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Methods of Reading, 2020

Ginsberg and Desire

Desire and literature

‘every literary text is in some way about desire’ (Bennett and Royle, 251)

‘But literary texts are not only about how and why character desire each other and what happens to those desire. Literary texts also produce or solicit desire’ (Bennett and Royle, 252).

Michel Foucault on desire

‘desire is bound up with all sorts of social and institutional practices and discourses – with questions of law, gender and sexuality, with the discourses of medicine, theology, economics and so on’ (Bennett and Royle, 252).

Two of the theories of desire discussed by Bennett and Royle (those of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan) have certain things in common. They see desire as:

complex and mobile: desire is constantly shifting, it has no proper, fixed object;

grounded in lack and ultimately unsatisfiable;

self-centred: desires shore up the individual against a fundamental condition of lack or absence.

Freud and desire for the mother

For Freud, all desire goes back to the child’s original desire for the mother, particularly the mother’s breast (Bennett and Royle 250).

Frued’s theory of the originary desire for the mother – to return to her or regain her - is central to the poem “Kaddish”:

“…seemed

perhaps a good idea to try – know the Monster of the Beginning

Womb – Perhaps – that way.” (“Kaddish” 51)

Jacques Lacan and Desire

“Desire [according to Lacan] is constitutive of subjectivity because desire defines subjectivity.” (Fuery 12).

Lacan’s structure of the psyche:

Real (the pre-symbolic)

Imaginary (mirror phase)

Symbolic (language, society, rules and laws)

The transition from the Real to the Symbolic realm (language, law of the father, the social) through a process Lacan terms the ‘mirror stage’ produces a fundamental split or gap in the subject which for Lacan is the ground of all desire.

Lacan and desire

“First, for Lacan, the alien or alienating character of desire is not something that happens to come along and make life difficult for people. Instead, people have become alienated before they even become people (or ‘subjects’ in psychoanalytic terms). The human subject is always already ‘split’ – divided within itself by the scandalous nature of desire … Second … [f]or Lacan language is not something that we can use in order to try and make ourselves more comfortable with the alien nature of desire: desire speaks through language and it speaks us” (254).

“who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no

broken hearts,” (“Howl” 2-3)

“Writing about homosexuality was unacceptable at Columbia [University, where Ginsberg studied literature], and unacceptable to Louis [Ginsberg’s father]. “Allen, as classwork, is writing a novel whose hero is a fictionalized Lucien Carr, a twisted eccentric,” Louis complained. “He is making clever but false verbal rationalizations that the immoralist’s way of life (à la Gide, I think) is a valid one … He seeks to philosophize abnormality into normality” (Raskin 52).

“the homosexual and the insane person is a menace to himself and to society” (Louis Ginsberg in a letter to his son, quoted in Raskin 56).

On August 14, 1944 one of the Beat writers, Lucien Carr (who was a closet bisexual) murdered a man called David Krammerer, who had been sexually pursuing Carr for some years and thus risked ‘outing’ him. It “taught [Ginsberg], at the age of nineteen, about the persecution of homosexuals in America … it was dangerous to be a homosexual” (Raskin 53).

“with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and/cock and endless balls” (“Howl” 1)

“who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists/and screamed with joy” (“Howl” 4)

Film Clip from Howl

Obscenity trail as feature in the film Howl (2010):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txfNHEuS4wE

‘Kaddish’: in search of the lost mother

“Strange to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes

while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich

Village.” (“Kaddish” 36)

“No love since Naomi screamed – since 1923? – now lost

in Greystone ward – new shock for her – Electricity, following

the 40 Insulin.

And Metrasol had made her fat” (“Kaddish” 47)

“The enemies approach – what poisons? Tape recorders FBI? Zhadnov hiding behind the counter? Trotsky mixing rat bacteria in the back of the store?” (“Kaddish” 45)

“O glorious muse that bore me from the womb, gave suck first mystic life & taught me talk and music, from whose pained head I first took Vision - ”

(“Kaddish”, 55)

The ‘lost’ Naomi

‘Take me home’ – I went alone sometimes looking for

the lost Naomi, taking Shock – and I’d say, ‘No, you’re

crazy Mama, - Trust the Drs.’ –

(“Kaddish”, 46)

Monster of the Beginning

“I was cold – later revolted a little, not much – seemed perhaps a good idea to try - know the Monster of the Beginning Womb”

(“Kaddish” 51)

“Now I’ve got to cut through – to talk to

you – as I didn’t when you had a mouth.

Forever. And we’re bound for that, Forever – like Emily Dickinson’s horses – headed to the end.

(“Kaddish” 40)

Fragmentation

“Over and over – refrain – of the Hospitals – still haven’t written your history – leave it abstract – a few images run thru the mind – like the saxaphone chorus of houses and years – remembrance of electrical shocks.” (“Kaddish” 41)

“Too thin, shrunk on her bones – age comes to Naomi – now broken into white hair – loose dress on her skeleton – face sunk, old! withered – cheek of crone – “ (55)

Trauma and ghostliness

Back! You! Naomi! Skull on you! Gaunt immortality and

revolution come – small broken woman – the ashen indoor

eyes of hospitals, ward greyness on skin -

(“Kaddish”, 56)

I came back she yelled more – they led her away – ‘You’re

not Allen-‘ I watched her face – but she passed by me, not

looking- “ (56)