Unit 2
1950s: The Beat Generation
1945-1960
Harry S. Truman (D) Dwight D. Eisenhower (R)
(1945-1952) (1952-1960)
THE COLD WAR
Two Blocks
Politics of Containment
Marshall Plan
NATO, Hostilities and Korea
POLITICS OF ANTICOMMUNISM
Second Red Scare
HUAC and the Anti-communist Crusade
McCarthysm and the McCarran Act (1950)
Election of 1952: Dwight D. Eisenhower (VP Nixon)
Late 1930s: DECLINE OF LEFTISM AND COMMITMENT
Disillusionment with left ideologies
Exhaustion of the engaged impulse in literature
Why?
Deteriorated image of the Soviet Union
(Moscow Trials, crop failures & famines, link with Nazism, etc.)
1941: entrance into WWII US enemy of Soviet Union
WWII “replaced” the Great Depression with a new age of prosperity
DEMOBILISATION AND RECONVERSION
Fear of Mass Unemployment and Depression
Demonization of Career Women
Baby Boom
Democratization of Higher Learning
ECONOMIC BOOM
The End of the New Deal Spirit
Wartime Savings / Demand of Consumer Goods
Middle-Class Lifestyle
Consumerism
EISENHOWER’S CONSERVATISM
The Affluent Society
Big Business
Middle-Class, Prosperity and the Suburbs
Age of Consensus
AGE OF CONSENSUS
Leader of the Western Block
Economic Propserity
Malvina Reynolds’s “Little Boxes”
And they all play on the golf course
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky, And drink their martinis dry,
Little boxes on the hillside, And they all have pretty children
Little boxes all the same. And the children go to school,
There's a green one and a pink one And the children go to summer camp
And a blue one and a yellow one, And then to the university,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky Where they are put in boxes
And they all look just the same. And they come out all the same.
And the people in the houses
And the boys go into business
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes And marry and raise a family
And they came out all the same, In boxes made of ticky tacky
And there's doctors and lawyers, And they all look just the same.
And business executives, There's a green one and a pink one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they all look just the same. And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
POPULAR CULTURE
Spectator Sports
Television (ABC, CBS, NBC)
Hollywood Westerns and Musicals
Celebration of Consumerism and Conformity
THE OTHER AMERICA
Poverty
Racial Tension
Latinos
Native-Americans
YOUTH CULTURE
The Effects of Affluence
Juvenile Delinquent
Black Music, White Kids
Hollywood’s Rebellious Teens
The Wild One (1953)
The Blackboard Jungle (1955)
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)
Based on the novel by Nelson Algren (1945)
The Beat Generation
Origin of the Beat Generation
Early 1940s: Enter Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs,
Allen Ginsberg and Lucien Carr
“New Vision” inspired by Yeats, Auden,
Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West
1. Uncensored self-expression as the seed of creativity
2. An expansion of the artist’s consciousness
3. Art beyond conventional morality
Origin of the Word “Beat”
“Everyone who has lived through war, any sort of war, knows that beat
means, not so much weariness, as rawness of the nerves; not so much being
‘filled up to here’ as being emptied out. It describes a state of mind from
which all unessentials have been stripped, leaving it receptive to everything
around it, but impatient with trivial obstructions. To be beat is to be at the
bottom of your personality, looking up”.
John Clellon Holmes, “This is the Beat Generation” New York Times (1952)
Origin of the Word “Beat”
“The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes
and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a
generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming
America, serious, 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 streetcorners 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”
Jack Kerouac, “About the Beat Generation” (1957)
Origin of the Word “Beat”
“[In the jargon of Afro-Americans,] the word beat originally meant poor,
down and out, dead-beat, on the bum, sad, sleeping in subways.[…] now
Beat Generation has simply become the slogan for a revolution in manners
in America[…]. But yet, but yet, woe to those who think that the Beat
Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality... woe unto
those who don't realize that America must, will, is, changing now, for the
better I say”
(Kerouac, “The Origins of the Beat Generation”, 1959).
And what about “Generation”?
“The Beats were never (nor ever pretended or aspired to be) a
homogeneous or a consistent movement. They issued no
manifestos, subscribed to no basic tenets, formulated no dogma,
embraced no common theory, doctrine, or creed. Rather, their
coherence was of another sort, one founded upon mutual
sympathy and inspiration, upon affinity and a sense of kinship in
personal and artistic matters.
(Gregory Stephenson Pilgrims to Elsewhere 8)
And what about “Generation”?
Small group
Collective Affinities/ Collective Biography
Literature of Experience
Spirituality
Drugs / Addiction / Pathology / Mental Instability
The Big Three
Jack Kerouac Allen Ginsberg William Burroughs
Deviant/Ouscast as Muse
Neal Cassady Herbert Huncke Carl Solomon
Jack Kerouac
William Burroughs
Allen Ginsberg
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Gary Snyder
Gregory Corso
Michael McCLure
Diane di Prima
Ted Joans
Paul Goodman
Neil Cassady
Herbet Hunckie
Carl Solomon
Beat America
Hedonistic self-indulgence
Spiritual wasteland
Spiritual kinship: addicts, thieves,
Repression and conformity dropouts, marginal individuals
Importance of radical lifestyle,
Contempt for the passive, liberation, individual spirit
well-adjusted consumer
Taboo subjects, oppositional attitude
Against corporate America
and middle-class suburbia Characters: Dangerous, amoral,
psychopathic, impulsive, addicted…
Influences
Romanticism (Shelley, Blake, Keats)
Transcendentalism (Thoreau)
American line-cadences of Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Hart
Crane, William Carlos Williams
Influences
Modernism (Pound, Williams, H.D.)
Free sex and instinctual liberation
(D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, or Wilhelm Reich)
French Intellectuals: Louis Ferdinand Celine and Jean Genet
Larger Context of Experimental Production
Black Mountain School
New York poets
San Francisco Renaissance
Abstract-Expressionist painters
Experimental filmmakers
(Robert Frank, Shirley Clarke, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger)
Beat Topics
Experiences with Drugs
Altered perceptions / experiences
Autobiographical / Literature of experience
Liberation, Against sexual repression,
Spirituality, Mysiticism
Interest in Madness and Mental Disease
Personal experience
Politicization of madness
Problematization of rationalism and reality
Beat attraction to madness
“In a culture that suspected mere difference in appearance as deviant
behavior, or regarded homosexuality as criminal perversion, Allen Ginsberg
maintained that ‘my measure at the time was the sense of personal genius and
acceptance of all strangeness in people as their nobility.’ […] The Beats were
attracted to ‘madness’ as a sustained presence; a lucid, singular, and obsessive
way to illuminate the shadows of the day.”
(John Tytell’s Naked Angels)
Beat Aesthetics
Free-form, Spontaneous style
Bebop Jazz
(dissonant, fragmented, inventive, difficult, etc.)
Authenticity / Against censorship and revision
Against intellectual establishment
Popular Culture + Experimentation
POPULAR CULTURE MATERIALS
Westerns, “whodunits”, hard-boiled classics,
juvenile delinquency melodramas
versus
HIGH-ART
free-form, modernist assault on tradition
Automatic writing, stream of consciousness, fragmentation
The Politics of the Beat Generation
Individualism and escapism
Community and marginal experience
Uprooted political resistance
Beyond political revolution
Early American Subcultures
The War
Minorities
The Beatnik / Beat Symptoms
On film
Legacy
Beat goes Beatnik
The Beatniks (1957) The Beat Generation (1959)
The Rebel Set (1959)
Pull My Daisie (1959)
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
Kerouac’s “Wild Form”
Influenced by Neal Cassady’s inhibited, spontaneous, fast, letters
“I have always held that when one writes, one should forget all rules, literary styles,
and other such pretensions as large words, lordly clauses… Rather I think one should
write, as nearly as possible, as if he were the first person on earth and was humbly
and sincerely putting on paper that which he saw and experienced and loved and lost,
what his passing thoughts were and his sorrows and desires…”
(Letter written by Cassady)
Kerouac’s “Wild Form”
From “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” by Jack Kerouac
The object is set before the mind, either in reality. as in sketching (before a landscape or teacup or old
face) or is set in the memory wherein it becomes the sketching from memory of a definite image-
object.
Not "selectivity' of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-
subject seas of thought, swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical
exhalation and expostulated statement, like a fist coming down on a table with each complete
utterance, bang!
If possible write "without consciousness" in semi-trance (as Yeats' later "trance writing") allowing
subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so "modern" language what
conscious art would censor, and write excitedly, swiftly, with writing-or-typing cramps, in accordance
(as from center to periphery) with laws of orgasm, Reich's "beclouding of consciousness."
Works
The Town and the City (1950)
On the Road (1957; w. 1951)
Visions of Cody (posth. 1972; w. 1951)
The Dharma Bums (1958)
The Subterraneans (1958)
…and more
The Town and the City (1950)
- First novel (5 books, long bilgdungsroman) - More fictional
- Memories of childhood in Lowell, MA - No “first thought, best thought” yet
and his experiences in NY in the 40s
- Accepted to follow Columbia’s literary
- Already Roman à clef strictures
- First look at the underground, - Creating something new, but also trying
postwar dislocation (family, social, to impress his teachers and literary models
cultural…)
- Published by the highly respectable
- Already uses the term “beat” publishing house Harcourt, Brace.
On the Road
(1957)
Roman à clef
New York
San Francisco
On the Road (1957)
Narrator
Spontaneity and Ephemerality
Themes
Style
Idealism / Transcendentalism
The ending
Works
The Town and the City (1950)
On the Road (1957; w. 1951)
Visions of Cody (posth. 1972; w. 1951)
The Dharma Bums (1958)
The Subterraneans (1958)
…and more
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Ginsberg’s Style
Ginsberg’s verse: Flashes, units of thought, breaths… Punctuation
Repetitions and lists (Whitmanian)
References to Popular Culture (music, film…) / High modernist
style, literary, religious and mythical references
Lyrical and Epic
Dissolution of language, irrationality, surrealism, associations…
solipsism…
Ginsberg’s Style
Influenced by
William Carlos Williams and Kerouac’s “sketching” technique
Natural speech and spontaneous transcription
Following “the sequence of perception in the course of the writing,
even if the route became as irrational, intuitive, and discontinuous as
the shape of the mind itself. Syntax, therefore, would not accord to the
essential nonsequential flow of the mind” (John Tytell, Naked Angels
214)
Thematic itnerests
High / Low: From transcendentalism to scatology
Politics
Religion / Transcendence
Mental instability and desease
Consumerism
Sexuality — Homosexuality — Vitalism
Some works
“Howl”
(1956)
“Kaddish”
(1961)
Reality Sandwiches
(1963)
Planet News
(1968)
The Fall of America
and Other Poems
(1973)
“Howl” (1956)
1955
Six Gallery Reading
Publication and Trial
San Francisco Renaissance
William Burroughs (1914-1997)
An Ambivalent Beat
Early member of the Beats
Reflection of the Beat spirit
Anticipated the dissolution of the Beat ethos
Beat attitude / Break with romanticized idealism
Style
From uninflected journalism to sci-fi hallucinations
Popular literature
(hard-boiled detective fiction, horror fiction, pulp science fiction…)
versus
Experimentalism
(prose poetry, fragmentation, “routines”)
Anti-heroic prose
William Burroughs
Junkie (1953)
Queer (1953)
Naked Lunch (1959)
The Soft Machine (1961)
The Ticket That Exploded (1962)
Nova Express (1964)
Junkie (1953)
The drug novel (40s/50s)
Uninflected, straightforward chronology
Heroin as an escape from middle-class boredom
Dehumanized individualism
Naked Lunch (1953)
Heroin underworld
Critique on consumer culture
Critique on institutions and law enforcement
Predecessor of postmodernism
Queer (w. 1951-3; p. 1985)
The 50s gay novel
Direct treatment of homosexual subculture
Relationship between drugs and sex
Problematic representation of homosexuality
Liberation, exhilaration, frenzy
EXPERIMENTAL TRILOGY
The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), Nova Express (1964)
Cut-up and experimental techniques
Recycling
Relationship between drugs and sex
Problematic representation of homosexuality
Liberation, exhilaration, frenzy
EXPERIMENTAL TRILOGY
The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), Nova Express (1964)
Experimental techniques
Recycling
“Pages of text are cut and rearranged to form new combinations of word
and image, that is, the page is actually cut with scissors, usually into four
sections, and the order is rearranged…I take a page of a text, my own or
someone else’s…lining up the lines. The composite text is then read across,
half one text and half the other. Perhaps one of tenworks out, and I use it.”
(Burroughs)
Cut-ups / Fold-ins: spontaneity + weapon against control
The Beats and Gender
“The Beats did reject the entire round of work and consumption; they did offer a vision of human adventure beside
which the commodified wonders of an affluent society looked pale and pointless. Yet their adventure did not include
women, except, perhaps, as ‘experiences’ that men might have. And in their vision, which found its way into the
utopian hopes of the counterculture, the ideal of personal freedom shaded over into an almost vicious irresponsibility
to the women who passed through their lives.”
(Barbara Ehrenreich The Hearts of Men 171)
The memoirs written by women of the Beat Generation
often draw attention to their secondary position, or their
limited mobility.
1990s: greater visibility of women and female poets and
writers of the Beat Generation .
Diane di Prima
Intenesely involved in the artistic and literary world:
(1936-present)
The Floating Bear (newsletter)
New York Poets Theater
Poets Press
Timothy Leary’s psychedelic community
Her poetry is often woman-centered, while being influenced by
Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Frank O´Hara and Buddhist
practices.
Her poem “Loba recovers the memory of a mare” partly
appropriates the structure of rhythm of Ginsberg’s “Howl” to
give expression to female experience (mostly absent, or
portrayed in negative terms in “Howl”)
ruth weiss Economic language verbs and nouns over
adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, etc.
(1928-present)
Interest in the brevity and centrality of image in
the Japanese form Haiku.
Fragmentation, non-linearity, orality and
performance poetry.
“No American poet has remained so faithful to jazz in the
construction of poetry as has ruth weiss. Her poems are scores
to be sounded with all her riffy ellipses and open-formed
phrasing swarming the senses. Verbal motion becoming
harmonious with a universe of rhythm is what her work
essentializes. Others read to jazz or write from jazz. ruth weiss
writes jazz in words.” (Jack Hirschman)
Joanne Kyger
(1934-present) Associated with:
The Beats (Gary Snyder)
The Black Mountain Poets (Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn)
The San Francisco Renaissance (Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley)
Her poetry:
Grounded in ordinary experience, the everyday life
Form and shape based on content
Immediate, accessible speech.
African-American Beats
Attraction to the marginalization of black people and minorities:
“At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th
and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling
that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me,
not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night... I wished I
were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I
was so drearily, a "white man" disillusioned.” (On the Road, 1957)
“[T]he white bebopper of the forties was as removed from society as the
Negroes, but as a matter of choice… [the] Negro himself had no choice.”
(LeRoi Jones, Blues People, 1963)
Amiri Baraka
(aka Leroy Jones)
(1934-2014)
Early association with the Beats
With the rise of the civil rights movement, his
poetry became more political
Death of Malcolm X : abandons his “beat” life
& white wife, moves to Harlem and founds
the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School to
create a “black aesthetic” in theater.
Bob Kaufman
(1925-1986)
Oral poetry performance poetry:
improvisational, inventive, momentary.
Poetry influenced by Jazz and Bebop:
importance on inventionand recitation.
Humor, satire, irony and mockery are
often found in his poetry.
