Chapter 21　Allen Ginsberg

Chapter 21　Allen Ginsberg

Ginsberg was the son of Louis Ginsberg, a poet and schoolteacher in New Jersey, and of Naomi Ginsberg, a Russian Émigré, whose madness and eventual death were memorialized in Kaddish(1959). Howl combined apocalyptic criticism of the dull, prosperous Eisenhower years with exuberant celebration of an emerging counterculture. It was the best-known and most widely circulated book of poems of its time, and with its appearance Ginsberg became part of the history of publicity as well as the history of poetry. Howl and Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road(1957) were the pocket bibles of the generation whose name Kerouac had coined—“Beat”, with its punning overtones of “beaten down” and “beatified”. With Ginsberg’s death, contemporary American poetry lost one of its most definitive and revolutionary figures. However, the poems endure.

Critical Perspectives

1.New Historicism

Daniel Karlin, in “Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg: at Kerouac’s Grave, and beyond”, takes its starting point as the conversation between Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan at the grave of Jack Kerouac in 1975 during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour, an encounter which was filmed, photographed and narrated, both by the two artists and by others. It considers the ways in which Kerouac’s work focused and mediated the friendship of Ginsberg and Dylan, their sense of each other’s art, and of their own. Ginsberg’s influence on Dylan was more than matched by Dylan’s influence on Ginsberg, but what binds them together is an idea of American speech (whether spoken or sung) for which Kerouac is the disembodied and occluded source.^[1]

Megan Tusler, in “Caption, Snapshot, Archive: On Allen Ginsberg’s Photo-Poems”, considers how Allen Ginsberg’s process of photographing and captioning reveals a project of community formation that reconsiders the position of the social subject. For Ginsberg the documentarian, the image/caption mode is ideal for his documentary project of recording the self in relation to its community. He produces a version of the self that is relative to its community and displaces an atomized, stable self from the self-portrait. His photographs and writings show the formation of a loose cultural group and demonstrate a point of view that shows how the image/caption as medium serves as a particularly descriptive method of documenting a community’s emergence. In Ginsberg’s work, portraiture and self-portraiture, in particular, work to describe a loose structure of affection and desire. Picture-poems open up the possibility of seeing the group’s arrangements because the aesthetic practice of cross-reading shows the photographer’s investment in mimesis. Ginsberg’s version of documentational aesthetics, that insists on giving durability to a historical moment, shows that he prioritizes a relation of “among”, enfolding the many, instead of a relation “between” two. His archival practice, furthermore, reiterates this insistence on a documentational viewpoint that speaks to the historical moment. Ginsberg’s collection, writing, photography, and arrangement insist, in contrast to the way the Beats are perceived in the press, on durability and permanence: they demonstrate a future orientation, a drive to record history. The gestural possibility of the snapshot shows its fit to capturing the ordinary and organizing the emergence of a social form.^[2]

Luke Walker, in “Allen Ginsberg’s Wales Visitation as a neo-Romantic Response to Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey”, considers the 1967 visit by American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg to the Wye River Valley and the Vale of Ewyas in Wales. As a result of the trip, Ginsberg was inspired to write poetry which paid homage to English poets William Blake and William Wordsworth. The reception of Blake and Wordsworth by the American counterculture of the 1960s is explored. Poems discussed include Ginsberg’s Wales Visitation and Wordsworth’s Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.^[3]

2.Psychoanalytical Study

Craig Svonkin, in “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg’s Spiritual Self-Othering”, explores Allen Ginsberg’s conflicted relationship to his given Jewishness. Ginsberg dealt with his ambivalence to his “endowed” identity through “transpiritualism”, the adoption of marginalized spiritual identities as his own. Ginsberg’s transpiritualism was quite complex, however, for he did not simply slough off an endowed Jewish identity for an appropriated or acquired Buddhist identity. Rather, Ginsberg crafted a spiritually complex, hybridized identity and thus escaped the “given” or “endowed” identity he experienced as limiting and claustrophobic. Exploring the psychological, cultural, historical, and aesthetic causes for transpiritual self-othering, Craig attempts to contextualize Ginsberg’s work in the culture of 1950s America.^[4]

John Tytell, in “An Emotional Time Bomb: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl at 60”, focuses on the poem Howl which marks its 60th anniversary in 2015. It mentions a brief background on Ginsberg and the poem that was written in San Francisco, California in 1955, the theme of the poem concerning the suffering and magnanimity aggravating the experiences of the so-called Beat Group under repression in the 1950s and assessments of the various parts of the poem which cover topics such as restraints of convention and the failure of a system.^[5]

3.Biographical Study

Jason Arthur, in “Allen Ginsberg’s Biographical Gestures”, discusses the editorial control of poet Allen Ginsberg to his biographies. It analyzes the text of Ginsberg’s poem The Green Automobile, which is a period laden with identity crises brought about by the poet’s academic training and his homosexuality. Mark Schechner, referring to Ginsberg’s role in the publication of his journals, suggests that the poet is aware that he matters less as a poet than as a figure. It proposes that Ginsberg has always exercised an editor’s control of the public side of his private life.^[6]

Gary Scharnhorst, in “Moodie, My Dad, Allen Ginsberg, and Me: Reflections on Wichita and Wichita Vortex Sutra”, describes his early years growing up in Wichita, Kansas in the 1960s. Described also is an older friend, Moodie Connell, who ran the Skidrow Beanery in downtown Wichita, and served beans, etc. to “bums ＆ hobos” for 25 cents. Trouble developed when he invited local high school and college students to read their poetry at the Beanery. After many so-called “violations”, his place was closed down and continued violations of the 1st Amendment became a typical reason for persecution and arrest of authors of that period. Allen Ginsberg’s response to the Wichita Beacon newspaper in showed hypocrisy in treatment of writers of that period.^[7](https://www.daowen.com)

4.Cultural Study

Yaakov Ariel, in “Charisma and Counterculture: Allen Ginsberg as a Prophet for a New Generation”, argues that the cultural role of Allen Ginsberg does not fit a typical Weberian model of charisma. The avant-garde poet was an outstanding personality and possessed an unusual ability to affect people. He played a vital role in expanding the boundaries of personal freedom in America of the 1950s-1990s, blazing new paths for spiritual, communal and artistic expression. Serving as a father figure for the counterculture—a symbol of an alternative set of cultural norms, lifestyles and literary forms—Ginsberg was a charismatic counter-leader, with no clearly defined followers or movement. As a leader in a more liberated era, he offered energy, ideas, inspiration, and color, but no structure or authority. Instead he was a prophet of freedom, calling on people to express themselves openly, to expand and experiment. This role demanded charisma but of a different kind—one that was more spiritual and less organizational or hierarchical. This article follows Gary Dickson’s essay Charisma, Medieval and Modern, in offering a suggestive analysis of and supplement to Weber’s understanding of charisma. The article grapples with the concept of charisma in relation to a generation that resented rigid structures and authorities.^[8]

【注释】

[1]Karlin D. “Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg: at Kerouac’s Grave, and beyond”. Popular Music History, 2013, 8(2):155-168.

[2]Tusler M. “Caption, Snapshot, Archive: On Allen Ginsberg’s Photo-Poems”. Criticism, 2019, 61(2):219-244.

[3]Walker L. “Allen Ginsberg’s Wales Visitation as a neo-Romantic Response to Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey”. Romanticism, 2013, 19(2):207-217.

[4]Svonkin C. “Manishevitz and Sake, the Kaddish and Sutras: Allen Ginsberg’s Spiritual Self-Othering”. College Literature, 2010, 37(4):166-193.

[5]Tytell J. “An Emotional Time Bomb: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl at 60”. Antioch Review, 2015, 73(4):636-646.

[6]Arthur J. “Allen Ginsberg’s Biographical Gestures”. Texas Studies in Literature ＆ Language, 2010, 52(2):227-246.

[7]Scharnhorst G. “Moodie, My Dad, Allen Ginsberg, and Me: Reflections on Wichita and Wichita Vortex Sutra”. Midwest Quarterly, 2004, 45(4):369-380.

[8]Ariel Y. “Charisma and Counterculture: Allen Ginsberg as a Prophet for a New Generation”. Religions, 2013, 4(1):51-66.