Importance of the text within the context of the author’s
work and time [as way of introduction]
The excerpt belongs to the first part of Allen Ginsberg’s
“Howl”, whose reciting in 1955 and publication in 1956 was a landmark for the
Beat Generation, a group of young artists and post-war intellectuals who felt
downcast (beat) by world politics (the atom bomb), government control and
capitalist society, preferred a marginal way of life and were greatly
influenced by the blast and freedom of the jazz scene. Replicating with their
typewriters the fury of the improptu beat, they sought also a closer
relationship between life and art (more intimacy) and, valuing spontaneity,
their writing was often a continuum of the heartbeat.
Structure and form:
Situated near
the poem’s beginning, the excerpt fits into the first part, that describes the
contrary and frenetic urges (urgency, desire and violence are at once convoked
through the poem’s title, “Howl”) of the poet’s peers, “the best minds of my
generation.” Following this description, the second part deals with the
materialistic, capitalist and machinal worldview that holds its sway over these
individuals. The third part adopts a more intimate register to address a
particular generation member – Carl Solomon – and to establish a bond with him,
and a later footnote recasts the first part’s jeremiad’s tone into a praise,
striving for redemption and acceptance.
The excerpt
begins by adopting an additional characterization for the “best minds”, “a lost
battalion of platonic conversationalists” and continues with the pattern of
initiating almost every line with the relative personal pronoun, “who”, an
anaphor that permits a catalogue of features (like in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, an archtypical text for
Ginsberg) to be heaped onto this generation, whose actions are also described
in an enumerative style, which helps to create a rhythm of velocity. This
rhythm, letting one to pause for breath only through the expirational “who”,
allows for the lines to be joined together. In fact, thoughout this long poem
Ginsberg uses the innovation of presenting the lines as odd paragraphs, with a
very sparce puncutation that gives way to free association, mixing poetry with
Kerouac’s precepts of “spontaneous prose”.
Subject of enunciation and point of view
From the
beginning of the poem (“I saw”) we know this is a first person testimony,
although the constant employment of “who”, referencing a third collective
party, the poet’s generation, offers such “cry” or “Howl” as representative.
This third person shift, occuring throughout this excerpt and in fact to the
end of the poem’s first part, creates some distanciation. The colloquial tone,
however, unmistakably asserts that the poet was a participative witness in the
conversations and ravings of his generation, also potentially contributing to
empathy with the reader: “yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering”.
Thematic threads along with rhetoric devices + symbolism
In this
excerpt, the main thematic thread describing this generation is perhaps the
excess of drugs, coupling a state of vagrancy, sometimes helplessness, with the
paradoxical search for visionarism, beyond the bleak reality of the US 50’s.
These simultaneous and contradictory urges are expressed through hyperbole and
paradox – in the excerpt’s first line there is sinking and self-destruction but
always from higher places (“fire escapes”, “windowsills”, “Empire State”, “the
moon”). Redundancy at times achieves the same effect of juxtaposing realities, as
in the excerpt’s last line, where the lack of punctuation in “seeking visionary
indian angels who were visionary indian angels” allows for the interpretation
that the seekers were already what they sought, visionary.
This last
line also indicates another theme, the urge for a previous state of innocence
or primitivism (“indians”) that would also facilitate a closer relationship to
nature, as that propugnated by the “founding” strain of transcendentalism in
American literature – hence, perhaps, the allusion to “grandfather night” in
the line that bespeaks this generation’s movement in boxcars “through snow
towards lonesome farms”.
The reference
to boxcars compounds the previsous lines’s “wander[ing]… in the railyard”, and
gives centrality to the train, which like the car was crucial to this
generation’s apology of movement through space. Dislocation is pictured as
aimless (“vanished into nowhere”, “wondering where to go”) but crucial, whether
through real transports of through the transportation of drug (ab)use and
withdrawal (and free association in writing leads easily from one to the other
(“migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark”).
The
repetition of “boxcars boxcars boxcars” give us simultaneously a sonorous
impression (the bipartition of the consonantic phonemes “b” and “p” replicates
the sound of the train “racketing through”) and a visual image of the train –
which is perhaps also an ambiguous symbol of modern society and progress, as it
can as well be seen as entrapping, inside boxes. Unmistakably oppressive are
the mechanisms of control and distribution of power of the poet’s
conteporaneous post-war society (“shocks of hospitals and jails and wars”)
While being
heavily contextually marked (“Tangerian bone-grindings” most probably refers to
one of the poet’s friends, Burroughs, short stay in Tangier, and “postcards of
Atlantic City Hall” has the ring of a private joke), the poem at once strives
for speed and intemporality. Speed is marked through the absence of commas but
also through polyssindotous in the enumerations “facts and memories and
anecdotes and eyball kicks and shocks”), as well as through profuse
alliteration, which seems to make everything overlap into a screaming instant
(for instance the vibrant and nasal sounds in “bonegrinding and migraines”).
Also, place is felt at once as compressed and expansible: “the cosmos
instintictively vibrated at their feet in Kansas”, as if the corrosion of space and time
categories led to the ideal happening of creation, invoked through a subtle
biblical allusion: “in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant
eyes”.
Intertextuality
While
“brilliant eyes” might allude ironically to drug consumption, it also resonates
with the previous “best minds”, longing for visionary states. The preference
for philosophical idealism is present in intertextual references to Plato (in
“platonic conversations”), Plotino, while mysticism and supernatural awe are
underlined by the references to “Poe” or “St John of Cross”. These overlapping
of cultural references serves to show how cultured were the “best minds” but
also how permeable to influence from different traditions and times. On the
other hand, one may speculate that the author’s Jewishness surfaces in two
contradictiory instances: the first seems to align institutional religiousness
to socially stratified urbanism – “meat for the synagoge cast on the pavement”,
while the second aligns the new musical counterculture (“bop”) with the
exegesis of Scripture (“Kabballah”)
Conclusion
“Bop
Keballah” is one of the surprising collocations in this excerpt (another being
“Zen New Jersey”) that signals this generation’s synchretic hunger for
knowledge and revelation. This revelatory impulse was, for its members,
compatible with a life of excess and reckless freedom, in opposition to the
sense of control imparted by middle-class America and the capitalist ideology
of its politics.
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