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The Beat That Has Gone On… The Beat That Has Gone On…. By Kristin Kawecki Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Susannah Rodriguez- Drissi English and Foreign Languages Department Kawecki 1 The Beat That Has Gone On…and On The Beat Generation was a chaotic, self-immolating, drug-enthused artistic blur of resistance to America’s conformist post-war culture. Their movement, while so antithetical to the American precept of normalcy for the times, became the foundation for much of what we hold as culturally “American” today. The Beats represent the shift from old to new in their recycling of both liberal politics and artistic forms into something that was entirely their own, yet a movement which rippled out into many others, and whose effects reverberate to this day. The name “Beats” was coined by Jack Kerouac when he claimed that they were a “beaten” generation; beaten by the oppression of the culture of their times. In response to the McCarthyist 1950’s culture’s drive to “return to normalcy” after the war, the Beats produced works which Beat artist Kenneth Rexroth explains “tirelessly pointed out that there was nothing normal about us,” engaging themselves in just about everything that was in direct opposition of the conforming majority—from drug-use to homo-sexuality, as well as in the content and form of their creative acts. The main thread then which united the Beat movement was their ideology of rebellion informing their “cultural practices”. In their repudiation of homogeneity, the Beats helped bring about an “avant-garde” to the artistic community which included music, painting and the plastic arts, as well as, of course, literature. However, as Mel van Elteren notes in “The Subculture of the Beats: A Sociological Revisit”, the Beats tapped into the preexisting Bohemian movement’s connotation with an “underworld of art”, and the artistic tie to unconventionality. In their movement of resistance, the Beats borrowed from an array of sources that fit outside of mainstream American culture, including previous artistic and arguably Boheminan movements, such as Romanticism and Transcendentalism. The Romantic influence is clear in the melodramatic Beat ideal of unadulterated self-sacrifice to their arts, and their “extreme passions Kawecki 2 aimed towards a goal that was ultimately unattainable as well as unsustainable,” (Elteren 72). The Romantic impulse to expose one’s feelings is visible in the style of the prose itself; for while the Beat’s free verse poems and stream of consciousness novels daringly break convention, they also reflect a desire to capture spontaneity and the exact emotion one had experienced. The influence of Transcendentalist philosophy manifests in the Beats’ appropriation of the ideal of self-reliance in their absorption with the individual, and emphasis on a “pure” process of creative invention. Additionally the Beats, particularly Allen Ginsberg, idolized Transcendental poet Walt Whitman, who gave to the Beats a tradition of poetry which celebrated uninhibited homosexuality, “and also a general proclivity towards what may be seen as “shocking” (Artifice). Romantic and Transcendental poetry also imbued the Beat Movement with a “romantic primitivism,” or belief in the superiority of a simple way of life close to nature, as well as in the superiority of pre-industrial societies and peoples to those of the present,” (80). This is often manifested in the Beat Generation’s idealization of a transient lifestyle, such as in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”, which is said to have ‘“romanticized hitchhiking and the American road to readers and travelers around the world,’” (Artifice). Besides Romantic influence, the Beats’ attraction to an idealized pre-industrial world is the result of the insurgence of Zen ideology. To some critics the “Zen Kick” was nothing more than a superficial trend for this egocentric group, claiming that Zen “gave a sense of intellectual, even religious justification to the Beats’ deep natural impulse to freedom, their wish to stay unattached and on the move” (94). While it is true that only a few Beat Artists stayed highly dedicated to Zen, one must differentiate between practice and influence, as Zen inarguably made great impact upon the philosophy of the Beats. One of the greatest manifestations of this was not Kawecki 3 in the content, but in the form of their poetry, as is especially clear in the “hybrid-mantric aesthetic,” attributed to Ginsberg. (Pawlik 100). One of the greatest influences on the form of Beat poetry was Surrealism, for As Joanna Pawlik explains in “Surrealism, Beat Literature and the San Francisco Renaissance” the appeal of surrealism is that it allowed for an alternative model to display “queertalk” or “hiptalk” (100), The Beats shared with the Surrealists the “quest for pure psychic automatic” and “unrevised composition” (99). Moreover, the Surreal aesthetic “bequeathed to American writers a fascination with mental derangement, destructiveness, and the darker recesses of the mind,” (99) all major themes in Beat poetry. However, to many critics the Beats had an “unmistakable and at times lamentable” proximity to Surrealism (98), which lent it a “perceived capacity to either legitimate or corrupt New American Poetry” (98). The Beats themselves reeled from claims that they were reincarnating the Surrealist tradition, believing that the irrationality of the Surrealists was inadequately serious in a Post-War Era still reeling from Fascism and the atomic bomb (Pawlik 100-101), due to Surrealism’s perceived connotations of artificiality, decadence and lack of restraint,” (99). However, today’s critics do not describe the Beats as initiating a new wave of Surrealism, but rather as applying ‘surrealistic’ features to their writing, for the purpose of incorrigibly intense reflection and examination of the self, (Pawlik 101). In the context of the Beats’ movement of dissent Surrealism functioned as a means for the ideal of freedom, and critique of conformist values to manifest itself in the form of their works.. Pawlik explains that, “a ‘language of resistance’ emerged through the combin[ation of] nonlinear representation, queer identity and Buddhist study and practice,” (100) “‘provid[ing] [the Beats] with an… antilogic which perfectly suited their notion of what was sane behaviour’”. In effect, many view the Beats to be the initiators of the Post-Modernist Aesthetic: through their alternative form the Beats Kawecki 4 ushered in an attack on the hegemony of the New Critics and the idea of the text as a hegemonic form, thus fostering a flowering of post-structuralism (Pawlik 99; 104). The Beat Generation is argued to have encapsulated the transition between the Modern and the Post-Modern. This act of rebellion against the hegemonic standard through borrowing from an earlier form parallels their approach to liberal ideology, as in repudiation of the McCarthyist culture of conformity, the Beats reshaped Old Left Ideology into the Leftist platform that flourished in the 1960’s and is still recognizable today. Although not too many years earlier communism had been surprisingly widespread, after the second world war a hostility, and at best, cynical view of communism was ushered in through a war of ideology and influence, the Cold War (Harrison 104; Lee 373). While repressed by the sentiment of anti-liberalism and ensuing ant- intellectualism coursing throughout the country, many, including the Beats, were also heavily disillusioned, believing the Old Left politics of their parents’ generation to be obsolete and unachievable in this post-war world (Lee 373). However, within much of Beat poetry gleams a nostalgia for the Old Left, as demonstrated prominently in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Carl Solomon’s “I Was a Communistic Youth,” (Lee 372-75). Ben Lee in “Howl and Other Poems: Is There Old Left In These New Beats?” contends that these “melancholic attachments to the Old Left generate even greater rhetorical energy” towards liberalism within the Beats poetry, “creat[ing] a temporal disjunction, calling up a past social identity at once buried under cynicism and exposed to justify it but which cannot be exposed without simultaneously underscoring a position of resistance both to that cynicism and to the post-Fordist, Cold War forces that produce it,” (Lee 374). Their works, Ginsberg’s especially, frequently manifest the desire to find a balance “‘between the Scylla of Stalinism and the Charybdis of anti-Stalinism,’” (Lee 382). Coupled with a Zen infused proclivity towards non-violence, Lee contends that the Romanticist Kawecki 5 leanings of the Beats were also prominent in this reformation of liberalism, the conflation of all three movements visible for instance in the effect Ginsberg’s Howl has of “tak[ing] the reader from the initial desolation of the industrial space, emptied out and militarized, to a Blakean vision of the blessed and beautiful form within all creatures,” (Lee 378). The Beats gave to America a new liberal vision dominated by the Romantic idealization of a pre-industrialized world, a world which was without the bomb; believing that big industry and big science sponsored by a capitalist government was inherently linked to violence (Harrison 104). While the Beats themselves were not revolutionaries in their political action, they were revolutionary and rebellious in their creative acts, as evinced in their “war” against conformity which manifested itself through their post-modern form and the controversial content of their works. This method of rebellion reflected a more-pacifistic, Zen-inspired liberalism
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