«ورزش از دیدگاه مکتب فرانکفورت»
نوشته ی اینجانب در نشریه ادبی - فرهنگی «گلستانه» شماره ۱۰۲ به چاپ رسیده است.
Allen Ginsberg is the one person in American poetry whose name belongs alongside the prominent and influential writers of almost every mid-20th-century literary movement, including BEAT POETRY, CONFESSIONAL POETRY, the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE, and even the
Ginsberg was born in
Ginsberg’s neo-romanticism traces its American lineage from Walt Whitman through Hart CRANE, but it reaches back to
Ginsberg’s one-time friend, Norman Podhoretz, remembers “the amazing virtuosity that enabled Ginsberg to turn out polished verses in virtually any style” during his Columbia days; what came after, however, seemed to Podhoretz “hysterical and un-modulated”. In spite of this general complaint, the former friend admires the metrical rigor, cleverness, and the imaginative originality of Howl and some of the other poems of that period. Along with incorporating the pacing and language of common speech advocated by Williams and Pound into contemporary verse, Ginsberg looked to and utilized Whitman is experimentation with line length; as his consciousness expanded thanks to Buddha and Blake, so too did his poetic constructions. In spoken performance, Ginsberg’s, long lines demand careful breath control to be delivered in rhythmic fullness, similar to what Charles OLSON prescribed in his formative 1950 essay “Projective Verse”, but in form they owe more to Whitman and Kerouac. For Ginsberg, poetry became a physical undertaking, as well as an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual one; the presentation and reception of the work requires all facets of the human in the same way that production of the work does. Ginsberg’s poetry, at every stage of the process and product, is concerned with the whole person — body, mind, and spirit. The result is a poetry that possesses not only a wildness in its all-inclusive scope but also a control in its dependence on conscious attention to rhythm and image. Ginsberg not only traveled endlessly, giving readings, he also recorded stylistically diverse performances, from Blake to punk, both spoken and sung. Among the recorded treasures is his first performance of “
"HOWL"
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
street!
III
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful
typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the
abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're
free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night
(1956)
William Carlos Williams on Ginsberg's Howl
When he was younger, and I was younger, I used to know Allen Ginsberg, a young poet living in Paterson, New Jersey, where he, son of a well-known poet, had been born and grew up. He was physically slight of build and mentally much disturbed by the life which he had encountered about him during those first years after the World War I as it was exhibited to him in and about New York City. He was always on the point of "going away," where it didn't seem to matter; he disturbed me; I never thought he'd live to grow up and write a book of poems. His ability to survive, travel, and go on writing astonishes me. That he has gone on developing and perfecting his art is no less amazing to me.
Now he turns up fifteen or twenty years later with an arresting poem. Literally he has, from all the evidence, been through hell. On the way he met a man named Carl Solomon with whom he shared among the teeth and excrement of this life something that cannot be described but in the words he has used to describe it. It is a howl of defeat. Not defeat at all for he has gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience, a trivial experience. Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.
It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body, through the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages. The wonder of the thing is not that he has survived but that he, from the very depths, has found a fellow whom he can love, a love he celebrates without looking aside in these poems. Say what you will, he proves to us, in spite of the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man, the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith--and the art! to persist.
It is the belief in the art of poetry that has gone hand in hand with this man into his Golgotha, from that charnel house, similar in every way, to that of the Jews in the past war. But this is in our country, our own fondest purlieus. We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels. This poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as his own--and, we believe, laughs at it and has the time and effrontery to love a fellow of his choice and record that love in a well-made poem.
Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.
Commentary on the poem Howl
The publication of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" (1956) sounded a cry of rage, and in turn other cries of rage — or downright dismissals — were raised against it. Ginsberg announces himself, in the opening of the volume's title poem, as speaking for his compatriots, naming their collective condition of disaffection: "I saw the best minds of my generation, starving, hysterical, naked." The title poem explicitly identifies itself as a lamentation for those most promising and most excluded from the "American ideal." In a long descriptive catalogue Ginsberg makes clear his contention that the finest have been driven, by what a critic called "the overwhelming pressures of conformity, competition, prestige and respectability," toward madness, dissipation, and the outraged enactments of the denied. Not only is he exiled from the tranquilized suburbs by virtue of ethnicity, sexuality, political philosophy, and intellectual energy; he also cannot locate in the codified possibilities of American society a tenable way of living. Thus the speaker inhabits a sort of psychic inferno, a territory of the lost which underlies the flawless, bourgeois vision of American life.
"Howl" became an important indicator of the changing climate in American poetry, an alarm sounding the decline of academic verse. If the poem was not taken seriously by many poets and critics — due to its bombastic, sprawling rhetoric, its spontaneous and chantlike form — then it at least offered a signal of a realm of possibility for powerful poetry to be constructed from "unmentionable" realms of experience.
This autobiographical poem has created a fury of praise or abuse whenever read or heard. It is a powerful work, cutting through to dynamic meaning. Ginsberg thinks he is going forward by going back to the methods of Whitman. The first reaction was that it is based on destructive violence. It is profoundly Jewish in temper. It is Biblical in its repetitive grammatical build-up. It is a howl against everything in our mechanistic civilization which kills the spirit, assuming that the louder you shout the more likely you are to be heard. It lays bare the nerves of suffering and spiritual struggle. Its positive force and energy come from a redemptive quality of love, although it destructively catalogues evils of our time from physical deprivation to madness.
In the 1950s it often seemed that the only openly gay poet was Allen Ginsberg. The enormous publicity that Ginsberg received made him an important figure, whose avowal of homosexuality was part of his larger attempt to undermine American society and its pretensions to respectability. Although many of the Beat writers were homosexual or bisexual (such as Burroughs or Kerouac), it was Ginsberg who made his sexuality an integral part of his public image and his poetry. "Howl" was the first poem to bring Ginsberg public attention, and its treatment of homosexuality is characteristic of Ginsberg's position during this time. "Howl" is a lament for "the best minds of my generation," the "angel-headed hipsters" destroyed by the cruelties of American society. The homosexual functions in the world of "Howl" as a figure of angelic innocence, his love a protest against the insensitivity and madness which surrounds him.
Ginsberg's relation to Whitman is clear in "Howl." Ginsberg learned from Whitman the use of the long line, the repetition of the subordinate clause, and the celebration of phallic energy. The line ["who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may"] shows Ginsberg's assumption of Whitman's democratic sexuality, the celebration of anonymous sexuality and the sharing of the poet's seminal energy. At the same time one can see a great deal of the private mythology of Ginsberg, the search for the sexual encounter as perfect religious experience. While this might seem to originate in Whitman's depiction of the sources of mystic vision as sexual, it should be remembered that Whitman's sexuality is portrayed as both active and passive, and that Whitman devotes as much attention to the image of two lovers simply happy to be together. But in Whitman the experience of sexual pleasure leads to a greater understanding of the world. Although Ginsberg calls on Whitman, he transforms an ultimately peaceful vision of human unity into an affirmation of the homosexual's alienation from the "straight" world and a desire to become an object of love rather than a participant in it.
"Howl" links the visionary and the concrete, the language of mystical illumination and the language of the street, and the two are joined not in a static synthesis but in a dialectical movement in which an exhausting and punishing immersion in the most sordid of contemporary realities issues in transcendent vision.
Perhaps the hardest aspect of the poem to accept is, paradoxically, its humor, for example, the "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection" are compared to lightbulbs, or to any machine that can be plugged in and operated by electricity. Even in relation to Ginsberg's conception of mystical experience, the comparison is reductive, for it suggests that such experiences turn on, galvanize the instant, and wink off, having no significance beyond the momentary "kick" or "trip." For another example, consider the persons in Howl who "threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time," and then "alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade." These Dadaists are typical Ginsberg questers, heroic and futile. He celebrates and ironizes. As he put it in a letter to Williams, he has "W.C. Fields on my left and Jehovah on my right." Though virtuous in other kinds of poems, in lament and prophecy this double perspective is a limitation. But Ginsberg's self-reducing humor helps to explain the remarkably good-natured acceptance bestowed on him. He is perceived more as a spiritual clown than as a threat.
Jack Kerouac is one of the most mythical figures in American literature, his name and the name of his novel On the Road (1957) having the power of invocation even for people who have never read a word he wrote; the names conjure freedom. By comparison, his poetry is obscure, but it is both powerful as poetry and significant as a direct influence on his fellow poets. Kerouac, with Allen GINSBERG, Gregory CORSO, and William S. Burroughs, was at the hub of the mid-20th-century shift in American literary consciousness known as the BEAT generation. When his first poems later published in MEXICO CITY BLUES (1959), arrived from Mexico in 1955, his friends who were involved in what became known as the SAN FRANCISCO RENAISSANCE, Gary SNYDER, Philip WHALEN, Philip Lamantia, and Michael MCCLURE, in particular, were moved and inspired. Kerouac, “authorcatalyst” of the writerly cataclysm that shook America, had a traceable impact on the writing of many others, such as Robert CREELEY, Amiri BARAKA, Lawrence FERLINGHETTI, Lew Welch, and Anne WALDMAN. Bob Dylan pointed to Kerouac’s verse as “the first poetry that spoke his [Dylan’s] own language”. Ginsberg proclaimed Kerouac “a major, perhaps seminal, poet and mayhap thru his imprint on Dylan and myself among others, a poetic influence over the entire planet”.
Jean-Louis de Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the youngest of three children in a French-Canadian family. His cultural origins are important, because of the role religion and language played in his life and his work; his first language was French, and his first and last religion was Roman Catholicism, interrupted by an earnest exploration of Buddhism. The collective force of mother tongue, mother church, and his own mother, Gabrielle, made him maternally fixated. He moved away from his language, his church, and his mother, physically and philosophically, but he always returned closer. Kerouac married three times, arguably had sex with as many men as he did women, and shamefully rejected his only child. Burdened all his life by the weight of his trinity of mother figures and by the early childhood loss of his brother Gerard, Kerouac died an ultraconservative, debilitated alcoholic, living once again with his mother.
“Ti Jean,” or “Petit Jean,” as he was called within his family, knew early that he wanted to be a writer, but he was also an athlete of promise and went to Columbia in 1940 on a football scholarship; he dropped out after a dispute with his coach. It was not until early 1944 that he met Ginsberg and Burroughs; two years after that, he met Neal Cassady, who became Keroauc’s muse and the model for On the Road’s Dean Moriarty. Already shaped by writers such as Walt Whitman, Hart CRANE, and Thomas Wolfe, Kerouac was further affected as a writer by his New York friends, by their ideas, their actions, and their speech, as they were by his. Burroughs explained that “Kerouac was a writer. That is, he wrote”; rather than just talk about writing or call himself a writer, he did it, even at the risk of being gored by the life about which he wrote. The fact that he was in a frequent state of sorrow surfaces repeatedly in his poems. He would “suffer / even for bugs” (“Running Through — Chinese Poem Song”), lament “Oh sad Bodhidharma you were right / Everything we loved disappeared” (“Long Island Chinese Poem Rain”), admit “I’m just a human being with a lot of / shit on my heart” (“Goofball Blues”), and wonder why “The story of man … Should hurt me so” (“Bowery Blues”). He recorded what went on around him, wrote experimentally, incorporated jazz improvisation into his prose and poetry; Creeley warns that there can be no real understanding of Kerouac’s work “if there is not the recognition that this remarkable person is living here, is actual in all that is written”.
Kerouac is in the work, in all his beauty and in all his despair. He appears in his poems as religious seeker, as sexual debauchee, as little boy, as happy friend, as musical composer, as penitent sinner, as unrepentant sinner. He wrote about everything and believed he had “better be a poet / Or lay down dead” (“San Francisco Blues — 42nd Chorus”). He created a concept of spontaneous composition, which, as Ginsberg explains it, was “the notion of writing and not looking back, not revising, but exhausting the mind by an outpouring of all the relevant associations”. Kerouac’s stated desire at the very start of his journey as a writer was to make “at least one deathless line”. He collaborated with Burroughs on a never-published novel, produced more than 20 other prose works, of which more than a dozen were published during his lifetime, and wrote five books of poetry, of which only one appeared in print before his death. Kerouac’s iconographic power in the American consciousness is unsurpassed and secure. His life, as a stream of-consciousness spontaneous composition alive in his art, is his “one deathless line.”
“Long Island Chinese Poem Rain”
The years are hurrying
Autumn rains fall on my awning
My accomplishments mean nothing to me
My girl no longer visits me
Maybe because I got warts on my cock
Or she found a younger man with a smooth cock
I can look up anything in my wine bottle
Whitman was happy about something around here
Followed by millions sick
What, Whitman, say?
The headlines of ten days ago no longer interest me
Rugs woven lovingly end on garage crates
The white dove desecrated in desuetude
And who wants wisdom?
The world is an eraser for these words
Oh sad Bodhidharma you were right
Everything we loved disappeared
Nobody in the chair
Nobody in the books
Nobody in the rain
“Bowery Blues”
The story of man
Makes me sick
Inside, outside,
I don't know why
Something so conditional
And all talk
Should hurt me so.
I am hurt
I am scared
I want to live
I want to die
I don't know
Where to turn
In the Void
And when
To cut
Out
For no Church told me
No Guru holds me
No advice
Just stone
Of New York
And on the cafeteria
We hear
The saxophone
O dead Ruby
Died of Shot
In Thirty Two,
Sounding like old times
And de bombed
Empty decapitated
Murder by the clock.
And I see Shadows
Dancing into Doom
In love, holding
TIght the lovely asses
Of the little girls
In love with sex
Showing themselves
In white undergarments
At elevated windows
Hoping for the Worst.
I can't take it
Anymore
If I can't hold
My little behind
To me in my room
Then it's goodbye
Sangsara
For me
Besides
Girls aren't as good
As they look
E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime under the Light of New-Historicism
Any discussion of Doctorow’s masterpiece Ragtime is impossible without a discussion of fiction versus history since Doctorow is one of the most representation figures in blurring the borders of fact and fiction. Ragtime is one of the main works of arts to show that there are no real borders between the two. Dr. Nojoumian in the essay “Time in Postmodern Literature” mentions how conventional history has changed its place by “textualized history”:
Postmodern literary art disillusioned by grand narratives of myth, universal history, and so on replaces the conventional history with its own – “textualized history” or history as story and claims that there is no access to history except in textuality. Textualized history is in fact the manifestation of the way the boundaries between history and fiction are shattered. Fictional history is justified because after all history as a discourse should be represented in a narrative form and while there is no narrative form in the process of contemporary history, fiction writers write their own histories. (58-59)
Although, in fact, the strategy of blending fictional with historical characters and situations was hardly new, the novel’s critics seemed determined to find in it either a profound new distillation of, or an unprecedented attack on, the essence of the American past. Without providing a precise term, Martin Green proposes it as a new genre, one that assaults the reader’s “rational composure” by its distortions of history (842). Roger Sale calls Ragtime a new historical novel based on a “ransacking of history,” a technique he thinks productive (21). Raymond Sokolov uses the phrase “pseudo-historical” novel as a similar term of approval (1). In fact, Doctorow rejects one-sided absolutes in favor of a more complex view of history enriched by a multiplicity of voices.
Hayden White’s Metahistory claims that history and fiction use the same methods with essentially the same goal: to impose a design on the chronicle of events. Hayden White concludes that historians use the same tools as any novelist; consequently the claims of history on the truth are more provisional than positivists would have us believe. In interviews on the occasion of Ragtime’s publication and in subsequent nonfiction pieces, Doctorow makes clear his interest in the ways that fiction and history interpenetrate. In one of his earliest interviews, Doctorow calls Ragtime a “fictive nonfiction” book, halfway between fiction and history. For the first time, he cites what will become a trademark phrase: Kenneth Rexroth’s term “false document.” In “False Documents” Doctorow asserts that there is no such thing as objective history (24). Ragtime is about the history-making process itself. Ragtime’s parody of the historical record announces that texts — both historical and fictional — are part of what comes to be called objective history. History does not hold up a mirror to reality any more than fiction does. Both are constructed by a particular narrative vision in which facts never spoke for themselves. This epithet describes the paradoxical appeal that fiction makes to readers (Gussow 12): it tells the truth in spite of its fictive status. Doctorow, Kramer argues, exploits the picturesque elements of story to offer a simplistic view of history: the myth of “bad” America. In Ragtime, Doctorow is more concerned with imaginative truth than with historical accuracy. That is, he is concerned with what truly happened rather than with what really happened.
The time the novel covers, roughly 1900-1917, or the Ragtime era — was a time of great social, political, scientific, and industrial change in America, reflected as well in the age’s other name — the Progressive Era. The population of America rose significantly during the period, influenced greatly by the flood of immigrants. Most settled in the cities as America became an urban rather than a rural nation. Some languished in a poverty they did not expect to find; others found jobs in sweatshops; still others manned posts in Henry Ford’s assembly line. Both the assembly line and the automobile greatly affected the course of American history. The growth of labor unions, begun in the late nineteenth century, continued. Political leaders resisted the unions, but most Americans were confident that humankind was moving toward perfection. Women, likewise, believed in and worked for positive change. The nature of leisure altered as well: the magic lantern turned into the motion picture; musical tastes turned toward ragtime music.
Doctorow’s works and Ragtime in particular, expresses his political beliefs as well as the time in which he wrote. Doctorow published Ragtime in 1975, the year in which the Vietnam War came to a close. The 1970s were a time in which many Americans grew disillusioned about both international and domestic issues. In Ragtime, Doctorow does not specifically address the events of his time, but rather lays out his beliefs through the framework of earlier American history. In his rendering of turn-of-the-century America, he expresses his liberal ideology. Some critics have labeled his views “radical Jewish humanism.” In his identification with certain oppressed populations such as African Americans and immigrants, he demonstrates compassion and social awareness.
Doctorow uses ragtime music as a metaphor for the struggle between stability and change. The basis for ragtime music is the tension between a restrained, ordered rhythm played by the left hand and free-flowing syncopation by the right (Blesh and Janis 7). Doctorow acknowledges this dual aspect when Coalhouse Walker plays ragtime for the family: “The pianist sat stiffly at the keyboard, his long dark hands with their pink nails seemingly with no effort producing the clusters of syncopating chords and the thumping octaves” (Doctorow 133). Yet even with these thumping regular octaves, the illusion ragtime music creates is of overwhelming change: “This was a most robust composition, a vigorous music that roused the senses and never stood still a moment” (Doctorow 133).
Illusions of stability in change or change in stability heighten the novel’s use of the theme, as Doctorow’s emphasis on Harry Houdini certifies. Houdini creates illusions of escape and freedom: “He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping” (Doctorow 6). In a wry aside, the narrator comments: “Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger” (Doctorow 7). Whereas in Houdini’s public life he could exclaim freedom and escape, in his private life, as Doctorow sketches it, Houdini is bound to his mother, later to her memory, and finally to an obsessive desire to make contact with her spirit.
Entropy, according to the second law of thermodynamics, is the tendency of the universe to move from a state of order to disorder and “measure of the capacity of a system to undergo spontaneous change” (Morris 437). The universe moves overwhelmingly toward change, toward chaos. The human impulse, however, is toward order, stability. Although many of the small episodes connect with the theme of change versus stability, Doctorow reverses its full treatment for the major actions that shape the novel: the stories of the three families — Coalhouse Walker’s, the Little boy’s, and Tateh’s — stories which move from tragic to the hopeful. Tateh, in fact, reacts to change more positively than any of the other characters in the novel. Ironically in what is basically an anti-nostalgic novel that sighs with a deep pessimism, Tateh is almost an embodiment of the American dream: a Jewish socialist from Latvia, he overcomes the hardship and uncertainty of his immigration and the deep dishonor he felt at his wife’s sexual favors to her employer to become a wealthy filmmaker. Indeed, Tateh, like the Little Boy, represents the dialectics of change in the novel. Doctorow, therefore, uses a postmodernist convention — contaminating historical truth with his fiction — as he sets forth the ironic truth that human beings struggle for stability in the face of overwhelming change.
Since the Freudian implications here are clear, it is not unusual to find Freud himself in the book. Moreover, Freud’s ideas were another source of great change in the era. Previously reality seemed to exist on the surface of both personality and the physical world. While humans in the Freudian model may exhibit almost changeless psychology, society, on the other hand, demonstrates great change in spite of human control. Doctorow has Freud visit America and see “in our careless commingling of great wealth and great poverty the chaos of an entropic European civilization” and concludes, “America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake” (Doctorow 33).
Works Cited
Blesh, Rudi, and Harriet Janis. They All Played Ragtime. New York: Knopf, 1950.
Doctorow, E. L. Ragtime. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1976.
---. “False Documents.” American Review 26: 215-32. In E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations, ed. Richard Trenner. Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1983.
Green, Martin. “Nostalgia Politics.” The American Scholar 45. 1976: 841-845.
Gussow, Mel. “Novelist Syncopates History in Ragtime.” The New York Times 12, 11 July 1975.
Kramer, Hilton. “Political Romance.” Commentary 60. 1975: 76-80.
Nojoumian, Amir Ali. “Time in Postmodernist Literature.” In Pažuheš-Nâmé (Scientific and Research Quarterly Journal), Faculty of Literature and Human Sciences, Special Issue of Literature, 37. Spring 2003.
Morris, Christopher, D. Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow. University Press of Mississippi. 1991.
Sale, Roger. “From Ragtime to Riches.” New York Review of Books, 7 August 1975: 21-22.
Sokolov, Raymond. Review of Ragtime. Book World, 13 July 1975: 1, 3.
White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
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