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Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. Literature Zachary Mccleod Hutchins, Editor, Community Without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act Kate A

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Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. Literature Zachary Mccleod Hutchins, Editor, Community Without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act Kate A WORLDBeat Generation Writing BEATS and the Worlding of U.S. Literature JIMMY FAZZINO World Beats re-Mapping the transnational A Dartmouth Series in American Studies series editor Donald E. Pease Avalon Foundation Chair of Humanities Founding Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute Dartmouth College The emergence of Transnational American Studies in the wake of the Cold War marks the most significant reconfiguration of American Studies since its inception. The shock waves generated by a newly globalized world order de- manded an understanding of America’s embeddedness within global and local processes rather than scholarly reaffirmations of its splendid isolation. The se- ries Re-Mapping the Transnational seeks to foster the cross-national dialogues needed to sustain the vitality of this emergent field. To advance a truly compar- ativist understanding of this scholarly endeavor, Dartmouth College Press wel- comes monographs from scholars both inside and outside the United States. For a complete list of books available in this series, see www.upne.com. Jimmy Fazzino, World Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. Literature Zachary McCleod Hutchins, editor, Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act Kate A. Baldwin, The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side Yuan Shu and Donald E. Pease, American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning Towards the Transpacific Melissa M. Adams-Campbell, New World Courtships: Transatlantic Alterna- tives to Companionate Marriage David LaRocca and Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso, editors, A Power to Translate the World: New Essays on Emerson and International Culture Elèna Mortara, Writing for Justice: Victor Séjour, the Mortara Case, and the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations Rob Kroes, Prison Area, Independence Valley: American Paradoxes in Political Life and Popular Culture Jimmy Fazzino World Beats Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. Literature dartMouth College press hanover, neW haMpshire Dartmouth College Press An imprint of University Press of New England www.upne.com © 2016 Trustees of Dartmouth College Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ All rights reserved For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com Page 247 constitutes a continuation of this copyright page. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fazzino, Jimmy, 1981– Title: World Beats: Beat Generation writing and the worlding of U.S. literature / Jimmy Fazzino. Description: Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2016. | Series: Re-mapping the transnational: a Dartmouth series in American studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed. Identifiers: LCCN 2015040764 (print) | LCCN 2015035037 (ebook) | ISBN 9781611689471 (epub, pdf & mobi) | ISBN 9781611688979 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781611688986 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781611689471 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Beat generation. | American literature—20th century— History and criticism. | Literature and transnationalism. Classification: LCC PS228.B6 (print) | LCC PS228.B6 F39 2016 (ebook) | DDC 810.9/0054—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015040764 for Suzanne and Olive no one WaY WorKs, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down. —Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters Contents Introduction: Worlding the Beats 1 1 A World, a Sweet Attention: Jack Kerouac’s Subterranean Itineraries 31 2 The Beat Manifesto: Avant-Garde Poetics, Black Power, and the Worlded Circuits of African American Beat Writing 64 3 A Multilayered Inspiration: Philip Lamantia, Beat Poet 95 4 Cut-Ups and Composite Cities: The Latin American Origins of Naked Lunch 128 5 For Africa . for the World: Brion Gysin and the Postcolonial Beat Novel 162 6 Columbus Avenue Revisited: Maxine Hong Kingston and the Post-Beat Canon 192 Notes 215 Bibliography 233 Credits 247 Index 249 World Beats introduCtion: Worlding the Beats in the earlY 1960s Allen Ginsberg spent fifteen months traveling around India with partner Peter Orlovsky. They were joined for a spell by Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger visiting from Japan, where Snyder had been studying Zen Buddhism. While in Kolkata, Ginsberg was nat- urally drawn to Sunil Gangopadhyay and the group of dissident Bengali poets known as the “Hungryalists,” or, in a clearer echo of Ginsberg and his Beat comrades, the “Hungry Generation,” who felt disaffected by the fervent nationalism they saw all around them in a still newly indepen- dent India and were dismayed by the escalating militarism that followed the 1962 war with China.1 Like the Beats, the Hungry Generation poets would be censored and even jailed for their literary licentiousness and antinomian views. They discussed with Ginsberg the need to break free from the stifling legacy of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore—to them what T. S. Eliot had been to Ginsberg and so many others—and Ginsberg urged them to write in Bengali and abandon Western models in favor of a renewed and native spiritualism. In particular, his new friends in Kolkata were searching for a way beyond both colonialism and a nationalism that did not, they believed, truly serve India’s needs, and their example high- lights the multivalent legacies of European imperialism, the complexities of decolonization, and, to a much greater extent than has been acknowl- edged, the interest of Beat Generation writers in such matters. The tensions within Bengali intellectual life and among Kolkata’s adda poets: between the past and the present, colonial rule and national in dependence, “their gods” and “the gods of modernism,” as Deborah Baker puts it, mean that India for Ginsberg is not timeless or unchang- ing or utterly exotic (hallmarks of orientalist thinking) but vital and dy- namic; it retains the specificity of its historical moment and engages with [ 2 ] Introduction the poet on its own terms.2 To grasp the nature and significance of this engagement requires a transnational perspective on Beat writing. The Beats were prolific travelers, and the fact that they produced some of their most significant and enduring works abroad—including Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and Gregory Corso’s Happy Birthday of Death, just to name a few—suggests that their calling as writers was somehow predicated upon their leaving the United States behind. This distance from home is what opens up a space for all sorts of unexpected connections and crossings to arise in their work. Beat Generation writers were profoundly engaged with the world at large, particularly colonial and postcolonial spaces in what was then called the third world. Living and writing abroad at the great moment of decolonization across the globe, the Beats were more than just tourists (as more than a few critics have asserted), that is to say, unconcerned or altogether unaware of the immediate and usually fraught political situations unfolding around them. They could in fact be very at- tuned to local struggles and local histories, although it can take a certain kind of worlded reading practice to unearth these histories in their work. Every travelogue is, at some level, a comment on home, and the worlded and worldly view gained by Beat writers abroad often involved a new perspective on the United States as well. When Amiri Baraka, for in- stance, visited Cuba in 1960 along with a delegation of African American artists and activists under the banner of the Fair Play for Cuba Commit- tee, his experiences there marked a real shift in consciousness for him.3 Among other things, Baraka’s time in Cuba gave him a different point of view on the U.S. civil rights movement, which was then in full swing. He saw firsthand how incredibly overdetermined and far from universal the discourse on race had become in the United States and how limited the solutions offered by the mainstream protest movement. He became open to the possibilities of a broader, more radical conception of political struggle and social change; as Todd Tietchen has argued, Baraka’s expe- rience of Cuba was the first step on a path that would lead him to black nationalism and then third world Marxism.4 He was deeply affected by the presence of fellow traveler Robert Williams. As an NAACP chapter head in North Carolina, Williams had recently made waves by arming the local African American community against the Klan. Williams, who would return to Cuba in 1961, wanted by the FBI, represented a more militant wing of the civil rights movement. He would inspire the future Black Panthers, and his philosophy was something that Baraka began to find more and more appealing as the 1960s wore on. Introduction [ 3 ] Even Gregory Corso, seemingly the most apolitical of Beat poets, has something to say about the global affairs of the day. Barry Miles, writing specifically about William Burroughs but expressing a more general sen- timent about the Beats in Paris and elsewhere abroad, argues that Bur- roughs’s “experience was much more internal; his was more a landscape of ideas, and in many ways he could have been living anywhere.”5 Yet Corso, however committed to the lyrical and averse to the earthbound, did not remain unaffected while in Paris by the tense political situation that existed there during the final months of the Fourth Republic—driven largely by the turmoil of the Algerian War. And he cannot help but figure these issues into his poetry, notably in “The Sacré-Coeur Café” and in “Bomb” (the centerpiece of his 1960 volume of Paris poems, The Happy Birthday of Death), where Corso makes his immediate political and his- torical context quite visible.
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