Beat Generation and Postmodernism: Deconstructing the Narratives of America

2015 Beat Generation and Postmodernism: Deconstructing the Narratives of America 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 2 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 3 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 4 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: 5 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 6 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).

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