Essay
Michelle_Michy
Week12GinsbergHowlandIdeology1.pptGinsberg, Howl and Ideology
Methods of Reading
The secret or hermetic tradition
In 1957, at the age of fifteen, I bought for seventy-five cents a copy of the City Lights paperback edition of Howl and Other Poems with the trademark black-and-white cover. It was the first book of poetry I ever bought, and it made me feel as cool as anyone in my high school. Howl was underground poetry, outlawed poetry. Ginsberg made it seem as though it was cool to be a teen and that teens, not adults, knew what was cool. To those of us – I wasn’t the only teenage beatnik in suburbia – who owned a copy, Howl conferred a strange power. Reading it brought initiation into a secret society. It bound us together and gave us a sense of identity as members of a new generation that had come of age in the wake of World War II and the atomic bomb, a generation that lived in the shadow of nuclear apocalypse. There was something wonderfully subversive about Howl, something the poet had hidden in the body of the poem because it was too dangerous to say openly, something we had to uncover and decode. Ginsberg didn’t want to be too easily understood. As he himself would explain, Howl was meant to appeal “to the secret or hermetic tradition of art.” Of course, as a teenager I didn’t know there was a secret tradition of art. It was Ginsberg who introduced me to it and prompted me to pursue it.
(Raskin xii – my emphasis)
“Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.”
“America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”
-Ginsberg, ‘America’
Beat Generation
Post-WWII America
Behind the calm exterior, the house beautiful and the happy family, there was anxiety, paranoia, and restlessness. In fiction, poetry, and the theatre, writers described, in darkly pessimistic works – Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman ... the end of the American dream, the fissures in American society, and collective apprehension about the future. (Raskin 4)
Still from the film noir Maltese Falcon, 1941
Stills from TV series Mad Men
Stills from Double Indemnity, 1944
Ginsberg satirizing Cold War-era paranoia and xenophobia
‘Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.’ (23)
Them Russian them Russians and them Chinamen. And them
Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She
wants to take our cars from out our garages.’ (24)
- Ginsberg, ‘America’
Censorship, persecution and paranoia
The U.S. government – from the State Department to Congress – regarded writers as dangerous. Hollywood directors and screenwriters were jailed. Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was investigated by the FBI and begrudgingly issued a visa … Dashiell Hammett, the author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man [examples of noir fiction], was sent to prison for refusing to knuckle under to investigators and name names. In academia and in the leading literary magazines of the day, teachers and critics warned against innovation and radicalism. (Raskin 5)
Conflicting ideologies
Mainstream 1950s America
- Capitalism
- Consumerism
- Industrial-military complex
- Conformism
- Conservatism
- ‘Nuclear’ family
- Heterosexuality
- Conservative Christianity
Cultural Revolution (of the 50s and 60s) aligned with artists such as the Beats
- Freedom (of expression, of sexuality etc)
- Bohemianism
- Drug culture and experimentation
- Feminism
- Anti-war
- Anti-capitalism
- Campaigns against racial segregation and violence
- Eastern religion and mysticism
Ideology
- In its simplest sense, as described by Bennett and Royle, ideology relates to ‘the way that people think about their world’ (our ideas about certain things) and ideology is always a product of language:
Language changes, and even creates the social and political world in which we live. Ideology in that sense is language (Bennett and Royle 231)
- Our ideas about most things – masculinity, success, freedom, the natural world, animals, love etc. - are a function of ideology, and reflect particular ideological positions. There are always a range of ideological perspectives and positions on any issue – for example climate change, abortion, class politics etc.
- dominant (or ‘hegemonic’) ideologies can often have the effect of seeming natural, commonsensical, ‘the way things are’ (i.e. a woman’s role is in the home, heterosexuality is ‘normal’ etc.)
- This links back to the idea of “false consciousness”
- Louis Althusser (a Marxist critic) extends and complicates earlier theories of ideology
- For him ideology and subjectivity are intimately connected. He states ‘man is an ideological animal by nature’: we constitute and define ourselves as humans through ideology (Bennett and Royle 233).
Ideology and the subject
“America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.” (‘America’, 22)
“Your machinery is too much for me.” (‘America’, 22)
Literature and Ideology
Rather than offering an escape from ideology, then, literary texts may be considered as places where the structures and fractures of ideology are both produced and reproduced. Literary texts do not simply or passively ‘express’ or reflect the ideology of their particular time and place. Rather, they are sites of conflict and difference, places where values and preconceptions, beliefs, prejudices, knowledge and social structures are represented and, in the process, opened to transformation
(Bennett and Royle 238)
‘America’ (1956)
“I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.” (24)
“I’m sick of your insane demands.” (22)
“It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.”
(23)
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. (25)
“Like many other writers around the world, Ginsberg turned the atom bomb into an all-inclusive metaphor. Everywhere he looked he saw apocalypse and atomization” (Raskin xv)
Howl
- 1. To utter or emit a long, mournful, plaintive sound.
- 2. To cry or wail loudly, as in pain, sorrow, or anger.
- 3. Slang To laugh heartily.
- 4. Slang To go on a spree.
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness/starving hysterical naked” (“Howl” 1)
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing
obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaved rooms in underwear, burning their
money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror
through the wall, (“Howl” 1)
who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and
bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary Indian angels who were visionary Indian angels (‘Howl’ 3)
- Ginsberg described ‘Howl’ as an “emotional time bomb that would continue exploding … [the] military-industrial-nationalistic complex” (Ginsberg quoted in Raskin xx).
- Ancient god Moloch: associated with the sacrifice (usually by fire) of children by their parents
What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls
and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable
dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys
sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
(‘Howl’ 8)
What kind of ideologies and institutions does Ginsberg associate with Moloch/America?
- State institutions that control various forms of non-conformism (the prison and asylum)
- The government (the ‘Congress of sorrows!’, 8)
- Capitalism and consumerism (‘Moloch whose blood is running money!’, 8)
- Army (‘Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!’, 8)
- Industrial modernity (‘Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!’, 9)
- etc. see Part II of ‘Howl’ for more…
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down
the American river!
(‘Howl’ 9)
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 inno-
cent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an
armed madhouse (‘Howl’ 10)
References and further reading/viewing
- Lee, B. '"Howl" and other poems: is there old left in these new beats?‘. American Literature 76.2 (2004): 367-89.
- Raskin, Jonah. American Scream. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. Berkeley: U. California Press, 2005. Chapter 1 on vUWS under ‘Further Reading’.
- Hartley, John. “Ideology”. Communication, Cultural Studies and Media Studies: The Key Concepts. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2002. 103-106. On vUWS.
- Kerouac, Jack. On the Road (1957); The Dharma Bums (1958).
- Contemporary films about Ginsberg and/or the Beat Generation include:
- Howl (2010, starring James Franco as Ginsberg)
- On the Road (2012, starring Sam Riley and Kristen Stewart)
- Kill your Darlings (2013, starring Daniel Radcliffe as Ginsberg)
