture and those between discourses of art and discourses of the world”, Burroughs shows that there is a fine line between reality and fiction. We are supposed to mistrust the narrative voice in his text, in the same way that we are supposed to question the disguised ‘fictions’ of society.

Burroughs principal technique, however, and the novel’s most unique aspect, is its nonlinear, decentralised narrative. Naked Lunch lacks a structured system of plot, language and themes and the narrative perspective does not have any direction or anchor points. For example, the opening narrative sequence mirrors the hard-boiled detective style following

Agent Bill Lee: “I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons” (Burroughs 3). However, two sections later in ‘Benway’,

Burroughs’ prose becomes more surreal and his imagery becomes more bizarre:

Dancing boys striptease with intestines, women stick severed genitals in their cunts, grind,

bump and flick it at the man of their choice . . . Religious fanatics harangue the crowd from

helicopters and rain stone tablets on their heads, inscribed with meaningless messages . . .

Leopard Men tear people to pieces with iron claws, coughing and grunting . . . Kwaktiutl

Cannibal Society initiates bite off noses and ears . . . (33).

The reader is taken from ‘Washington Street Station’ at the beginning of the novel and cast straight into a world of drug hallucinations. As a result, there are no fixed points, in space or

time, to which the reader can cling, leaving the reader helpless in their desire to locate reliable reality.

As Loewinsohn observes, the “trend toward greater chaos and ever more unfamiliar imagery reaches its climax in the central sections of the book, ‘The Market,’ ‘Ordinary Men and Women,’ and ‘Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone’” (3). In ‘The Market’, the reader is presented with an unusually rich and ambivalent depiction of what Timothy Yu describes as a “rising postmodern city . . . a space of both liberation and oppression, of ecstasy and fear” (48). Under the influence of yagé, the narrator writes:

The room takes on aspect of Near East whorehouse with blue walls and red tasseled lamps

. . . I feel myself turning into a Negress, the black color silently invading my flesh . . .

Convulsions of lust . . . My legs take on a well-rounded Polynesian substance . . . Everything

stirs with a writhing furtive life . . .The room is Near East, Negro, South Pacific, in some

familiar place I can not locate . . . Yagé is space-time travel . . . The room seems to vibrate

and shake with motion . . . The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian

Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian, races as yet unconceived and

unborn, passes through the body (92).

Timothy Yu views Interzone as a “metaphor for a postmodern space in which all borders - bodily, national, racial-have collapsed” (50). Interzone, with its amalgamation of races, cultures, creeds, is therefore representative of Burroughs uncontrolled narrative space. The use of the ‘cut-up’ method, “an arbitrary juxtaposition of randomly selected words and phrases”, often found in descriptions of hallucinogenic visions, symbolise Naked Lunch’s

“attempt to restructure the grammar of perception” (Tytell 14). In other words, the “new linguistic order that Burroughs invents initiates the Beats’ assault on the conditioning influences of language” (Tytell 14).

Naked Lunch is therefore an exercise in the loosening of control, giving the reader an opportunity to liberate themselves from the dominating discourses of the nation. This is

achieved by Burroughs’ narrative technique which encourages a new way of reading and ultimately, a new way of ‘seeing’. Burroughs states in the ‘Atrophied Preface’ that you “can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point . . . Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To

Book” (Burroughs, 187). Peter Michelson correctly points out that “direct experience and perception is the aesthetic base of Burroughs' poetic” as opposed to a structured plot (82).

Supporting Michelson’s claim, Burroughs writes:

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment

of writing . . . I am a recording instrument . . . I do not presume to impose “story” “plot”

“continuity” . . . Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I

may have limited function . . . I am not an entertainer (Burroughs 184).

Burroughs seems to suggest that reader, just like the writer, should only have one objective when reading his text: to perceive things as they are. Only then will the subtextual relationships between Burroughs’ vignettes become apparent. In this “frozen moment” we can be aware of the dominating discourses and their influence on our values, beliefs and reality (Burroughs 199). Once we understand our subordinated position in society, we can begin to “question how we represent – how we construct – our view of reality and of our selves” (Hutcheon 40).Thus, when situated within the theory of postmodernism, Burroughs innovative narrative attempts to liberate the reader from the constraints of dominant discourses, including his own.

In conclusion, Burroughs’ postmodern techniques enforce Naked Lunch’s political and social message, and savage satire on a society that remains impotent and powerless against law and order. While the metaphor of addiction serves as a “compelling commentary of 1950s America”, when situated within the theory of postmodernism, the central theme of the novel becomes the power of language as an instrument of control (Paton 49).The novel echoes the postmodern claim that we cannot rely on our so-called reality because language systems are inherently unreliable cultural constructs. Through its own narrative technique,

Naked Lunch exhibits how language can construct reality and contaminate it at the same time. Throughout Naked Lunch, Burroughs subversively turns the vocabulary of disease against itself by equating processes of law and government with cancer. Thus, through the

‘Human Virus’ of language, he employs his own version of telepathy on the reader which is no different from the one used by the systems of control.

Burroughs’ novel therefore challenges our “our conventional notions about the status of the author in the text, about the referentiality of language, and about the dualism of

Western thought” (Lydenberg xi). Burroughs is able to reveal that “some of the dominant features of our way of life”, including discourses on purity and innocence are in fact constructs of our own society (Hutcheon, 2). However, just as he believes that there is a cure for addiction, he believes that there is a cure from liberating oneself from the imprisoning narratives of post-war America. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch therefore goes beyond undermining the suppressive dominance of national discourses. The fact that we can construct and reinterpret every text anew in Naked Lunch gives the reader an opportunity to liberate him or herself from social and political discourses. Once the reader recognises that they are being controlled by Burroughs’ narrative they can liberate themselves from its constraints and ultimately from being imprisoned by national discourses. As Anthony Hilfer expertly put it, Naked Lunch’s “paradoxically enabling gesture is to create readers capable of rejecting its most seductive overtures” (265).

Chapter 3

Ginsberg’s Mythical Heroes

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is commonly described a poem that defined a generation. It is one on hand a meditation on a culture living on the fringes of mainstream society and a vicious attack on the corruptions of post-war America on the other. The poem’s literary and social significance was confirmed by its trial in 1957, the subsequent publicity it gained and the famous opening line which has now become a catchphrase: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked” (1). Moreover, the poem

"demonstrated (in a seismic way) that literary and social change could emanate from the shared spirit of a highly charged language" (Shinder 3). The open form of the poem

“provided the appropriate forum for Ginsberg to speak of seemingly unspeakable personal, political and sexual matters – specifically perhaps that of his struggle and celebration as a gay, Jewish man” (Shinder 3). Therefore, it is no wonder why Ginsberg’s taboo breaking poem with its obscene use of language and indictment of contemporary American society is regarded as a countercultural artefact that heralded a change of consciousness in the country.

Howl was written at a time when Cold War conflict and McCarthyism in the 1950s provoked many intellectuals, one being Thomas Merton, to question the morality of the

American government:

We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity

to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it

from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the

sane ones who are the most dangerous (qtd. in Tytell 11).

This resulted in a disconnection between the individual and society. John Tytell describes this schism:

[John Clellon] Holmes offered the image of a broken circuit to suggest the lack of connection

to the immediate present felt by members of his generation. It was as dangerous a condition

as a hot electrical wire discharging energy randomly into the universe without a proper

destination. The philosophical cause was not so much the horrible fact of war . . . but the

emergence of the new postwar values that accepted man as the victim of circumstance, and

no longer granted him the agency of his own destiny; the illusion of free will, the buoyantly

igniting spark of the American character, had been suddenly extinguished (qtd. in Stiles 66).

As mentioned in the introduction of this research, the American Dream is no longer an individual pursuit in post-war America. The consumer society that rapidly emerged in the years during and following the war placed emphasis on the nation as a whole. As Tytell explains, this Cold War culture of containment perpetuated a sense of alienation and prompted a group of intellectuals, now known as the Beats, to discover their place in society.

The Beats’ quest for social identity involved the trespassing of both legal and moral boundaries in the search of personal freedom and exuberant means of living and being.

Eric Monstram writes that the Beat ‘philosophy’ also included an escape from social conventions and the rejection of middle class values:

[The Beats were] an expression of new forms of prose, and poetry and an exploration of

consciousness, which joined the dissent of existing Bohemias . . . to produce a distinct style

of literature and living, based on disaffiliation, poverty, anarchic individualism and communal

living. A relaxation of 'square' (puritan, middle-class, respectable) attitudes towards sex,

drugs, religion and art became the opposing uniformity of ‘beat’ (28).

Monstram’s description of the Beat literature also epitomises Ginsberg’s rebellious impulse in Howl. However, in order to reinterpret and go beyond the widely accepted critical reading of Ginsberg’s poem as countercultural, it is necessary to approach the text as a product of, not an emancipation from, the national discourses of the time. As Nick Selby has interestingly pointed out, Ginsberg's “much-vaunted rebellious sexual heroism, of which

Whitman is the model, is not a liberation but a myth. It takes place within the discourses of conformity and commodity which dominated the capitalist enterprise of 50s America” (69).

Selby’s analysis is in line with Jean-François Lyotard’s theory on postmodern critique which he claims “operates within the realist context of a given culture to shatter its norms and challenge its assumptions, not with a new criteria set drawn from outside of that culture” but

“rather by showing the contradictions the culture contains, what it represses, refuses to recognize or makes unpresentable” (Malpas 30). Therefore, when situated within the theory of postmodernism, we can place Allen Ginsberg’s poetry within the discourses of the mainstream as opposed to at its margins. Thus, we can go beyond the simplistic reading of

Ginsberg’s poetry as purely countercultural and read it more as a tension between the myths of America and its reality. In Howl, identity, just like the official narrative of America, is constructed and contradictory, powerful but fissured.

Fragmentation of the Self

At the heart of Ginsberg’s poem there is an inherent postmodern theme: the emphasis on the fragmentation of the self and the decentring of the individual as subject. For Fredric

Jameson, the “disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal consequence, the increasing unavailability of the personal style, engender the well-nigh universal practice today of what may be called pastiche” (Jameson 17). When the category of the self is erased, there is an "emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense" in the postmodern culture and aesthetic (17). Pastiche is the dominant mode of the postmodern aesthetic where competing discourses and styles severs our connection to history. For Jameson, pastiche does not involve an implicit political critique. However, the disappearance of the individual subject in Ginsberg’s poetry

“undermines the hegemony of various other basic assumptions or beliefs upon which

Western society is founded, such as the superiority of the ego, and the authority of order, meaning, control, identity and reason” (Kruger 28).

While Part 1 of Howl beings with an affirmation of the subject – “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked” – the transformation from ‘I’ to ‘who’ sees the poet’s self consumed by a series of dislocated identities (1). The subsequent lines of the poem are no longer the experiences of the subject; they occupy a heterogeneous space, not an individual one:

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the

supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of

cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels

staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas

and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes

on the windows of the skull (Ginsberg 3-4).

By removing the centred subject, Ginsberg adopts an “alternative, radically fragmented series of subaltern identities or a syncretic identity constructed out of various marginal spiritualities and cultural forms” (Svonkin 170). As Haidee Kruger explains, on the level of the individual, “Beat poetry resists the traditional definition or metanarrative of the self as ego or fixed point of identity, primarily defined by virtue of its capacity to reason” (29). In Howl, the blurring of identities has the effect of destabilising the depersonalisation and anonymity of the individual in post-war America and thus brings into question the dominant discourses of society.

Brian McHale in Postmodern Fiction argues that postmodernism is a transition from problems of knowing, associated with modernism, to problems of modes of being. He writes:

“The dominant of postmodern fiction is ontological” (10). In other words, he claims that postmodern texts are interested in questions surrounding being, existence and reality.

McHale’s theory on the postmodern dominant is therefore the key to understanding

Ginsberg’s representation of the ‘best minds’ of his generation. In Part 1 of Howl, Ginsberg foregrounds the intertwining of various discourses and ideologies, showing us what happens when “different kinds of worlds are placed in confrontation or when boundaries between worlds are violated” (McHale 60). From this perspective, we can read the first part of

Ginsberg’s poem as ontological rather than representational because his lines produce a state of being. The first part of the poem “centres on descriptions of individuals searching for meaning in extremes of physical, emotional and spiritual experience” (Kruger 38)

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before

the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for

committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and

intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof

waving genitals and manuscripts (33-5)

In the above lines, immediacy, intensity and irrationality come to the forefront, conveyed by the verbs depicting vigorous, intense action and feeling. In the line, “who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons”, sexuality, shame and mortality come together with mechanical power. This foregrounding of intense experience echoes Charles Altieri’s observations about postmodernist poetry.

According to Altieri, postmodern poetry is a “direct habitation, a directly instrumental rather than contemplative use of language. And its test of value becomes the mobility and intensity immediately made available to the poet” (775).

Altieri’s description is similar to Ginsberg’s dictum, “first thought, best thought” which he describes as “Spontaneous insight – the sequence of thought-forms passing naturally through ordinary mind” (Ginsberg 6). Here, Ginsberg is referring to his spontaneous,

unrestrained method of writing which focuses on naked and authentic experience to reveal the truth. By celebrating chaotic and intense experience over the dominance of order and reason, Ginsberg foregrounds those living in the margins of society. Ginsberg poem is therefore counterhegemonic, a common trait in Beat literature according to Tytell:

In the Fifties, when the voice of personality seemed so endangered by anonymity of

sameness, the Beats discovered a natural counter for the silence of the day in a new sense

of self, a renaissance of the romantic impulse to combat unbelievably superior forces (62).

Thus, it is no surprise then that Ginsberg adopts an anti-establishment, spiritual ideology that directly subverts the dominant culture of the time to elucidate a marginalised subculture. He celebrates the

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the

starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the

supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of

cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels

staggering on tenement roofs illuminated

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas

and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war (3-6)

In the first instance, Ginsberg’s juxtaposition of the physical and the spiritual, the real and the visionary reflects the tormented consciousness of the ‘best minds of his generation’ who are stifled in their attempt to achieve spiritual transcendence.

However, as Nick Selby points out, despite their search for a transcendent identity,

Ginsberg’s rebellious heroes are actually products of the dominant discourses:

Paradoxically, yet in a typically American manner here, the voice of conformity speaks

through that of a representative rebel hero. This voice speaks consciously for a new

generation on a heroic quest through a ravaged America. It bears witness to a ‘destroyed’

and ‘hysterical’ American urban landscape and declares allegiance to a mythical America, a

transcendental new world of youth ‘burning for the heavenly connection to the starry dynamo

the machinery of the night’ (65).

The rebellious impulse of Ginsberg’s heroes in fact derives from the original promise of the

American Dream: the possibility of something new. According to Jason Spangler, America cannot forget its past and the mythology on which it is based, as to “break ties with history is to resort to living in a compromised present – one whose meaning and value is tenuous and mutable” (315). In 1950s America, there is a contradiction between contemporary dominant discourses of containment and confinement and the ideals of freedom and opportunity at the heart of the country’s ethos. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, meaning in a literary text must be understood “against the background of other concrete utterances on the same theme, a background made up of contradictory opinions, points of view, and value judgments” (281).

Thus, when situated within postmodern theory, Ginsberg poem asks us to reconsider our place in society and question how we appropriate our identity in the face of a dominant culture.

Kenneth Gergen’s observation in his book, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, is a useful entry point when analysing the contradictory notions of self in Howl. According to Gergen, postmodern culture erases the category of the self:

Emerging technologies saturate us with the voices of humankind – both harmonious and

alien. As we absorb their varied rhymes and reasons, they become part of us and we of them.

Social saturation furnishes us with a multiplicity of incoherent and unrelated languages of the

self . . . the fragmentation of self-conceptions corresponds to a multiplicity of incoherent and

disconnected relationships. These relationships pull us in myriad directions, inviting us to play

such a variety of roles that the very concept of an 'authentic self' with knowable

characteristics recedes from view. The fully saturated self becomes no self at all (6-7).

In the postmodern world, the self is fragmented and incoherent. We exist in a state of construction and reconstruction where we become a mosaic of different stories and experiences. While the multiplicity of the self in Howl on one hand resists the notion of a fixed American identity, it also depicts the difficulty of appropriating one’s identity in an ever- changing society. Ginsberg “presents a series of very American heroes: rebels, frontiersmen, and rugged individuals in an attempt to get to grips with American identity”

(Selby 64).

Heroes of the Past

In a similar way to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Ginsberg’s poet in Howl, conspicuously consumes “old myths of heroism that, in turn, re-inscribe the idea of America as having lost its way, passed into forgetfulness” (Selby 69). Thus, in order to combat his lack of connection with the present, Ginsberg transforms his ‘angelheaded hipsters’ of the present into American heroes of the past. It is in its “proliferation of sexual discourses that the poem reflects most strongly its search for a mythical American connectedness” (Selby 64).

Heroism and sexuality are inextricably linked in Howl. Ginsberg presents his sexual rebels as heroes:

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and

screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of

Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of

public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom-

ever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a

partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to

pierce them with a sword (36-9).

Here, Ginsberg’s conflates the sexually rebellious heroes and the traditional icons of

American identity and popular culture. Controversially, Ginsberg presents traditionally masculine and heterosexual identities – ‘saintly motorcyclists’, heroic ‘sailors’ – engaging in homosexual intercourse. Interestingly, Ginsberg creates his own myth of America where sexual encounters are described in the same terms as the stories of the conqueror heroes in popular culture.

The deployment of sexuality within the discourse of American popular heroism becomes even more apparent in the poem's description of Neal Cassady. Cassady is

“presented as an American Adonis, the ‘secret hero of these poems’, because his sexual conquests come to represent the conquest of the American landscape” (Selby, 66). He is described as someone

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and

were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of

the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C.,

secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver – joy to

the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner

backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or

with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings

& especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys

too (42-3).

The poem moves from the vivid descriptions of homosexuality in the previous lines to a discussion of vehement heterosexual heroism. Cassady is pictured conquering and, at the

same time, feminising the American landscape in a series of sexual escapades. As Annette

Kolodny argues, archetypal images of the American landscape such as sunset, sunrise and distant horizons all function as the sexual exploration of the female body (Kolodny, 17).

According to Nick Selby, the inclusion of Cassady as the ‘secret’ heterosexual hero means that “Ginsberg’s sexual dissidence, his gay identity, is absorbed into the discourses of mainstream American” (66). He continues:

The poems of Howl thus contribute to a litany of displacement in which the heroism of

Ginsberg's desire to confess his sexual identity is subsumed by his attempt to define himself

as a prototypical American hero. Rather than simply valorizing his gay identity in opposition to

the repressive structures of American society of the 50s . . . his poetry reveals far deeper

entanglements between sexuality, popular culture and American identity (66-7).

We can therefore place Ginsberg’s rebellious heroism within the discourses of the mainstream rather than at its margins. We can go beyond a simplistic reading of Howl as a countercultural poem or a “weapon against taboos” and approach it more as a tension between myths of America and its reality (Selby 67). Ginsberg’s explicit expression of homosexuality in Howl is not a direct challenge to the norms of American society. Instead, it calls into question the myth of the American Dream which promises freedom, equality and opportunity to all its citizens. Therefore, in doing so, he exhibits how identity, just like the official narrative of America, is constructed and contradictory, powerful but fissured.

In conclusion, when Howl is situated within Lyotard’s theory on postmodern critique,

Ginsberg’s poem operates within the discourses of conformity and commodity which defined

1950s America. Rather than employing an alternative political or aesthetic language,

Ginsberg uses the official narrative of America and sexuality to show the “contradictions the culture contains, what it represses, refuses to recognize or makes unpresentable” (Malpas

30). Ginsberg’s poem documents the ‘angelheaded hipsters’ attempting to find their place in society and reconnect with a lost America. The blurring of identities in Howl has the effect of

destabilising the depersonalisation and anonymity of the individual in post-war America and by doing so, brings into question the dominant discourses of society. Ginsberg draws our attention to the contradiction between contemporary discourses of containment and confinement and the ideals of freedom and opportunity at the heart of the country’s ethos.

Thus, the rebellious impulse of Ginsberg’s heroes in fact derives from the original promise of the American Dream: the possibility of something new. The alienation and confusion of urban life derives from individuals struggling to find their place in a society that limits individuality which, in turn, results in contradictory, fragmented and incoherent notions of the self.

While the multiplicity of the self in Howl on one hand resists the notion of a fixed

American identity, it also depicts the difficulty of appropriating one’s identity in an ever- changing society. Ginsberg “presents a series of very American heroes: rebels, frontiersmen, and rugged individuals in an attempt to get to grips with American identity”

(Selby, 64). As the “emergence of new postwar values . . . accepted man as the victim of circumstance, and no longer granted him the agency of his own destiny” and extinguished

“the illusion of free will [and] the buoyantly igniting spark of the American character”,

Ginsberg incorporates the mythical heroes of America who epitomize what it means to be

American (qtd. in Stiles 66). However, Howl “exemplifies the production and consumption of sex and heroism as commodities of American popular culture. What we see in the text is the way in which marginalized discourses are absorbed into the mainstream” (Selby 63). In the end, Ginsberg's rebellious heroes become commodities, unable to find a transcendent identity outside of the dominant discourses.

Conclusion

This research has set out to reinterpret and recontextualise the principal Beat writers – Jack

Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs – from the theoretical perspective of postmodernism. In doing so, I have been able to go beyond the traditional interpretation of the Beat Generation as a countercultural, counterhegemonic movement and challenge the

“binary opposition between the establishment culture and a dissenting counterculture”

(Martinez 7). I have discovered, through the interpretative paradigm of postmodernism, that the Beat writers were concerned with the tension between the myths of America and its reality, appropriating one’s identity in the face of a dominant culture and questions surrounding being, existence and reality. While Kerouac’s protagonist is searching for a transcendent identity as promised by the myth of America, Ginsberg’s speaker is trying to appropriate his identity within the myths of America. We can therefore locate their texts within the discourses of the mainstream as opposed to at its margins. For instance,

Burroughs’ Naked Lunch consciously asks its readers to be aware of the dominating discourses of society and encourages them to liberate themselves from the one-sided narrative of Cold War America. Less explicitly, Howl and On the Road break down norms and challenge beliefs “by showing the contradictions the culture contains, what it represses, refuses to recognise or makes unpresentable” (Malpas 30). Their writings were therefore important in deconstructing the social given and advocating freedom of action.

On the Road and the Problems of Identity

When situated within McHale’s postmodern theory on the ontological dominant, On the Road becomes a novel concerned with ontological questions surrounding being, existence and reality in the face of a dominant culture. It becomes clear that On the Road is less about rebellion and more about appropriating one’s identity in a new cultural moment – what it means to be a white, middle-class man in post-war America. The promise of the road and its disappointing reality brings the master narrative of America into question which, in turn,

brings his own sense of identity into question. The representational clash between the narrator’s historical and mythical projections and the geographical America he discovers results in his fluid, shifting self. The myths of America are called into question by Kerouac’s protagonist as he travels across the continent in search for the real American Dream.

However, the promise and escape symbolised by the west is unfulfilled because the “cultural and economic evils of the day do not evaporate into the realization of the American Dream”

(Spangler 319).

Thus, Sal is unable to escape the ideological structures of middle-class whiteness, despite his efforts to escape time and deterritorialize himself. As a result, he turns to

America’s marginalised racial others as the “postmodern desire for a heterogeneous, fellahin world, while scandalous at the time, offered the Beats a sense of renewed possibility, of release from conventional white middle-class desires” (Holton 268). However, his idealisation of the America’s marginalised others reveal more about his own unstable identity as it does about the people he encounters. Kerouac’s novel is countercultural, in the postmodern sense, because we are forced to reconsider our place in society and question how we appropriate our identity in a country built on the myth of freedom and opportunity, in a reality of containment and conformity. Sal’s failure to find an authentic identity in his journey portrays the problems of the American romantic notion of identity and the individual in 1950s America.

Naked Lunch and the Power of Language

Burroughs’ novel echoes the postmodern claim that we cannot rely on our so-called reality because language systems are inherently unreliable cultural constructs. Through its own narrative technique, Naked Lunch exhibits how language can construct reality and contaminate it at the same time. Ultimately, when situated within the theory of postmodernism, Burroughs’ decentralised narrative subverts the dominate discourses of the time while at the same time liberating his readers from its constraints. With this interpretation, the central theme of the novel becomes the power of language as an

instrument of control. Burroughs’ postmodern techniques enforce Naked Lunch’s political and social message, and savage satire on a society that remains impotent and powerless against dominant society.

Burroughs’ novel therefore challenges our “our conventional notions about the status of the author in the text, about the referentiality of language, and about the dualism of

Western thought” (Lydenberg xi). Burroughs is able to reveal that “some of the dominant features of our way of life”, including discourses on purity and innocence are in fact constructs of our own society (Hutcheon 2). However, just as he believes that there is a cure for addiction, he believes that there is a cure from liberating oneself from the imprisoning narratives of post-war America. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch therefore goes beyond undermining the suppressive dominance of national discourses. The fact that we can construct and reinterpret every text anew in Naked Lunch gives the reader an opportunity to liberate him or herself from social and political discourses. Once the reader recognises that they are being controlled by Burroughs’ narrative they can liberate themselves from its constraints and ultimately from being imprisoned by national discourses. Thus, in addition to his savage commentary on 1950s America, there is a redeeming quality in Burroughs’ work.

Howl’s Mythical Heroes

From a postmodern theoretical perspective, we can place Allen Ginsberg’s poetry within the discourses of the mainstream as opposed to at its margins. In this way, Howl can be read as a tension between the myths of America and its reality. The notion of individual identity, just like the official narrative of America, is constructed and contradictory, powerful but fissured.

The blurring of identities in Howl has the effect of destabilising the depersonalisation and anonymity of the individual in post-war America, allowing Ginsberg to bring into question the dominant discourses of society. Ginsberg draws our attention to the contradiction between contemporary discourses of containment and confinement and the ideals of freedom and opportunity at the heart of the country’s ethos. Thus, the rebellious impulse of Ginsberg’s heroes in fact derives from the original promise of the American Dream: the possibility of

something new. The alienation and confusion of urban life derives from individuals struggling to find their place in a society that limits individuality which, in turn, results in contradictory, fragmented and incoherent notions of the self.

While the multiplicity of the self in Howl on one hand resists the notion of a fixed

American identity, it also depicts the difficulty of appropriating one’s identity in an ever- changing society Rather than employing an alternative political or aesthetic language,

Ginsberg uses the official narrative of America and sexuality when describing his rebellious heroes. Ginsberg “presents a series of very American heroes: rebels, frontiersmen, and rugged individuals in an attempt to get to grips with American identity” (Selby 64). As the

“emergence of new postwar values . . . accepted man as the victim of circumstance, and no longer granted him the agency of his own destiny” and extinguished “the illusion of free will

[and] the buoyantly igniting spark of the American character”, Ginsberg incorporates the mythical heroes of America who epitomize what it means to be American (qtd. in Stiles 66).

However, Howl “exemplifies the production and consumption of sex and heroism as commodities of American popular culture. What we see in the text is the way in which marginalized discourses are absorbed into the mainstream” (Selby 63). In the end,

Ginsberg's rebellious heroes become commodities, unable to find a transcendent identity outside of the dominant discourses. In the end, as Bill Morgan correctly points out, the Beats’

“vision of the importance of the individual was thoroughly consistent with what many people believe to be the real American Dream” (248).

Works Cited

Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch: The Restored Text. London: Penguin Classics, 2015. Print.

Ginsberg Allen, “Howl”. Collected Poems, 1947-1997. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Print.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. London: Penguin Classics, 2000. Print.

Adams, James Truslow. Epic of America. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1931. Print.

Altieri, C. “What is living and what is dead in American postmodernism: establishing the contemporaneity of some American poetry”. Critical inquiry. Vol.22. 1996. pp.764-789.

Anctil, Pierre, Louis Dupont, Rémi Ferland, and Eric Waddell, eds. Un Homme Grand: Jack Kerouac at the Crossroads of Many Cultures. Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1990. Print.

Bakhtin, M.M. "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel." The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. ed. Michael Holquist. trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Print, 1981. 84-258. Print.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext, 1983. Print.

Bolton, Micheal Sean. Mosaic of Juxtaposition: William S. Burroughs’ Narrative Revolution. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. Print.

Burroughs, William S. The Job: Interviews with William S Burroughs. ed. Daniel Odier. New York, Penguin: 1989. Print.

Butler, Christopher. Postmodernism - A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.

Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Vintage Books, 2003. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Print.

George-Warren, Holly. ed. The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1999. Print.

Gergen, Kenneth J. The saturated self: dilemmas of identity in contemporary life. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Print.

Green, Jeremy. Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print.

Haslam, Jason, “’It Was My Dream That Screwed Up’: The Relativity of Transcendence in On the Road”. Canadian Review of American Studies, Vol.39, No.4. 2009. pp.443-464. Print.

Hilfer, Anthony. “Mariner and Wedding Guest in William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.” Criticism Vol.22, No.2.1980. pp.52-65. Print.

Holmes, John Clellon. “The Game of the Name". The Portable Beat Reader. ed. Anne Charters. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. 615-22. Print.

Holton, Robert, “Kerouac Among the Fellahim: On The Road To The Postmodern”. MFS Modern Fiction Studies. Vol.41. No.2. 1995. pp.265-283. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989. Print. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1991.

Johnson, Ronna C. “‘You're Putting Me on’: Jack Kerouac and the Postmodern Emergence”. College Literature. Vol.27, No. 1. January 2000. pp.22-38. Print.

Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Print.

Kruger, Haidee. “‘Confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought’: a reading of Allen Ginsberg’s Beat poetry”.Literator. Vol 28, No.1. 2007. pp 23-46. Print.

Loewinsohn, Ron. “‘Gentle Reader, I Fain Would Spare You This, but My Pen Hath Its Will like the Ancient Mariner’: Narrator(s) and Audience in William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.” Contemporary Literature. Vol.39, No.4. 1998. pp.560-585. Print.

Lydenberg, Robin. Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs’ Fiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987. Print.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Print.

Malpas, Simon. The Postmodern. London: Routledge, 2005. Print.

Martinez, Manuel Luis. Countering the Counterculture: Rereading Postwar American Dissent from Jack Kerouac to Tomás Rivera. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. 2003. Print.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction, London: Methuen, 1987. Print

Michelson, Peter, Speaking the Unspeakable: A Poetics of Obscenity. New York: SUNY Press, 1993. Print.

Monstram, Eric. The Penguin Companion to Literature. London: Penguin,1971. Print.

Morgan, Bill. The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation. New York: Free Press, 2010. Print.

Mortenson, Erik R. “Beating Time: Configurations of Temporality in Jack Kerouac's On the Road”. College Literature. Vol.28, No.3. October 2001. pp.51-67. Print.

Murphy, Timothy S. “Intersection Points: Teaching William Burroughs's Naked Lunch”. College Literature. Vol.27, No.1. January 2000. pp.84-102. Print.

Paton, Fiona. “Monstrous Rhetoric: Naked Lunch, National Insecurity, and the Gothic Fifties”.Texas Studies in Literature and Language. Vol.52, No.1. April 2010. pp.48-69. Print.

Richardson, Mark. “Peasant Dreams: Reading On the Road”. Texas Studies in Literature and Language Vol.43, No.2. 2001. pp.218-242. Print.

Selby, Nick. “Allen Ginsberg's Howl: Sexuality and Popular Heroism in 50s America” Revue française d'études américaines, Vol.1, No.68. March 1996, pp.62-70. Print.

Shinder, Jason, et. al. “From The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later”. The American Poetry Review. Vol.35, No.2. March 2006. pp.3-10. Print.

Skinazi, Karen E. H. “Through Roots and Routes: On the Road's Portrayal of an Outsider's Journey into the Meaning of America” Canadian Review of American Studies. Vol.39, No.1. 2009. pp.85-103. Print.

Smith, Geoffrey S. “National Security and Personal Isolation: Sex, Gender, and Disease in the Cold-War United States”. The International History Review. Vol.14, No.2. 1992. pp.307- 337. Print.

Spangler, Jason. “We're On a Road to Nowhere: Steinbeck, Kerouac, and The Legacy of The Great Depression”. Studies in the Novel, 1 October 2008, Vol.40, No.3. October 2008. pp.308-327. Print.

Stiles, Bradley J. Emerson's Contemporaries and Kerouac's Crowd: A Problem of Self- location, Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 2003. Print.

Svonkin, Craig. “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg's Spiritual Self-Othering”. College Literature. Vol.37, No.4. 2010. pp.166-193. Print.

Tytell, John, Naked Angels: The Lives & Literature of the Beat Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Print.

Weinrech, Regina. “Can On the Road Go on the Screen”. What's Your Road, Man?: Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Eds. Hilary Holladay and Robert Holton. Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. 187-204. Print.

Yannella, Philip R. American literature in Context After 1929. Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2010. Print.

Yu, Timothy. “Oriental Cities, Postmodern Futures: Naked Lunch, Blade Runner, and Neuromancer”. MELUS. Vol. 33, No.4. pp.45-71. Print.