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Religion and Spirituality in the Work of the Beat Generation DOCTORAL THESIS Irrational Doorways: Religion and Spirituality in the Work of the Beat Generation Reynolds, Loni Sophia Award date: 2011 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 28. Sep. 2021 Irrational Doorways: Religion and Spirituality in the Work of the Beat Generation by Loni Sophia Reynolds BA, MA A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD Department of English and Creative Writing University of Roehampton 2011 Reynolds i ABSTRACT My thesis explores the role of religion and spirituality in the work of the Beat Generation, a mid-twentieth century American literary movement. I focus on four major Beat authors: William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso. Through a close reading of their work, I identify the major religious and spiritual attitudes that shape their texts. All four authors’ religious and spiritual beliefs form a challenge to the Modern Western worldview of rationality, embracing systems of belief which allow for experiences that cannot be empirically explained. They also assert the primacy of the individual—a major American value—in a society which the authors believed to encroach upon individual agency. Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Corso are also strongly influenced by established religious traditions: an aspect of their work that is currently overlooked in Beat criticism. Burroughs’ belief in a magical universe shapes his work. Ginsberg is heavily influenced by the Jewish exegetical tradition. Kerouac and Corso’s work contains Catholic themes. My study rectifies some tendencies in current criticism which I find problematic: a dismissal of the Beats as a countercultural phenomenon rather than a literary movement, a tendency to frame Beat religion and spirituality in vague language, and a tendency to focus solely on Buddhism within the movement. My study illustrates that the Beat authors’ work contains serious religious and spiritual content, that they take part in American religious and literary traditions, and that the authors engage with major social issues of the post-war period. Reynolds ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One 2 The Beat Generation and its Place in the (Religious) World Critical Reception 8 Defining Religion, Spirituality, and the Subjective Turn 13 American Religious History and the Beats’ Subjective Turn 24 Outline of the Research 31 Chapter Two 42 “Heaven Consists of Freeing Oneself”: The Magical and the Spiritual in the Work of William S. Burroughs The Merveilleux, the Magical, and the Spiritual in William Lee’s Quest 44 The Cut-up Technique and the “Magical Universe” 65 Chapter Three 78 “The Voice Out of the Burning Bush”: Allen Ginsberg’s Poetics of Textual Interpretation The Jewish Tradition: Openness, the Individual, and Textual Experience of God 80 Ginsberg’s Blake Experience: A Textual Encounter with the Divine 88 Poetics of Textual Interpretation: Poems of Mystical Experience, 1948-1958 96 Poetics of Textual Interpretation: Revising the Jewish Canon in “Many Loves” and Kaddish 105 Chapter Four 121 The Catholic (Sacra)mental: Religious Loss in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road On the Road’s Sacramental Universe 129 “Unproductive Expenditures” and Sacramental Experience 138 Dean Moria-rty: Fool for Christ 150 Reynolds iii Chapter Five 160 “A Humane yet Dark Tribute to Life”: The Eucharist in the Work of Gregory Corso Christianity’s Role in the Post-War World: “Bomb” and “St. Francis Holding the Church from Falling” 166 Corso’s Transubstantial Poetics 173 The Breaded and the Fried: The Eucharist in The American Express 187 Chapter Six 198 Conclusion Works Cited 226 Reynolds iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank all those who have been helpful in various ways as I have undertaken this thesis. My supervisor, Kevin McCarron, and my co-supervisor, Mark Knight, have guided me through the entire process, and I thank them for all their help and approachability. I would also like to thank Tina Beattie for help with the material on Catholicism. My parents, Rita and Jasper Reynolds, have provided invaluable support and encouragement along the way, without which this thesis would not be possible. I would also like to express my gratitude to Tom Robinson for proofreading and lively discussions. Reynolds 1 “Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems we read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them” (James 302). “Something even more evil than atomic destruction is . an anti-dream drug which destroys the symbolizing, myth-making, intuitive, empathizing, telepathic faculty in man, so that his behavior can be controlled and predicted by the scientific methods that have proved so useful in the physical sciences” (Burroughs, Letters 268). “The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are / holy the ecstasy is holy!” (Ginsberg, “Footnote to Howl” 9-10) “it was as a Catholic…that I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood (one of them), Ste. Jeanne d‟Arc in Lowell, Mass., and suddenly with tears in my eyes and had a vision of what I must have really meant with „Beat‟ anyhow when I heard the holy silence in the church (I was the only one in there, it was five p. m., dogs were barking outside, children yelling, the fall leaves, the candles were flickering alone just for me), the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific” (Kerouac, “Origins” 63). “We will not force ourselves into any hand-me-down inherited straight-jacket [sic] of all cast-off moral concepts mixed with beastly superstition derived from the primitive mythology which is found in the bible- not that I have any objection to mythology in its proper place. We are human” (Corso, “Variations” 184). Reynolds 2 Chapter One The Beat Generation and its Place in the (Religious) World The Beat Generation is a mid-twentieth century American literary movement, beginning in the early 1940s in New York City and continuing throughout the late forties and fifties, when most of the movement‘s major work was produced. By the early sixties, the movement can be considered to ―wane‖ (Stephenson, Daybreak 3), though some work was still produced after this point. Major Beat authors like Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg championed open literary forms based on spontaneity and the full expression of personal emotions and urges. Their work was often considered vulgar in its time—two major works, Ginsberg‘s Howl (1956) and Burroughs‘ Naked Lunch (1959), were the subject of obscenity trials. However, despite this incendiary content, much Beat writing is seen to have a spiritual aspect by commentators, critics, and the Beat authors alike. This spiritual characteristic is often linked to the new religious movements of the 1960s, particularly to the burgeoning interest in Eastern-tradition religions among the American counterculture. In her introduction to The Portable Beat Reader (1992), Ann Charters discusses her conception of the Beat Generation. She writes: Its members share . their ―own sense of life, something that might be defined as an intricate web of perceptions, judgments, feelings, and aspirations.‖ This shared experience for the Beat writers was historical and political, based on the tumultuous changes of their times: the historic events that began with America‘s dropping the atomic bomb on Japan to bring World War II to an end, and the political ramifications of the ensuing Cold War and wave of anti- Reynolds 3 Communist hysteria that followed in the United States in the late 1940s and the 1950s. (xvi-xvii)1 Beat writers themselves often comment, in interviews, essays, and journals, on their own understandings of the movement. Jack Kerouac, who named the movement, remarked in 1958: The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had . in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, curious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way— a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word beat spoken on street corners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown-city-night of postwar America—beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction. (―Aftermath‖ 47)2 This statement points to some of the movement‘s central aspects, such as madness (―crazy illuminated hipsters‖) and a preoccupation with the ―down and out‖ society of underground New York. Beat authors often view these marginal segments of society as having a spiritual aspect, evidenced here by Kerouac‘s use of the terms ―illumination‖ and ―beatitude.‖ It is the spiritual aspect of the Beat Generation which I argue is the movement‘s most important feature, and which is the focus of my thesis. I investigate the role of religion and spirituality in the work of the Beat movement, with a particular emphasis on the links between the Beats and traditional religious forms. My investigation responds to what I view as a gap within current Beat scholarship: although Beat texts are full of rich and varied religious and spiritual themes, the current critical understanding of this aspect of the movement is Reynolds 4 incomplete.
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