San Francisco As Countercultural City: a Spatial Approach Through Literature and Culture (1950-1969)
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UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA TESIS DOCTORAL San Francisco as Countercultural City: A Spatial Approach through Literature and Culture (1950-1969) San Francisco como ciudad contracultural: un análisis espacial a través de la literatura y la cultura, (1950-1969) MEMORIA PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE DOCTOR PRESENTADA POR Pedro Antonio Galán Lozano Directora Carmen Méndez García Madrid, 2018 © Pedro Antonio Galán Lozano, 2017 UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA Doctorado en Estudios Literarios TESIS DOCTORAL San Francisco as Countercultural City: A Spatial Approach through Literature and Culture (1950-1969) San Francisco como ciudad contracultural: un análisis espacial a través de la literatura y la cultura (1950-1969) MEMORIA PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE DOCTOR PRESENTADA POR Pedro Antonio Galán Lozano Directora Carmen Méndez García Madrid, 2017 For my family ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to thank Dr. Carmen Méndez for her invaluable effort as advisor to this dissertation. Since the moment she accepted to be a fundamental part of this project, her insight, responsiveness, and affability have been central to the completion of this work. I can only be grateful for her disposition to adjust to my pace and her full understanding in the moments of greater stagnancy. Although they surely do not know, Dr. Méndez, Dr. Eusebio de Lorenzo, and Dr. Eduardo Valls partly inspired this dissertation during my undergraduate and graduate years. They are all paradigmatic examples of the mark that an enthusiastic professor can leave on a student. Dr. Valls’s guidance while I was writing my master’s dissertation back in 2011 was moreover especially enlightening, for he taught me many of the secrets behind a good academic work. My parents, Pedro and Bernardina, are also part of this project. I owe them much of the determination that has been put into this dissertation. They have always encouraged me to devote responsibly to what I have enjoyed the most, for which I am extremely indebted. This project would not have come to an end without their constant trust and support through the years. Thank you to Xiana for exceeding my expectations and being far more understanding than I ever thought she would be. She has to know that she, in her own way, has made an effort I am very proud of. The most special thanks goes to Rebeca, my inseparable companion. Throughout this process, she has been caring, supportive, empathic, and compassionate to an - 5 - unparalleled extent. A lifetime might not be enough for me to return her generosity. She knows how much we have been through and how much we have been able to accomplish. Once again, we have made it. This dissertation is certainly hers, too. To all of them, and to all of those relatives and friends who have shown their respect and support for this project all along, I express my deepest gratitude. - 6 - - 7 - - 8 - CONTENTS ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................11 Abstract | English........................................................................................................13 Resumen | Español......................................................................................................19 INTRODUCTION.........................................................................................................29 METHODOLOGICAL NOTES...................................................................................51 PART ONE: THE FIFTIES..........................................................................................67 1.1. Edenic North Beach: Enclave Consciousness in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry............................................................................69 1.2. Bob Kaufman and the Problematic Racialization of the Beat Social Space......................................................................................87 1.3. Placelessness and the Hobo: Jack Kerouac in the San Francisco Skid Row......................................................................................99 1.4. A Trans-Pacific Heterotopia: Beat Orientalism from Kenneth Rexroth to Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen........................................115 PART TWO: SAN FRANCISCO’S TRANSITION FROM THE FIFTIES TO THE SIXTIES................................................................139 2.1. Post-Beat San Francisco: A Few Ideas for a Cultural-Historical Contextualization................................................................141 2.2. Drifting towards the Sixties in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49..........................................................................................147 2.3. John Wieners and Queer Spatialization in Post-Beat San Francisco.....................................................................................................161 PART THREE: THE SIXTIES..................................................................................175 3.1. Dissent on Stage: Radical Theater and the Reclamation of the Public Space.............................................................................................177 3.2. The Sixties Put into Real-Life Practice: The Haight-Ashbury Community.............................................................................193 3.3. The Kesey-Leary Dichotomy: Shaping a Distinctive West Coast Psychedelic Counterculture............................................................203 CONCLUSIONS..........................................................................................................221 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................235 - 9 - - 10 - ABSTRACT - 11 - - 12 - ABSTRACT | English This dissertation is inspired by a personal interest in an approach to the mid-20th century American counterculture that goes beyond the usual historical and cultural critical perspectives. Given the frequent failure of these perspectives to address the importance of the spatial dimension, our intention is to study the relationship between counterculture and urban space in the particular case of the city of San Francisco. We argue that it is not incidental that a large number of social and cultural dissenting movements have emerged in San Francisco over the years. The peculiar history of the city and the energies stemming from it have fueled an intimate and long-lasting dialogue between San Francisco and the counterculture that has turned the city into a hotbed of resistance to the American status quo. Consequently, we propose an analysis of this dialogue, how it takes shape, and how it impacts both on the counterculture and the city. With the purpose of defining a clear frame of study, the present dissertation puts the focus on the literary and cultural representations of the 1950s and 1960s counterculture. While this phenomenon amalgamated a heterogeneous array of loosely connected forces, it also represents a relatively cohesive ensemble within the social and cultural history of San Francisco and the United States. The significance of the mid- century counterculture in American history lies in its being part of a critical period for the social and economic configuration of the United States the way we know it nowadays. Within our time frame, we observe two essential countercultural sub-periods in - 13 - San Francisco at mid-century: the Fifties and the Sixties. Although both sub-periods belong to their respective decades in terms of time, neither fits in length the notion of decade. The Fifties represent the heyday of the Beat Generation in San Francisco, which we date within the span that runs from 1955 until the gradual decline of this movement in the city between 1958 and 1960. The Sixties, in turn, cover the variety of countercultural tendencies clustered in San Francisco in the second half of the 1960s. We frame this period between the emergence of a sound radical theater scene in San Francisco around 1964 and the rapid deterioration of the hippie subculture in the months that followed the 1967 Summer of Love. We find a close connection between both sub- periods that makes them inseparable from each other, for the San Francisco Sixties certainly build on the foundations set in the Fifties. We note in this close relationship, additionally, a transitional period that outlines sensibilities that had remained unresolved in the Fifties and that would erupt in the Sixties and beyond. In our study of the area where San Francisco and the counterculture intersect, we choose not to articulate our analysis around a homogeneous critical framework. Instead, this dissertation benefits from an eclectic critical basis that relies on secondary sources pertaining mainly to human geography and philosophy. This corpus finds cohesion in its contribution to the broader field of spatial studies. Among these sources, we can find reference figures in these disciplines such as Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Yi-Fu Tuan, Edward Relph, or Tim Cresswell. Along with the counterculture and San Francisco, spatial studies, therefore, close the triangle of concepts that gives shape to this study. Our examination of the dialectics between the city and the counterculture at mid- century begins, thus, with the Fifties. We start with Beat author Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s - 14 - poetry in its expression of an enclave consciousness that condenses a feeling of attachment to the North Beach neighborhood among the local Beats. It is particularly