Introduction
Born out of a counter-cultural reevaluation of society in the aftermath of World War II, the Beat Generation formed into a literary and cultural movement that questioned society’s widespread materialism and shallowness. In many ways, the so-called “Beatniks” established new visions for poetry and prose, creating works that featured unorthodox conventions and ideas; however, not all of their ideas were necessarily unique: in fact, much of their philosophy reflects the ideas of already established postmodern thinkers, especially Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard, a French sociologist and cultural theorist, ascertained in his book Simulacra and Simulation the concept of the world losing its understanding of reality as we substitute images of reality for reality itself, creating an indistinguishable image of what is real. Similarly, he posited this loss of reality would lead to a “temporal breakdown.” In essence, Baudrillard’s semiotic notions were reflected in both the Beat Gen literature itself – for instance, Ginsberg’s “Moloch” demon was spawned by the follies of men, and Kerouac’s On the Road semi-autobiographical format confounded the fictional protagonist with Kerouac himself – as well as the image society held of the Beat Gen writers. When society thought of the Beat Gen, they subconsciously substituted the two-dimensional image they had in their minds for the reality of who each man was. In this way, Baudrillard – subconsciously or consciously – affected the Beat movement quite greatly.
Body
Underlying the relationship between Baudrillard and the Beat generation is the basic philosophies of the postmodern culture that was forming in the 60s; thus, in order to understand how specifically Baudrillard impacted the Beat generation, one must first understand the context from which both stem. Unlike any movement before its time, postmodernism intensely scrutinized all pre-existing notions of art or philosophy, calling into question all the theories and ideologies that were present at the time. Because of its wide usage in a range of cultural and critical movements since the 1970s, the concept of postmodernism is rarely explained precisely; postmodernism describes not only a period but also a set of ideas, which should be understood in relation to the literary eras the preceded it, especially modernism. According to Daniel Palmer, a Senior Lecturer for the Art History & Theory Program at Monash University, postmodernism is “best understood as a questioning of the ideas and values associated with a form of modernism that believes in progress and innovation. Modernism insists on a clear divide between art and popular culture” (Palmer, 1). But unlike modernism, Palmer notes, postmodernism does not specify any one style of art or culture. Instead, it abandons conventional ideas of originality and composition in favor of a parody of “dead” styles. Thus, postmodernism relies heavily on the substitution of pastiche for the satirical purpose of parody, leading to what Jean Baudrillard would define as a simulacrum – substituting a copy of the real in the place of the real itself and, more importantly, being unable to distinguish between the two. Once the postmodern authors created their parodies, they were manifested as reality; readers read the works as original, when in reality, the works were recreations of old styles.
A reflection of the expanding postmodern culture of the time, the Beat generation writers – particularly Ginsberg and Kerouac – transcended all prior notions of literature, becoming themselves a societal image that evolved into a simulacrum. The media and all its audience could not distinguish between their false image of the Beat gen and the real writers themselves; moreover, the writers themselves became so entrenched in their image that they lost sight of who they truly were. Similarly, in an almost paradoxical way, their poems and novels each incorporated some manifestation of simulacra or temporal breakdowns – concepts brought about by a postmodern thinker (Baudrillard) – while still addressing the philosophies of postmodern culture themselves.
To understand the Beat generation’s “hyperreal” nature, one must also understand the philosophies of the postmodern era regarding society’s replacement of the image for the real, an idea introduced by Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard was a French philosopher who revolutionized postmodern thought and contributed to new leftist movements that challenged concepts like structuralism and capitalism. At the core of postmodernism lie the notion that, at that point in history, nothing could be original; we had surpassed the ability to create unique, original work of any form, and no thoughts were original, either. Further, postmodern art, music, and writing often sought to parody previously created styles, like modernism or romanticism, in exaggerated ways; these parodies and pastiches were born in part out of a criticism of society and its past styles, but also to illustrate the unoriginal nature of society, since they were simply recreating past work, rather than making something original.
These postmodern concepts stood at the forefront of all of Baudrillard’s philosophies. Much of his writing wrestled with the concept of “hyperreality,” or the virtual, simulated or fake nature of all of human experience. He argued that because nothing could be original, all of human experience was, in its essence, fake. Humans in postmodern society, he claimed, inherently depend upon images and models so heavily that we lose all contact with and understanding of whichever reality preceded such images and models; instead, reality imitates the images, and people assume the images are real. According to Baudrillard, when it comes to postmodern simulation and simulacra, “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real” ("The Precession of Simulacra" 2). Moreover, he argues that postmodern culture is not simply artificial – which would still require the ability to recognize reality as compared to that which is artificial – but rather that we can no longer distinguish between that which is artificial and that which is real.
To clarify his point, Baudrillard argues that there are three "orders of simulacra": 1) the image is a clear copy of the real, and the image can be distinguished as just an illusion of the real; 2) the distinctions between the image and the representation begin to break down because of mass production and the proliferation of copies, which misrepresents and masks an underlying reality by imitating it so well, thus threatening to replace it (e.g. in photography or ideology); however, there is still a belief that, through critique or effective political action, one can still access the hidden fact of the real; 3) the third order of simulacra, which is associated with the postmodern age, in which we are confronted with a precession of simulacra; that is, the representation precedes and determines the real. There is no longer any distinction between reality and its representation; there is only the simulacrum.
Among the phenomena Baudrillard cites as causing our inability to distinguish between image and reality are two elements fundamental to Beat literature: media culture and language. Contemporary media (television, film, magazines, billboards, the Internet) are concerned not just with relaying information or stories but with interpreting our most private selves for us, making us approach each other and the world through the lens of these media images. We therefore no longer acquire goods because of real needs but because of desires that are increasingly defined by commercials and commercialized images, which keep us at one step removed from the reality of our bodies or of the world around us. Similarly, Baudrillard illustrates how in such subtle ways language keeps us from accessing “reality.” The earlier understanding of ideology was that it hid the truth, that it represented a “false consciousness,” as Marxists phrase it, keeping us from seeing the real workings of the state, of economic forces, or of the dominant groups in power. (This understanding of ideology corresponds to Baudrillard's second order of simulacra.) Postmodernism, on the other hand, understands ideology as the support for our very perception of reality. There is no outside of ideology, according to this view, at least no outside that can be articulated in language. Because we are so reliant on language to structure our perceptions, any representation of reality is always already ideological, always already constructed by simulacra. Additionally, Baudrillard often points to Marxism – or, rather, the ‘evils’ of capitalism – as a reason for our descent into postmodern culture; again, this is another topic dealt with frequently within Beat literature.
BACKGROUND OF BEAT GEN
Like postmodernism, the ‘Beat’ era transcended writing, becoming a cultural phenomenon. The Beats are generally considered a branch of postmodernism in the ways they parodied pre-existing styles and sought to create originality when they saw originality lacking through society; however, in their endeavors – again, like postmodernism as a whole – they ended up confounding their work with originality. In John Clellon Holmes’s novel Go, Holmes defines ‘Beat’ not simply as literature, but ‘an attitude towards life’; and as for the hipster of the bebop jazz movement art was ‘more than music’, so to for the Beat Generation, art was more than writing (Holmes, J., p.30). The Beat movement was not merely literary; it also enacted strong social change, making its impact political and cultural as well. While the literature was one aspect of the movement, living the ideas of those writings within the social sphere was equally important. This cultural gravitas eventually added a greater weight to the image of the writers, especially for Jack Kerouac, making the simulacra even more confounded and more problematic.
Although many saw the Beat gen as disheveled hipsters, much of society quickly idolized them, which gave them an authority to grow a political and countercultural movement. Through their poetry and novels, certain social realisms that they felt had been long ignored or condemned were brought into the light: generally, they focused on addiction, homosexuality, and the horrors of war. Writers like Ginsberg and Kerouac focused on liberation, writing without structure or convention. They advocated a freer state of mind, and their writing generally went unedited or changed after its first contact with paper, expressing the immediacy of their experiences. That said, while their subject matter was unorthodox and profane, the writing itself still demonstrated examples of simulacra because they were copies of pre-existing concepts or realities. For example, Kerouac’s novel On the Road was semi-autobiographical; that is, much of the experiences in the story were based on real ones from his life. He wrote On the Road in this way because he wanted to not simply imagine the experiences of his characters, but he wanted to live them as well. The novel is a roman à clef, or a novel of real life overlaid with a facade of fiction. While the story’s subject matter – two friends travelling across America against a backdrop of drugs, poetry, jazz, and art – is somewhat taboo and the writing style is Kerouac’s famous stream-of-consciousness, the fact that it’s based on his real life while still claiming to be fiction makes it a simulacrum. The same paradoxical effect – discussing the elusion of copies while being a copy in and of itself – applies across the writing of all the Beat gen.
The 1950s were characterized by the considerable rise of mass media, particularly television, which paralleled the implementation of Cold War policies by the American government. Popular culture and politics both sought to defeat the communist menace by elevating democratic capitalism to a national ideology and a defining trait of American identity. Government propaganda aimed at neutralizing political dissent by creating a homogeneous American society centered on its economic system. Americans were expected to contribute to the capitalist economy and help win the war against communism, which threatened their way of life.
One of the most prominent examples of the Beat gen’s illusory nature occurred in Jack Kerouac. Given the many parallels and close proximity of these two mythologies in the life and work of Jack Kerouac, the popular option for the study of his work has been to bridge the gap between the two by creating a “new” mythology that is a synthesis of both its parents. But this is a dangerous method of practicing literary criticism, since a near-seamless blend of the two is often impossible, and the external mythology of the Beats is not necessarily a self-generated one. This leads us to a difficult crossroads with Jack Kerouac, for a “purely literary” reading of his texts in feigned ignorance of the details of his life is also an unsatisfactory option for most twenty-first-century scholars: gone is much of the popular taste for T.S. Eliot’s famous claim that “[p]oetry … is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” and that “[t]o divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim.”
Nevertheless, if we continue to reach for an understanding of the Beats that is founded in a synthesis of internal and external mythologies, we are treading on needlessly shaky critical ground until we can separate the two mythologies long enough to gain a better understanding of each. It is for this reason that I will now put aside the literature of the Beats for a closer, though perhaps artificially isolated, examination of the external myths of Kerouac and others. My hope is that a deeper understanding of how they operate in relation to the internal myths of Beat literature will make future studies of the synthesis of Beat mythology more rewarding. But my approach is not without problems of its own. In Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, for example, as two characters visit the “Most Photographed Barn in America,” one wryly remarks that “[o]nce you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it’s impossible to see the barn…only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception…We can’t get outside of the aura.”
What DeLillo exposes through the “Most Photographed Barn in America” is, in Baudrillard’s language, a simulacrum, which, for all its tongue-in-cheek silliness, is structurally and formally identical to the simulacrum that Johnson identifies as the “image of Kerouac.” And the perils of the Barn transfer well to my study of the Beats: once we have seen the Beats’ signs and absorbed their treatment (and maltreatment) by everyone from Steve Allen to the writers of
The Simpsons, it becomes more and more difficult to read the Beats as literary figures—even the phrase “literary figures” suggests the elevated stature the Beats were (arguably) denied during their most productive years.
This volume concludes with Oliver Harris’s analysis of the problematic of Beat legend, specifically how Kerouac’s creation of a legend about Burroughs shaped the reception and production of Burroughs’s work. Harris proposes that Burroughs’s analysis of the power of image is a reaction against the practice of other Beat writers, especially Kerouac. In fact, the power of legend is problematic for all students of the Beats—the legend fascinates, and its mass media simulacra promote endless reiteration and proliferation. As I have argued in my earlier work on Burroughs and Jane Bowles, the antidote to leg- end is to historicize and contextualize, and to read the legend as a collaborative artwork that requires critical intervention. Johnson’s earlier comments, which effectively tie together notions of celebrity and simulacrum, are a particularly strong example of what seems to be a popular first- paragraph observation in papers on the Beats, and especially on Kerouac: that the immense presence of the Beat Generation as a cultural myth frequently overshadows their existence not only as human beings, but as writers of remarkable social relevance. What inevitably follows from the privileging of the “put on” or the mythologized Beat figure is what can be described spatially as an ousting or an exile of identity. This is especially significant in Kerouac’s case. Critics’ tendency to interrogate works like On The Road through the window of expressivism is, in Lacanian terms, a méconnaisance: In the case of Kerouac, when we look deep into the work and see the author, we are effectively misrecognizing and mistaking for our author an author-image of some external mythic design. If we describe Kerouac, as Aimée Mitchell does, as a “Beat King,” we must be aware not only that this itself is a mythologization, but that the “Beat King” of popular suppositions and American cultural fairy-tales is not an Old Hamlet but a Claudius. For all his resemblance to the human Kerouac, the mythic Kerouac is a false pretender who is, to this day, accorded equal status by virtue of his outward similarities to the original, which might, at best, be a slight family resemblance.
Kerouac’s myth is to Kerouac as Disneyland is to America, and as Baudrillard has famously declared in his Simulations, “Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland.… Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.”
The myth of Kerouac is one myth, and the existence of a man or even a body of writing behind the myth is another. To focus analytically on the myth, then, and to recognize its substantial reality, is to concede that the reality of myth may, ironically, be the only tangible reality we have left. It takes no great insight to recognize the strength and prevalence of cultural myths like those of Kerouac and the other Beats. But it takes courage and critical adventurousness to admit that such a myth, for all its Edenic innocence and Molochian hollowness, is the central postmodern reality, and the one to which all critical and cultural discussions must inevitably allow back into their midst.
His poems “Howl,” “America,” and “A Supermarket in California” challenge the American capitalist ethos in an attempt to provide the American people with a renewed spirituality originating from his visionary poetry. These poems are concerned with the necessity of moving beyond the growing artificiality of American culture generated by mass media and consumerism. In an interview, Ginsberg deplored that “America was gone mad with materialism, a police-state America, a sexless and soulless America prepared to battle the world in defence of a false image of its authority” (“Poetry, Violence, and The Trembling Lamb” 221). This sustenance of a “false image” of America by “materialism” and the “police-state” echoes Jean Baudrillard’s postmodern concept of hyperreality.
According to Baudrillard, those controlling public discourse in a consumer-driven society (i.e. the media and the government or “present-day simulators” (2)), “attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation,” that is, with their conceptualisation of reality (2). He adds that the real “is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere” (2). Baudrillard’s definition of hyperreality might seem as elitist and complex as the technocracy he criticizes. Yet, it describes a simple concept: a reality constructed in a purely capitalistic manner where images and discourses are manipulated and commercialized so as to create needs and encourage consumption. Hyperreality, then, results from the general acceptance of artificial constructions as truths, as reality. In this entirely counterfeit reality grounded on rationality, technology, and consumerism, the very possibility of connecting with the mystical and the sublime become unattainable because they are also masked by the hyperreal.
Allen Ginsberg’s most famous and widely anthologized poem “Howl” describes the disruption of the American social fabric and the alienation of a marginalized generation of which he claims to be part. Ginsberg equates the coercive capitalist system and the politics of containment in place in 1950s America with the biblical child-devouring demon Moloch. He writes, “Moloch the incomprehensible prison! . . . Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!” (“Howl” 82). Moloch is thus the embodiment of an oppressive and corrupted society. Ginsberg expresses the 1950s containment culture10 by evoking the image of an “incomprehensible prison” whose “buildings”, or institutions, have the power to judge and condemn; its walls, “the vast stone of war,” imprison a disillusioned youth with the sanction of a government that is supposed to protect it. In another passage, Ginsberg deplores, “Moloch whose name is the Mind! . . . / They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons!” (85, 89). Here, he indicates that Moloch’s demonic influence has invaded the minds of his compatriots who are, figuratively, left with their backs broken, unable to stand up for themselves because they choose to venerate him. The glorification of industrialization, media culture and plenitude, encompassed in the words “Pavements,” “radios,” and “tons,” has led to their indoctrination and powerlessness.11 In sum, Ginsberg portrays Moloch as a deceptive god who fools the American population by spreading a fallacious image of the country.
Moloch can be equated to the hyperreal since its artificial constructions are perceived as unavoidable truths that blind human beings, thus preventing them from being in touch with their individuality, creativity, and spirituality. Moloch is the disease afflicting the “best minds” that Ginsberg describes in Part I of his poem: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical naked” (1). Part I of “Howl” consists of a listing of alienated individuals who are looking for a new sense of purpose to their lives; they are longing for an “angry fix” capable of soothing their pain away, that is, a re- connection with the universe and spirituality, with “the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” (2-3).12 However, lines 2 and 3 suggest the difficulty of finding this spiritual “fix” as Ginsberg’s use of the words “dynamo” and “machinery” to describe the night sky conveys the idea that the universe is essentially mechanical. As such, this passage articulates the impossibility for “the best minds” to satisfy their longing for a glimpse of the sublime because hyperreality reduces human experience to technology and economics. For Ginsberg, this loss of connection with nature and spirituality compromises the health of American society.
Ginsberg’s countercultural poetry, or “alternative mode of communication” as Lardas phrases it, not only articulates his own vision of reality—one resolutely spiritual—but also invites other disaffiliated Americans to express theirs, thereby creating a community of independent individuals—for the New Left, the personal is always political—seeking fulfillment in self-expression rather than in mass conformity. His lyrical depiction of a nation emancipated from Moloch evokes Baudrillard’s claim that “[i]t is always a question of proving the real through the imaginary, proving truth through scandal, proving the law through transgression … the proof of art through anti-art” (19). Similarly, for Ginsberg, the affirmation of his spiritual reality can expose the existence of a soulless hyperreality. There is not one absolute reality, but a multitude of equally valid individual visions which should all have the opportunity to be expressed. For him, their importance lies in the fact that they emanate from the self rather than from a consumerist culture he believes to be driven by greed.
Explain relationship through SOCIETAL IMAGE
Conclusion