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Bathetic Humor, the Beats, and Walt Whitman's Idealism

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Bathetic Humor, the Beats, and Walt Whitman's Idealism The Dream and the Dystopia: Bathetic Humor, the Beats, and Walt Whitman’s Idealism Andrew Vogel ABSTRACT Among the many influences on the Beats, none looms larger than Walt Whitman from whom they adopted an idealistic vision of democratic equality, potent artistic honesty, and forthright sexual expression. In the greedy, conformist, paranoid America of the 1950s, however, the actu- alization of such a vision seemed terrifically farfetched. The distance between Whitman’s vision of America and the dystopia described in “Howl,” for instance, animated the Beats’ literary project, but it also propagated an abiding sense of ideological doubt. This is one of the primary bases of the Beat ethos. Crucially, when the Beats invoke the distance between Whitman’s ide- alistic dream of democratic vistas and the dystopia of 1950s America, they frequently do so in ways that are comical or that depict characters laughing. Allen Ginsberg, John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder, for example, all wrestled with doubts as to the idealism they in- herited from Whitman, and they all associated this struggle with laughter. The distance between Whitman’s dream and the Beats’ dystopia is hardly a laughing matter, however, making such humor bathetic. Bathos can be defined as the laughable result of straining for a sublime ideal but tripping over hard reality into the absurd. Despite their range of forms and styles, Ginsberg, Holmes, Kerouac, and Snyder all reflect the bathetic impulse emerging from America’s failure to manifest anything resembling Whitman’s dream. I am an idealist who has outgrown my idealism. Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues I. Allen Ginsberg’s first full reading of “Howl” was recorded in the winter of 1956 at the Berkeley Town Hall in a follow-up to the infamous Six Gallery read- ing. Ginsberg is very serious in his reading of “Howl.” As he steps to the micro- phone, the crowd seems to anticipate some of the raucousness that accompanied the previous reading, during which Jack Kerouac had famously passed around a jug of wine and led the crowd by chanting “go.” Yet at this reading, Ginsberg discourages interruptions. “Cut out all the bullshit now,” he demands before start- ing; “I’d prefer reading without … hip static,” he insists, alluding to the heckling that accompanied his introduction. Throughout the reading of “Howl,” Ginsberg measures his pace and cultivates an incantatory tone so as to stifle breakouts of laughter, which he understood certain lines may encourage. Yet later that same evening, he is much more playful, clowning around while reading “America,” 390 Andrew Vogel timing the delivery to elicit outbreaks of hilarity. The crowd titters as he earnestly pleads with America to send eggs to India, giggles as he adamantly questions why he can’t buy anything with his good looks, cheers when he swoons for the Wob- blies, and erupts when he gleefully exclaims, “I smoke marijuana every chance I get.” The audience also favors moments when Ginsberg deliberately satirizes the Cold War, worrying that the Russians might ferret the car from his garage or that Asia may be rising against him, leaving him without a “Chinaman’s chance.” Likewise, jokes aimed at the culture of mainstream conformity, like his worry that Time magazine may be running his emotional life or that everyone but he is serious and responsible, spark genuine mirth. Yet the greatest laughter greets the pivotal lines: “It occurs to me that I am America. / I am talking to myself again.” Here Ginsberg deprecatingly plays up the supposed schizophrenia that marginal- izes him from mainstream society, but the humor of the jibe overlays a very seri- ous critique. If America has been talking to itself, it has not really been listening, and such ignorance could be disastrous. In 1993, listening back on those old recordings prior to release on Holy Soul Jelly Roll, Ginsberg acknowledges that the reading of “America” sounds some- what like a stand-up comedy routine, but he hastens to add, curiously, “I’m a little ashamed of milking the gags when I hear this.”1 Shame? Why should Ginsberg distance himself from a poem and a reading that so clearly resonates with his thinking and the personality of his work? Why should he undermine a perfor- mance that so obviously distilled the feelings of many people during a turbulent moment in American history? The answer to this question can be found by exca- vating the influence of Walt Whitman on Ginsberg during the composition of the poems in Howl.2 In “Supermarket in California” Ginsberg asks Whitman, “what America did you have” when Charon delivered you to the far side of Lethe. Invoking the previ- ous line of the poem, the question is whether Whitman ever actually enjoyed the “lost America of love” so vigorously promulgated throughout his writing (Howl 30). In “Composed on the Tongue” Ginsberg saw Whitman trying to make an ideal America which would be an America of comradely awareness, acknowledgment of tenderness […] gentleness…comradeship…adhesiveness… Because… If this country did not have some glue to keep people together…there was no possibility 1 This quotation can be found in the liner notes of Holly Soul Jelly Roll, the CD box set of Ginsberg’s recordings. Hearing the timbre of Ginsberg’s speech, as well as his laughter, under- scores the bathos of his performance. Although it is beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth noting that familiarity with this and other sound recordings by Ginsberg and his compatriots only makes the textual depictions more recognizable as bathetic. Ginsberg’s reflections on this performance can also be found in Hoffman 137. 2 Major and minor influences on Ginsberg in particular and the Beats in general include, but are not limited to, William Blake, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Arthur Rimbaud, Oswald Spengler, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Thomas Wolfe, Ferdinand Celine, and Jean Genet. Among these influential authors Whitman stands out because he articulated a comprehensive vision that the Beat writers could embrace. Whitman’s democracy was rooted in artistic and personal freedom, including the liberation of sexual expression, and it voiced the importance of tolerance and human dignity, values that the Beats considered deficient in Cold War America. The Dream and the Dystopia 391 of democracy working and we’d just be a lot of people fighting for advantage, iron advan- tage, coal advantage, silver advantage, [and] gold […]. (426-28) If compassion and sensitivity were “squelched,” Ginsberg clarifies, democracy would be “squelched”; it would be “debased […] made into a paranoid, mechano- megalopolis congregation of freaks afeard of each other” (429). Bill Morgan’s bi- ography of Ginsberg sheds some additional light on Whitman’s complicated influ- ence on Ginsberg in the mid-1950s. One evening while arguing with W. H. Auden, who did not much care for Whitman, Ginsberg vehemently contended that Demo- cratic Vistas represented “the best statement I’ve seen anywhere on what [an] American poet should be and do” (251); however, during the same period in 1957 Ginsberg had begun to “formulate a theory about the fall of America” (261). Thus for Ginsberg, who was clinging to Whitman’s vision of a loving democracy, the question of “Supermarket in California” is considerable. Ginsberg poignantly wonders whether it isn’t ‘absurd’ to hold out hope for his country. Almost answer- ing the question, “America” portrays a nation systematically dismantling compas- sion and sensitivity in favor of fear, militarism, and greed. In a word, “America” is an elegy for the ‘lost America of love’ that Whitman had envisioned. So in spite of its comedic lines, “America” is not funny, as the laughter and Ginsberg’s perfor- mance would imply; rather, it is deeply sorrowful. The humor is bathetic, and the ruefulness Ginsberg later expressed stems not from the fact that he made people laugh but rather from the possibility that by playing up the comedy the deeply serious concerns may have been obscured. The incident is exceptionally telling because it illuminates more than a single poem; it highlights a condition common to Beat writing. Deeply influenced by Whitman aesthetically, politically, and spiritually, the Beats yearned for the ac- tualization of his vatic vision. As Gordon Ball has noted, they channeled that “‘subtle and tremendous force infusion’ Whitman called for” in Democratic Vis- tas (99). Following Whitman, they set themselves in opposition to a mainstream culture bent on vapid consumerism and paranoid militarism. In a country where alternative viewpoints were villainized and the lines between real threat and harmless critique were indiscriminately blurred by casting all protests as ‘un- American,’ the Beats rebelled.3 Unable to directly combat America’s misplaced values, their solution in the 1950s was to drop out of the mainstream, celebrate the fringe, and critique the insane status quo with art. Since dropping out left them generally poverty stricken and adrift, they embraced such marginalized positions 3 Numerous critics have drawn out the Beat writers’ countercultural position in 1940s and 50s America. For example, Oliver Harris has observed that “Whitman’s ideal of open com- munication stood, for Ginsberg, as the definitive indictment of Cold War culture”; however, the social context pressured Beat writers to internalize the anxiety fomented by the national paranoia and “falsify” themselves in their writing (174). Likewise, Bradley Stiles draws out the Beat’s influence from the tradition of transcendentalism (in which Whitman is central) to argue that the characteristic feature of Beat writing is a shared ethos defined by the difficulty they had in locating themselves within the landscape and the culture (67, 69). One manifestation of the Beats’ identity crisis, which Stiles describes colorfully as “a self-created monster devouring its own tail,” may be bathos (137).
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