An_Introduction_to_Literature_Criticism_and_Theor…_—-_27_Desirechapter Week13GinsbergandDesire2.pptxAn_Introduction_to_Literature_Criticism_and_Theor…_—-_25_Ideologychapter Week12GinsbergHowlandIdeology1.pptGinsbergA._Howl_1POEM
27. Desire
In Morten Tyldum’s acclaimed film The Imitation Game (2014), BenedictCumberbatch plays Alan Turing, a man who was instrumental both in
the invention of the digital computer and in cracking the complex ciphers
developed by the Nazis in the Second World War. The film ends with Turing’s
suicide in 1954, two years after being prosecuted for ‘gross indecency’ – for
having sex with another man. Turing’s crime had been to desire the wrong
person, to have the wrong desire. The man who helped to transform our world
by the manipulation of a binary system (on/off ) was prosecuted and per-
secuted thanks to another binary system – right/wrong, good/evil, moral/
immoral, legal/illegal, heterosexual/homosexual, normal/perverse. There is a
terrible irony here. The machines that Turing dreamed up are now in our cars,
airplanes, watches, TVs, mobile phones, cookers – increasingly everywhere –
as well as in our PCs and in the mainframe computers that power the complex
infrastructure of society. And they exploit a simple polarity to develop the
most complex patterns imaginable (and those beyond imagination). Society’s
system of ethics and legality, by contrast, can often seem to be stuck in a rigid
and unforgiving set of simplistic binary oppositions. Desire: right or wrong.
Is it possible that desire is more complex? The most influential philo-
sopher of desire in the twentieth century was Sigmund Freud. For Freud, all
desire goes back to the child’s original desire for the mother, for the mother’s
breast. This desire is so strong that it produces an absolute identification:
‘ “I am the breast”,’ wrote Freud, ventriloquizing the unspoken words of
the infant (Freud 1975b, 299). Beyond this originary desire, however, Freud
tends to see the precise structure of desire as determined by socialization,
by the way in which the child is brought up. In such texts as On Sexuality:
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Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905; Freud 1977), he argues that
desire is ‘essentially’ mobile – it has no essence, no proper object, beyond the
child’s hallucinatory desire for the breast. Most justifications for the proscrip-
tion of desire – against homosexual acts, for example – rely on assertions about
what is ‘natural’. But if we accept Freud’s arguments, we find that the appeal to
the natural is highly questionable.
The mobility of desire is demonstrated by a text such as Shakespeare’s
comedy Twelfth Night (c. 1601). While his Romeo and Juliet (1595) may
seem to reproduce the myth of an absolute and eternal love between one
man and one woman, Twelfth Night is concerned rather with the contingency
and mobility of desire. Duke Orsino sees himself as a true lover, a man
overwhelmed by love and constant only in his desire:
For such as I am, all true lovers are,
Unstaid and skittish in all motions else
Save in the constant image of the creature
That is beloved. (2.4.16–19)
In love with an image of the woman he claims to love, Orsino is at the same time
in love with the image of himself in love. A philosopher of love – most of his
speeches meditate, often absurdly, on the nature of love and the lover – Orsino
is unaware that ‘true love’, including his own, is ultimately love of love, that
desire is desire for its own image. In spite of himself, Orsino illustrates the
accuracy of Nietzsche’s aphorism: ‘In the end one loves one’s desire and not
what is desired’ (Nietzsche 1989, 93). In fact, by the end of the play it has
become clear that Orsino’s desire is radically mobile and contingent. Orsino
uses his servant Cesario as a messenger between himself and Lady Olivia, the
woman he desires. Cesario is really a woman called Viola, dressed as a man,
and is herself in love with the Duke. At the end of the play, Olivia marries
Viola’s twin brother and Viola reveals that she is really a woman. At this point,
unabashed by the ease with which his desire can move from one object to
another, Orsino proposes marriage to Viola. The ‘true lover’ in Shakespeare’s
play turns out to have mobile and vicarious desires, and even gender seems to
be more a comedy of convention than a matter of nature. Does Orsino finally
desire Viola or Cesario?
In the context of literature more generally, we can begin to think about the
importance of desire in two fundamental ways. In the first place, we would
suggest that every literary text is in some way about desire. To say this, how-
ever, is not to suggest that it is everywhere and always the same desire. As
D e s i r e 251
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252 A n I n t r o d u c t i o n t o L i t e r a t u r e , C r i t i c i s m a n d T h e o r y
Michel Foucault’s influential three-volume The History of Sexuality (1976–84)
makes particularly clear, desire is bound up with all sorts of social and institu-
tional practices and discourses – with questions of law, gender and sexuality,
with the discourses of medicine, theology, economics and so on. Thinking
about desire in literary texts – about representations of desire – inevitably
opens on to questions of historical context. For example, nowadays we may
take for granted the term ‘homosexual’ and the notion of homosexual desire.
But as we show in more detail in Chapter 28, below, the term and indeed the
concept is relatively recent. The first entry for ‘homosexual’ in the OED is
from 1892. Critics such as Joseph Bristow have demonstrated that a critical
appreciation of a play such as Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest
(1895) is crucially dependent on an understanding of the historical emer-
gence of a homosexual lifestyle at the end of the nineteenth century (Bristow
1992a). While the term ‘homosexual’ can refer to both men and women, its
entry into the English language in the late nineteenth century did not result in
a sudden visibility for lesbians, however. Indeed, the most striking aspect of
lesbianism in ‘straight’ culture generally has been the denial of its existence.
There’s a well-known story that in 1885 Queen Victoria reacted to the sug-
gestion that there should be a law for women corresponding to the new law
against ‘gross indecency’ between men by remarking that ‘no woman could
ever do that’ (quoted in Castle 1992, 128). The story is probably apocryphal,
but it does register something important about the historical denial of sex
between women. A similar denial is recorded in Leonard Woolf ’s mother’s
response to Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928):
‘I am seventy-six – but until I read this book I did not know that such things
went on at all. I do not think they do’ (quoted in Knopp 1992, 118). And, in
literary criticism, despite pioneering studies such as Jeannette Foster’s Sex
Variant Women in Literature from 1958, it was only in the 1980s that a critical
vocabulary for talking about lesbian writing began to emerge. As far as
‘straight’ culture goes, critics such as Joseph Allan Boone, for example, have
shown how the very form of conventional nineteenth-century narrative is
bound up with the Victorian social dynamics of courtship and marriage
(Boone 1987). According to Boone, the traditional marriage plot ‘owes much
of its idealizing appeal to its manipulation of form to evoke an illusion of order
and resolution’: this ‘illusory’ sense of order, he suggests, itself ‘glosses over
the contradictions, the inequalities, concealed in the institution of marriage’
(Boone 1987, 9).
But literary texts are not only about how and why characters desire each
other and what happens to those desires. Literary texts also produce or solicit
desire. They make us desire, in reading. Literary texts, we might say, are (in
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D e s i r e 253
Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase) ‘machines of desire’. Not only do they gener-
ate desire (such as the desire to read on), but they are generated by it (by the
desire, for example, to tell). In this respect it might be useful to turn Freud’s
famous question of female desire, ‘what does a woman want?’ (quoted in Jones
1953–7, 2: 468) – and Gayatri Spivak’s reformulation of it as ‘what does a man
want?’ – into a question about literary texts: What does a text want? Does it
want to tell us something or conceal something? Does it want to make us want
it? How? And so on. But if texts can be thought to desire, readers desire, too:
we desire solutions, we desire to get to the end of the story, we desire insight or
wisdom, pleasure or sadness, laughter or anger. The fundamental paradox of
reading, however, is that we always desire an end (a resolution, an explanation,
the triumph of good), but that this end is not the end of desire. As Boone has
shown, classic nineteenth-century narratives tend to end with the apparent
satisfaction of desire (the reader’s, the character’s or preferably both). But as
Freud has taught us, this end of desire is not the end of the story: as he specu-
lates in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, there is something in the very nature
of sexual life that ‘denies us full satisfaction’ (Freud 1985e, 295).
Perhaps the most important post-Freudian theorist of desire, especially in
the context of literary studies, is the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. His
particular concern is with what he terms the ‘paradoxical, deviant, erratic,
eccentric, even scandalous character’ of desire (Lacan 1977a, 286, quoted
in Bowie 1991, 134). Lacan’s texts are notoriously difficult to read, in part
because they claim to (or are condemned to) speak on behalf of this strange
figure of desire. Any attempt to summarize or explain what he has to say about
desire is bound to be misguided – precisely to the extent that it will appear to
be putting this scandalous figure in a conceptual straitjacket. With that pro-
viso in mind, however, we could be a bit scandalous in our own fashion and
summarize Lacan’s characterization of desire as follows: Lacan elaborates on
Freud’s contention that there is something about the nature of desire that is
incompatible with satisfaction. His account of desire is more radical than
Freud’s, however. Freud emphasizes the ways in which we can never get what
we want: we may think we have got it (downloading a new tune to our iPhone,
paying for a new car), but actually desire will always have moved on again (to
the next tune to download, to the chance to get on the road and drive and so
on). This, after all, is how capitalism works, what it desires – or needs, indeed
– in order to function at all. Waiting for a final fulfilment of desire is like waiting
for Godot in Samuel Beckett’s play. For Freud, this endlessly deferred com-
plete satisfaction is seen simply as an unavoidable, if rather poignant aspect of
what it is to be human. For Lacan, on the other hand, the nature of desire is at
once more alien and more subversive. This can be illustrated in two ways.
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254 A n I n t r o d u c t i o n t o L i t e r a t u r e , C r i t i c i s m a n d T h e o r y
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 psychoan-
alytic terms). The human subject is always already ‘split’ – divided within itself
by the scandalous nature of desire. Second, Lacan gives much greater empha-
sis than Freud to the role of language in relation to desire. One of Lacan’s most
famous dicta is that ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’ (see, for
example, Lacan 1977a). For Lacan, language is not something that we can use in
order to try to make ourselves more comfortable with the alien nature of desire:
desire speaks through language and it speaks us. We are, in a way, the senseless
puppets of desire as much when we speak or write as when we fall in love.
The interdependence of desire and language in turn is an overt concern
of many literary texts. In such texts, there is a recognition that language or
meaning can never finally be closed or completed and that desire can never
be fulfilled. Robert Browning’s poem ‘Two in the Campagna’, from 1855, is
one such text:
1
I wonder do you feel today
As I have felt since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
In spirit better through the land,
5 This morn of Rome and May?
2
For me, I touched a thought, I know,
Has tantalized me many times,
(Like turns of thread the spiders throw
Mocking across our path) for rhymes
10 To catch at and let go.
3
Help me to hold it! First it left
The yellowing fennel, run to seed
There, branching from the brickwork’s cleft,
Some old tomb’s ruin: yonder weed
15 Took up the floating weft,
4
Where one small orange cup amassed
Five beetles,—blind and green they grope
Among the honey-meal: and last,
Everywhere on the grassy slope
20 I traced it. Hold it fast!
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D e s i r e 255
5
The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!
Silence and passion, joy and peace,
An everlasting wash of air—
25 Rome’s ghost since her decease.
6
Such life here, through such lengths of hours,
Such miracles performed in play,
Such primal naked forms of flowers,
Such letting nature have her way
30 While heaven looks from its towers!
7
How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
How is it under our control
35 To love or not to love?
8
I would that you were all to me,
You that are just so much, no more.
Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free!
Where does the fault lie? What the core
40 O’ the wound, since wound must be?
9
I would I could adopt your will,
See with your eyes, and set my heart
Beating by yours, and drink my fill
At your soul’s springs,—your part my part
45 In life, for good and ill.
10
No. I yearn upward, touch you close,
Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
Catch your soul’s warmth,—I pluck the rose
And love it more than tongue can speak—
50 Then the good minute goes.
11
Already how am I so far
Out of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
55 Fixed by no friendly star?
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256 A n I n t r o d u c t i o n t o L i t e r a t u r e , C r i t i c i s m a n d T h e o r y
12
Just when I seemed about to learn!
Where is the thread now? Off again!
The old trick! Only I discern—
Infinite passion, and the pain
60 Of finite hearts that yearn.
The poem is about the impossibility of capturing the moment of desire, of
capturing or ‘holding’ desire, of fulfilling and so ending it. The speaker desires
the ‘good minute’ – analogous to what James Joyce later calls ‘epiphany’ and
Virginia Woolf ‘moments of being’ – but recognizes its inevitable escape. The
second stanza makes it clear that this is also a poem about language, about the
tantalizing nature of a moment which poetry attempts to but cannot capture.
In stanza 10, the speaker ‘pluck[s] the rose / And love[s] it more than tongue
can speak’; but the moment passes immediately and he asks, ‘Already how am
I so far / Out of that minute?’ Exploring the central trope of romantic love – the
loss of identity in a merging with the other, the desire evoked in stanza nine in
particular – Browning’s poem suggests the impossibility and inevitable failure
of this desire. The poem traces the paradoxes of romantic love while discern-
ing the impossibility of expressing in language the flux of life, the fluidity and
fragility of experience.
If literature and theory alike demonstrate that desire is mobile, endlessly
displaced, they also suggest that it is ‘mediated’, produced through imitation
and simulation. Particularly influential in this context has been the recent
work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Developing the ideas of the French post-
structuralist critic René Girard, Sedgwick has argued that desire is every-
where mediated, that desire is structured by a triangular relation of rivalry.
Take three people: A, B and C. A, let us say, desires B. Why? Normally, we
would assume that A desires B because B is desirable (at least to A). For Girard
and Sedgwick, however, things are rather different. For them, A desires B
because B is desired by C. We learn to desire, Girard and Sedgwick argue, by
copying others’ desires, and our desire is produced, fundamentally, in
response to the desire of another. ‘The great novelists’, Girard claims, ‘reveal
the imitative nature of desire’ and expose what he terms ‘the lie of spontaneous
desire’ (Girard 1965, 14, 16). Now, Sedgwick further points out that most of
the examples in Girard’s book Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1965) involve a
specific relation of gender, wherein B is a woman and A and C men: the woman
is the object of desire, while the two men are rivals. Love stories often concern
the rivalry of two men for a woman, in which the rivalry itself indeed becomes
more important than the desire for the woman. For Sedgwick, in fact, Western
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D e s i r e 257
culture in general is structured by a ‘crisis of homo/heterosexual definition’:
‘an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be,
not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that
it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual
definition’ (Sedgwick 1991, 1). She develops these insights to suggest that,
in Western discourse, in stories, novels, films and so on, relationships are
most commonly structured in terms of what she calls ‘homosocial desire’.
Homosocial desire is not the same as homosexual desire. It does not need to
be explicitly expressed as desire, and it is not necessarily physical. In fact,
homosocial desire is often concerned rigorously to exclude the possibility of
homosexual relations. The traditional male preserves of locker room, board-
room and clubroom are sites of homosocial bonding which, at the same time,
may be virulently homophobic. But in a male-dominated society, such rela-
tions are fundamental: in all such societies, Sedgwick claims, ‘there is a special
relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the
structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power’ (Sedgwick
1985, 25). Sedgwick argues that a large proportion of the stories, films, songs
and other narratives by which Western society imaginatively structures desire
can be read as narratives of homosocial desire: while such narratives take as
their overt subject the desire of a man for a woman, again and again the really
important relationship is that between two men, either as rivals or as col-
leagues, friends, or associates. Developing the idea first proposed by the
French structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss that in many soci-
eties women tend to be tokens of exchange, Sedgwick argues that women are
effaced in this triangular structure, as mere objects for barter. At some level,
then, patriarchal society excludes women even from relations of desire.
Homosocial desire in our society, Sedgwick suggests, is both the most
required and the most carefully regimented desire.
Sedgwick offers a highly provocative model for thinking about desire in
narrative. According to this model, the workings of desire are inextricably
linked to the homophobic, homosocial and patriarchal structures of society.
Many canonical works of literature might be reread in these terms. This is not
to suggest that the Great Tradition is full of closet homosexuality, for example,
just waiting to be ‘outed’ (although we make some suggestions in this regard in
our ‘Queer’ chapter, below). Rather, it is to suggest that homosocial desire
in all its forms is central to the workings of what we might like to think of
simply as ‘heterosexual’ writing. The notions of heterosexual and homo-
sexual need to be rethought. Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1600–01), for example,
concerns not only the murder of Hamlet’s father and its revenge, but also
a relation of rivalry between Prince Hamlet (as a surrogate for his father,
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258 A n I n t r o d u c t i o n t o L i t e r a t u r e , C r i t i c i s m a n d T h e o r y
King Hamlet) and Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius (the dead King’s brother), over
the Queen. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) may gain much of
its power from the barely hidden conflicts of homosocial desire between
Heathcliff and other men, resulting in rivalry and extraordinary violence. In its
focus on the triangle of two men (Eugene Wrayburn and Bradley Headstone)
and one woman (Lizzie Hexam), Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend
(1865) is a superb, if disturbing, example of the potentially murderous erotic
dynamic that exists between men. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbevilles
(1891), a novel that appears to focus on the eponymous and tragic heroine,
is also structured by rivalry between two men who desire her, Angel Clare
and Alec D’Urbeville. D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1921), while overtly
about two men and their love for two women, is also, and perhaps more import-
antly, about the relationship between the two men, Gerald and Birkin.
Desire, then, is both a fundamental topic of literary texts and fundamental
to reading. But one of the things that literary texts consistently suggest is
that desire is paradoxical, mobile, mediated. And perhaps the homophobia
that may have ultimately resulted in the death of Alan Turing can itself be
understood in terms of a distortion or displacement of desire – a fear of
homosexuality, a fear of the other, which is bound up in society’s anxieties
about such mobilities and mediations. One of the responsibilities of con-
temporary literary criticism and theory lies in the exposure, questioning and
transformation of the rigid oppositions that result in such fear and oppression.
Further reading
Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1981) is a crucial
starting point for thinking about desire. Similarly influential is Deleuze and
Guattari’s difficult but compelling Anti-Oedipus (1983). Peter Brooks offers
fascinating accounts of the reader’s desire in Reading for the Plot (1984) and
Body Work (1993), while Catherine Belsey presents a very readable poststruc-
turalist account of a number of literary texts of desire in her Desire: Love
Stories in Western Culture (1994). William Irvine’s On Desire (2005) offers a
philosopher’s wide-ranging meditation on the question of desire. Leo Bersani’s
A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (1976) remains a
brilliant and thought-provoking point of reference for exploring the represen-
tation and effects of desire in literary texts. For three excellent brief accounts
of the work of Lacan, see the introductory books by Bowie (1991), Weber
(1992) and Rabaté (2001); see also Ehsan Azari’s intriguing study Lacan and
the Destiny of Literature (2008). On the discourse of homosexual desire and
homophobia, see Jonathan Dollimore’s influential book Sexual Dissidence
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D e s i r e 259
(1991), and for a collection of essays on lesbian criticism and theory,
see Munt, ed., New Lesbian Criticism (1992). E.L. McCallum and Mikko
Tuhkanen, eds, The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014)
is another hugely helpful resource. On the importance of heterosexual desire
for the development of the novel in the nineteenth century, see Joseph
Allen Boone, Tradition and Counter Tradition (1987). For historically wide-
ranging discussions of issues of desire, see Dollimore’s Death, Desire and Loss
in Western Culture (1998) and Sex, Literature and Censorship (2001).
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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):
‘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)
Further reading
Raskin, John, American Scream. Berkeley: Uni. of California Press, 2005. On reserve. See chapters 2 (family background) and 11 (obscenity trial).
Charters, Ann. ‘Allen Ginsberg’s Life’. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/ginsberg/life.htm
Fuery, Patrick. ‘Jouissance and It’s Paradox’. Theories of Desire. Melbourne: Melbourne Uni. Press, 1995. This chapter discusses Lacan’s theory of desire in relation to subjectivity.
For an introductory discussion of Lacan’s theory of the psyche and desire see: Felluga, Dino. “Modules on Lacan: On the Structure of the Psyche.” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/psychoanalysis/lacanstructure.html>.
25
.
Ideology
The way you think, what you think – about society, ethics, politics, justice,about poverty and wealth, about education and the health and welfare
systems, about crime and punishment, about human rights, race, religion
and ethnicity, unemployment and the minimum wage, about immigration and
asylum seekers, sexuality and gender, the environment, the ecosystem and
global warming, about war and revolution, about terrorists and freedom
fighters – is a matter of language. You make up your mind about these and a
host of other questions in and through the words you and others use to
describe them. Politicians know this, of course, not least because the politi-
cian’s job is almost exclusively concerned with talking (and to a lesser extent
writing) – in parliament, on TV and radio (if she gets the chance), on the
streets and in election campaigns, in her weekly ‘surgery’, on the telephone,
tweeting, on the internet and in blogs, in newspapers, in committees and other
meetings. The politician’s job is to talk, to manipulate language in order to
influence the way others think about and see the world. Her job is all about
‘ideology’: ideology, the way that people think about their world, is produced
and altered in and through language. Language changes, and even creates the
social and political world in which we live. Ideology in that sense is language.
Some readers might even feel that our decision to speak of the politician here
as female is itself an instance of ideology – for example, as ‘politically correct’
language. To have called her a ‘him’ could likewise, of course, be called ‘ideo-
logical’ (gender-biased, patriarchal, sexist or misogynist just in its assump-
tions that politicians are, by default, men).
We could illustrate some of these issues through a brief consideration of a
few of the political slogans that have washed over us in the last 75 years or so –
since radio, TV and more recently the internet established themselves as
the dominant ways by which political communication happens, and since
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232 A n I n t r o d u c t i o n t o L i t e r a t u r e , C r i t i c i s m a n d T h e o r y
politicians developed the knack of producing phrases (political slogans or
‘soundbites’) that can be extracted, quoted and re-quoted, in and out of
context, in order to sum up a policy, a political position, a world view. The
following snippets of language may be said to have influenced people’s men-
talities, their ‘ideology’, and consequently their social, political and economic
world: ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself ’ (Franklin D. Roosevelt,
1933); ‘We will fight on the beaches’ (Winston Churchill, 1940); people have
‘never had it so good’ (Harold Macmillan, 1957); ‘ask not what your country
can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’ ( John F. Kennedy,
1961); the ‘white heat’ of the technological revolution (Harold Wilson, 1963);
‘I have a dream’ (Martin Luther King, 1963); get the government ‘off the
backs of the people’ (Ronald Reagan, 1981); there is ‘no such thing’ as society
(Margaret Thatcher, 1987); ‘back to basics’ ( John Major, 1993); ‘tough on
crime, tough on the causes of crime’ (Tony Blair, 1992); the ‘war on terror’
(George W. Bush, 2001); ‘change we can believe in’ (Barack Obama, 2008);
‘Make America Great Again!’ (Donald Trump, 2016). In fact, of course,
political slogans or sound bites are nothing new: pre-TV and radio, the US
presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, for example, used a memorable
metaphor from cowboy culture to influence the way people voted: ‘Don’t
swap horses in the middle of the stream’ (1864). And the US constitution is
itself partly founded on the series of sound bites making up Benjamin
Franklin’s preamble to the Declaration of Independence of 1776: ‘We hold
these truths to be self-evident . . . all men are created equal . . . certain
unalienable Rights . . . Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. But the
growth of democracy and of the propagation and dissemination of ideas
through new communication technologies in recent years has significantly
increased the importance and power of the isolated sound bite.
What do these isolated pieces of language have to do with literature? And
what can they tell us about the relationship between literature and ideology?
The literary critic and theorist Paul de Man suggests one answer in a statement
that has itself become a sound bite, in his 1982 essay ‘The Resistance to
Theory’: ‘What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with
natural reality’ (de Man 1986, 11). What de Man seems to be alluding to is
the way that, for example, by designating the man with a gun and a balaclava
as a ‘terrorist’ you understand his actions in one way and thereby ‘confuse’ that
naming with the ‘reality’ of his actions and purpose; but by naming him a ‘free-
dom fighter’, you understand him differently, and ‘confuse’ your phrase with
another sense of his ‘reality’. ‘Ideology’ has to do with the attempt to establish
one of these ways of talking about the man in the balaclava as the dominant
discourse, as the ‘hegemony’. Or, to give another example: ideology would be
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I d e o l o g y 233
what is at work whenever or wherever anyone assumes, as a ‘natural reality’,
that public institutions (such as hospitals or universities) should and must
base themselves on the language of the market and profit-making’ rather than,
say, the public good or social welfare. De Man’s remark places literature, the
art of language, at the centre of political or ‘ideological’ debate: it means that,
‘more than any other mode of inquiry’, literary criticism and theory (what
de Man calls ‘the linguistics of literariness’) is itself ‘a powerful and indispens-
able tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations’ (de Man 1986, 11).
The word ‘ideology’ has something of a bad name: the ‘crude’ Marxist
notion of ideology is of ‘false consciousness’, ‘the system of ideas and rep-
resentations that dominate the mind of a man [sic] or a social group’
(Althusser 1977, 149), as contrasted with the underlying reality of economic
and class relations. The influential theorist Louis Althusser summarizes
Marx’s notion of ideology by contrasting it with ‘the concrete history of
concrete material individuals’: ideology, instead, is a ‘pure dream’, it is ‘empty
and vain’ and ‘an imaginary assemblage’. ‘Ideology’, Althusser continues,
‘represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions
of existence’ (Althusser 1977, 151, 153). In classical Marxism – which, as
we shall see, Althusser radically develops – ideology is an imagined represen-
tation of reality: it is false, distorted by definition. Ideology is not, Terry
Eagleton remarks, ‘a set of doctrines’: rather, it ‘signifies the way men [sic] live
out their roles in class-society, the values, ideas and images which tie them by
their social functions and so prevent them from a true knowledge of society as
a whole’ (Eagleton 1976, 16 –17).
From a poststructuralist perspective, the notion of ideology is fun-
damentally suspect, since it relies on a questionable opposition of true and
false, of reality and false consciousness. By this view, ideology appears too
easily as a master term for totalizing readings of literary texts. In this chapter,
however, we shall attempt to suggest ways in which the work of the neo-
Marxist critic Louis Althusser has effectively produced a powerful critical tool
by substantially modifying the ‘crude’ opposition of disguised or distorted
representations, on the one hand, and an underlying political and material
reality, on the other.
In a well-known essay entitled ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’
(1969), Louis Althusser seeks to describe ways in which the state exerts its
power outside such institutions as the army, the courts, the police, and so on –
that is to say, in culture and society generally. The central insight of the essay is
that ideology is bound up with the constitution of the subject, that ‘man is
an ideological animal by nature’ – meaning that people constitute or define
themselves as humans through ideology. Althusser argues that
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234 A n I n t r o d u c t i o n t o L i t e r a t u r e , C r i t i c i s m a n d T h e o r y
the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but at the same
time . . . the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology
insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’
concrete individuals as subjects. (Althusser 1977, 160)
To put it simply: subjects – people – make their own ideology at the same time
as ideology makes them subjects. The implications of this idea are enormous
because it means that ‘ideology’ goes to the heart of personal identity, of how
we conceive ourselves as subjects in the world and all that this involves.
Althusser avoids a reductive opposition of ideology and reality by suggest-
ing that ideology makes our reality in constituting us as subjects. Ideology,
Althusser argues, ‘hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete sub-
jects’ (162): it calls us or calls to us as subjects and we recognize ourselves as
subjects in our response to this call. To become human, to identify oneself as
a subject, then, is an effect of ideology. For Althusser, the function of Art gen-
erally is, as he remarks in ‘A Letter on Art’, ‘to make us see’, and what it allows
us to see, what it forces us to see, is ‘the ideology from which it is born’
(Althusser 1977, 204). What is most terrifying and compelling about this is
the fact that being a subject feels so real, so natural – and yet, as Althusser
remarks, this very ‘reality’ or ‘naturalness’ of being a subject is itself an
‘ideological effect’.
This may seem rather heady stuff – if also, as Althusser suggests, terribly
real. How can we begin to think about the workings of ideology in literary
texts? Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey take us some way towards an
understanding of the question in their important essay ‘On Literature as an
Ideological Form’ (1981). They argue that literary texts produce the illusion
of ‘unity’. Such writing is, for them, itself ideological. For Balibar and
Macherey a ‘material analysis’ needs to look for ‘signs of contradictions’
which appear ‘as unevenly resolved conflicts in the text’ (87). For these
critics, indeed, literature begins with ‘the imaginary solution of implacable
ideological contradictions’: literature is there because ‘such a solution is
impossible’ (88). In capitalist society, literature itself is an ‘ideological form’,
both produced by and producing ideology. The task of the critic would be to
look beyond the unity that the literary text strives to present, and forcefully to
explore the contradictions embedded within it. The strange case of detective
fiction illustrates this point very well. The genre produces its own consoling
fictions, its own ideology. While we may think of crime as eternally recurring,
for example, as an unavoidable function of any sociopolitical context, detective
fiction allows us to perceive it as both solvable and the result of the actions of
specific, isolated and morally culpable individuals.
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I d e o l o g y 235
The cultural theorist Tony Bennett has argued that a thoroughgoing
Althusserian criticism would not simply restore or reveal the contradictions
that are already in texts: rather, it would ‘read contradictions into the text’ in
such a way that it would ‘effect a work of transformation on those forms of
signification which are said to be ideological’ (Bennett 1979, 146 –7). In this
respect, an ‘ideological criticism’ is not one that understands the reality of a
text better. Rather it is criticism that changes the text. Such a reading of, say, an
Agatha Christie detective novel would not simply seek to expose ways in which
such writing conforms to and reinforces the status quo of bourgeois capitalism.
Instead, it would recognize reading as an intervention in and transformation of
that text itself. Bennett argues that there can be no notion of ‘the text’ underly-
ing any reading: texts have ‘historically specific functions and effects’ (Bennett
1979, 148), they change in time, and what changes them is reading.
In order to think about some of these points and questions, we shall briefly
consider Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1845). This story,
and Poe’s earlier ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) and ‘The Mystery
of Marie Roget’ (1842–3), are often considered to be the first examples of
modern detective fiction. Set in Paris, the narrative concerns a detective named
Auguste C. Dupin, who is asked to solve a mystery concerning the theft of a let-
ter from the ‘royal apartments’ belonging to ‘a personage of the most exalted
station’ (495), that is to say, presumably, the Queen of France. The contents of
the letter have the potential to compromise the Queen and leave her open to
blackmail. As she is reading the letter she is interrupted by her husband, from
whom the letter must be concealed. She does not have time to hide the letter so
she lays it on the table as she talks to her husband, relying on the fact that it is
not concealed to hide the fact that it must be concealed. While they are talking,
another person, ‘Minister D.’, enters the room, notices the letter and manages
to exchange it for a worthless letter that he happens to be holding. The Queen
sees this exchange but can do nothing to stop it without drawing attention to
the secret letter. She is now open to blackmail and her letter must be discreetly
retrieved by the head of the police service. The police have surreptitiously
searched Minister D.’s house but have been unable to find the letter. Dupin is
asked to help. He goes to the minister’s house and manages to spot the letter,
turned inside out, but revealed for all to see, hanging from the minister’s
mantelpiece. Later, by returning to the house with a copy of the letter and
arranging for the minister to be distracted while he is there, Dupin manages
to substitute his copy for the genuine article and retrieve the now doubly
purloined letter.
Detective fiction may be understood to have a conservative ideological
form because of its generic investment in the restoration of the status quo.
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236 A n I n t r o d u c t i o n t o L i t e r a t u r e , C r i t i c i s m a n d T h e o r y
A detective story typically involves a disturbance of order in the wake of
an originary event of physical violence or theft of property, followed by the
re-establishment of order by the discovery of the criminal – after which the
jewels are returned or the murderer is punished (or both). Moreover, the genre
conventionally relies on the idea of the criminal as an autonomous individual:
he or she must be morally responsible for his or her actions and must not be
insane (or at least be sane enough to be morally culpable). This is because
the genre depends, on the one hand, on an outcome in which society’s and the
reader’s desire for moral restitution is fulfilled and, on the other hand, on the
detective’s ability rationally to deduce the criminal’s motives. If the criminal
is mad, he or she cannot be punished (he or she must be cured), and his or
her motives and actions cannot be rationally deduced because they will be, by
definition, irrational. Similarly, any critique of society or social institutions
is likely to be counterproductive in a work of detective fiction because of the
danger that ‘society’, rather than a particular individual, will itself come to
be seen as the culprit. This is a dilemma which is particularly acute in, for
example, contemporary feminist detective fiction: the novels of such writers as
Sara Paretsky, Amanda Cross and Gillian Slovo are concerned as much with
exposing the gross injustices of patriarchal society as with finding a specific
criminal. In such cases there is a sense in which the criminal cannot finally be
punished and the status quo restored because it is that very status quo which
is responsible for the crime. Encoded within classic detective fiction, then,
is a reactionary political agenda. This ideological form of the genre might
be said to be an unspoken but necessary part of any conventional detective
story. From this point of view, one could say that ‘The Purloined Letter’
involves the re-establishment of power relations, the assertion of the culprit as
autonomous and independent, and the implementation of reason to restore
the status quo.
But what is particularly interesting about Poe’s story from this perspective
is not so much the way in which it institutes and reinforces the ideological
formation of a certain literary genre, as the fact that this formation also entails
a number of paradoxes, sites of disturbance and displacement. One of the key
elements of the story is the identification of the detective with the criminal.
Dupin explains that he was able to discover the letter by identifying himself
with Minister D. and, in particular, by identifying the minister’s mode of
thinking as both rational and poetic (like Dupin, he is both mathematician and
poet). The story establishes what we might call ‘inspired reasoning’ – as con-
trasted with the rational approach of the regular police – as the characteristic
technique for both detective and criminal in detective fiction. But the story
also initiates a central paradox of the genre whereby the detective not only
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I d e o l o g y 237
identifies with but is in some ways identical to the criminal. In this sense, it is
no accident that the letter is, in fact, ‘purloined’ twice – once by the minister
and once by Dupin. The detective in this story, and in detective fiction more
generally, must obey the double bind of identity with, but difference from, the
criminal. This intrinsic generic paradox suggests ways in which the ideolog-
ical conservativism of the genre, its investment in a restoration of the status
quo and reinforcement of an absolute distinction between criminal and non-
criminal, may be undermined. Similarly, in establishing ‘inspired reasoning’
as the modus operandi for both detective and criminal, Poe’s story opens the
way for its own deconstruction. While detective and criminal, author and
reader all need to employ reason to attain their ends, such reason is continu-
ally disturbed by its ‘other’, by inspiration or unreason. It comes as no sur-
prise, therefore, that Poe was also obsessed with occultism, spiritualism and
the uncanny. Nor is it any surprise to discover that the inventor of Sherlock
Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, was on the one hand a trained physician and,
on the other, a keen amateur in the study of telepathy and the afterlife. The
detective in this context combines a doctor’s empirical and scientific acumen
with a telepath’s ability to read the criminal’s mind. More generally, detective
fiction seems to be continually threatened with its generic other – the gothic,
tales of psychic phenomena, spiritualism – as is suggested by such gothic
tales as Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), for example, or such
apparently supernatural tales as his ‘The Parasite’ (1893). Finally, the genre
of detective fiction is organized through a precarious relation with social
critique. As we have pointed out, classic detective fiction must distance itself
from an ideological critique of society that, however, can never be finally
erased. Detective fiction can only exist if there are crimes to detect, and if
there are crimes to detect society cannot be perfect. Some of the most interest-
ing exponents of detective fiction – Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler,
Elmore Leonard, or more recently Paul Auster, William McIlvanney, Sara
Paretsky, Philip Kerr, Walter Mosley, Patricia Highsmith, Ian Rankin, Henning
Mankell – gain much of their narrative energy from precisely such a tension –
the possibility that the constitution of their narratives as detective fiction will
be dissolved by their unavoidable engagement in social and political critique.
Our final point concerning Poe’s story and its relation to ideology concerns
the way in which it is based on the idea that what is most open or revealed,
most ‘obvious’, may itself be the most deceptive or most concealing. The fact
that Minister D. conceals the purloined letter precisely by not hiding it, by
leaving it where all can see it (the place where no one – except Dupin – will
look, because it is too exposed), makes ‘The Purloined Letter’ an allegory of
ideological formation. Ideology may be defined in terms of the obvious,
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238 A n I n t r o d u c t i o n t o L i t e r a t u r e , C r i t i c i s m a n d T h e o r y
in terms of common sense. It is, in the West, ‘common sense’ that a ‘normal’
subject or person is autonomous, for example, that crime is the result of indi-
vidual actions, or that such an individual operates through rational motivation.
But at the same time each of these obvious, self-evident or commonsensical
points disguises a very specific concept of the self, an 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
and prejudices, knowledge and social structures are represented and, in the
process, opened to transformation.
Further reading
A good brief account of ideology is the entry in Williams, Keywords (1976).
More recent, more detailed and exhaustive is Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of
the Aesthetic (1990). Good short introductions to the subject include Terry
Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (1991), David Hawkes, Ideology (1996),
James Decker, Ideology (2004), and Michael Freeden, Ideology (2003). For
useful collections of essays, see Eagleton, ed., Ideology (1994) and Mulhern,
ed., Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism (1992). Althusser’s ‘Ideology
and the Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1977) is a basic text for a considera-
tion of the fundamental importance of ideology in the constitution of the
human subject. The classic Althusserian account of literature is Macherey’s
astute and highly readable A Theory of Literary Production (1978); see
also Balibar and Macherey, ‘On Literature as an Ideological Form’ (1981). For
a more up-to-date account, drawing on numerous Althusser texts post-
humously published in French, see Warren Montag, Louis Althusser (2003).
Those interested in Marxist readings of literature will also gain much from
Fredric Jameson’s now classic The Political Unconscious (1981). For a chal-
lenging but illuminating consideration of the question of ideology in the work
of Paul de Man, see Andrej Warminksi, Ideology, Rhetoric, Aesthetics (2013).
A valuable work on the ideology of detective fiction in particular is Stephen
Knight’s Form and Ideology in Detective Fiction (1980). Poe’s ‘The Purloined
Letter’ has itself become a site of intense ideological conflict and theoretical
speculation following important essays by Lacan and Derrida: see Muller and
Richardson, eds, The Purloined Poe (1988). There is a helpful account
of ‘The Ideology of Narrative Fiction’ in the online Living Handbook of
Narratology (www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de).
Bennett, A., & Royle, N. (2016). An introduction to literature, criticism and theory. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com
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Ginsberg, 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)
Howl, Kadd ish and other Poems
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
own 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 al
l
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 affrontery 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.
William Carlos Williams
viii
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 connec-
tion to the starry dynamo in the machinery 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 Moham-
medan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallu-
cinating 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, burning 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, alcohol and
cock and endless balls,
Howl, Kaddish and other Poems
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and light-
ning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada &
Paterson, illuminating all the motionless 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 Brnoklyn, 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 afternoon 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 Brooklyn Bridge,
a 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-grindings and
migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s
bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad
2
Howl
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 grandfather night,
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,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in
supernatural ecstasy.
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on
the impulse of winter midnight streetlight 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 fireplace 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 incomprehensible 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 trem-
bling 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 manuscripts,
Howl, Kaddish and other Poems
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and light-
ning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada &
Paterson, illuminating all the motionless 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 Brooklyn, 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 afternoon 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 Brooklyn Bridge,
a 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-grindings and
migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s
bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad
2
Howl
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 grandfather night,
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,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in
supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on
the impulse of winter midnight streetlight 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 fireplace 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 incomprehensible 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 trem-
bling 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 manuscripts,
Howl, Kaddish and other Poems
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 rosegardens 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 candle 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 sunrise, 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 innu-
merable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards,
moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or
with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petti-
coat 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 hungover with heartless Tokay and
4
Howl
horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to
unemployment 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 incan-
tations 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 unsuccessfully,
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 nitrogly-
cerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard
gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by
the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
– .. I
L.
Howl, Kaddish and other Poems
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 rosegardens 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 candle 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 sunrise, 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 innu-
merable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards,
moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or
with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petti-
coat 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 hungover with heartless Tokay and
4
:~
I
!I
!.
I
”
(
:t
J, .
Howl
horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to
unemployment 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 incan-
tations 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 unsuccessfully.
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 nitrogly-
cerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard
gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by
the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality.
5
Howl, Kaddish and other Poems
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened
and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly
daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even
one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway
window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes,
cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses
barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic Euro-
pean 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 illu-
minated 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 Wood-
lawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism
& were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung
jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and
6
Howl
subsequently presented themselves on the granite
steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harle-
quin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous
lobotomy;
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occu-
pational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic ping-
pong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and
tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the
wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bick-
ering with the echoes of the soul, rocking 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 furnished 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 vibrating 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
7
1
Howl, Kaddish and other Poems
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened
and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly
daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even
one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway
window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes,
cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses
barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic Euro-
pean 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 illu-
minated 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 Wood-
lawn to the daisychain or grave ,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism
& were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung
jury;
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and
6
Howl
subsequently presented themselves on the granite
steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harle-
quin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous
lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occu-
pational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic ping-
pong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and
tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the
wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bick-
ering with the echoes of the soul, rocking 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 furnished 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 vibrating 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
7
Howl, Kaddish and other Poems
stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking
with shame, rejected yet confessing 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 imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable
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 stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood
is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!
Moloch whose breast is a cannibal 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 factories dream and croak in
8
Howl
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! skel-
eton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries!
spectral nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks!
monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements,
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 boat-
load of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down
the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! 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!
9
Howl, Kaddish and other Poems
stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking
with shame, rejected yet confessing 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 imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable
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 stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood
is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!
Moloch whose breast is a cannibal 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 factories dream and croak in
8
Howl
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! skel-
eton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries!
spectral nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks!
monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements,
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 boat-
load of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down
the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! 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!
9
..
Howl, Kaddish and other Poems
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 type-
writer
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 inno-
cent 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
IO
l
i
‘•
J_ .
fr
Howl
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 resur-
rect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I’m with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad comrades 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 collapse O skinny legions run outside
0 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
San Francisco 1955-56
II
Haw!, Kaddish and other Poems
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 type-
writer
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 inno-
cent 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
IO
Howl
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 resur-
rect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I’m with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad comrades . 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 collapse O skinny legions run outside
0 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
San Francisco 1955-:56
II
1