Beat Primer: part 3 - Ginsberg posted by Adam Marks

Ginsberg was the most comfortable of the principal Beats. He was the closest thing the Beat Generation had to a spokesperson. He wholeheartedly embraced the Beats social and counter cultural legacy, unlike Burroughs or Kerouac.

As a writer he shared a lot in common with Jack Kerouac. Compare Ginsberg performances of Howl with Kerouac reading pages from On The Road. They are similar texts: written to be performed. Whereas Kerouac shrank into self-consciousness (his stories were always roman a clef) Ginsberg remained proudly direct.

The most striking thing about his poetry is its conversational quality. A sample from a popular poem, America:

America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?

Now there’s a question and a half! America is typical (except in one respect) of Ginsberg, especially early Ginsberg. He rarely obeys the ‘rules’. He writes open form poetry. Any respect shown toward metre or rhyme is contingent. What matters is direct communication of the mind onto paper or into the air: very Beat.

There are two commonly cited influences on Ginsberg and the Beat poets. First come the romantic poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ginsberg had is famous auditory hallucination reading Blake’s Ah, Sunflower and The Sick Rose, when a booming voice appeared, reading aloud over the rooftops in New York. It appeared to be a holy revelation. Ginsberg deduced it was Blake himself.

Walt Whitman was an equally big influence on Ginsberg, a similar, egoistic free spirit (touchingly celebrated in A Supermarket in California). Apart from his frank male eroticism, Ginsberg chiefly took his notion of long breath lines, emphasising the performance value of poetry.

The other influences (less cited) are the modernist and, in particular, the imagist poets, such as Ezra Pound, TS Eliot and William Carlos Williams. The idea is that poetry is heightened language creating strong images in the reader or listener’s mind (eyeball kicks perhaps?). Though common throughout his work, it’s perhaps more obvious in his short poems. An example (not quite short enough to quote) would be First Party at Ken Kesey’s with Hell’s Angels, which does exactly what it says on the tin.

But now…

We have to get a measure of the geezer.

We can draft an artistic summary, however, Ginsberg is a Beat. He is purposely autobiographical. Let’s dig and see what we can find.

First thing to note, Ginsberg was born in 1926, in New Jersey to Louis and Naomi Ginsberg, two active socialists. Ginsberg was a red diaper baby. He had the kind of upbringing we all should have, affluent and nurturing without being insular.

His mother was an active member of the CPUSA. She took Allen and his brother, Eugene, to meetings, which Ginsberg remembered fondly all his life. As he grew up he was encouraged to hold opinions, as a teenager he would write to newspapers about current affairs. At university he trained to become a labour lawyer. In between he found time to contribute to campus magazines and debating societies.

The Beat family was first flung together at Columbia University. Ginsberg’s primal scene came via a friend of the family, a career criminal called Herbert Hunke (usually credited with minting the modern meaning of Beat). Hunke lived with Ginsberg for a while. Hunke was arrested and their home searched for stolen goods. Ginsberg was charged with being an accessory.

Fearing prison he pleaded insanity and was committed. In hospital he met a man called Carl Solomon, to whom he eventually dedicated his breakthrough poem. By most accounts Solomon was a witty eccentric who had been driven mad by the hospital’s EST programme.

Ginsberg was doubly sensitised to this environment by his upbringing. Growing up in a left-wing family: he was particularly attached to his mother who, by this time was succumbing to schizophrenia. A large part of his Beat perspective was formed here. The free individual up against the dehumanising system (Moloch the incomprehensible prison!): unrestricted expression clashing with violent control.

Six years later (1955) Ginsberg took this experience and turned it into Howl for Carl Solomon. The question is why did he express himself in the way he did? Before we get to the answer let’s go on a useful digression.

The effect of mechanical reproduction on art.

There is a short piece by Walter Benjamin on the effect of society and technology on art. The point he makes is, at the dawn of human civilisation, there is very little to separate art from religion or, to be more precise, the ritual of religion. As mechanical reproduction (and with it the commodity economy) rises, the nature of art changes as it becomes independent.

In the beginning religion is an umbrella, a total system that embraces culture, law, philosophy and so forth. Its only as society develops the different branches grow and become self-sufficient (and develop their own systems).

Because there is little in the way of industry there is no way of reproducing works of art. It is very difficult to disseminate culture to the people. Instead the people have to come to culture, hence the attachment to religious ritual.

In Western Europe you have a breakthrough in the high mediaeval period. The introduction of printing created the possibility of mass literacy. In Britain, between the arrival of St Augustine and the rise of the printing press, literacy was closely connected with the church and the court. The fact that successful printing works could be established in towns across North Western Europe suggested there was a rising middle class readership: an early sign of the changes to come.

The novel is, in many ways, the child of the printing press. It is the perfect bourgeois art form. The novel is easily turned into a commodity. It is designed for mass individual consumption. It is not a performing art.

The high period of the English novel is usually put somewhere between the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. What were the common preoccupations of the literary canon of that time: the comedy of manners, the ethics of love and marriage, the crisis of legitimacy and so forth, themes uppermost in the minds of bourgeois readers grapping with new wealth and power.

Where does this leave older forms of ‘literature’, specifically what we know as poems and plays?

They are, pointing to the obvious, performing arts. To some extent they were the same thing to begin with. The epic poem has all the basic elements of what we’d call a script: plot, characters, action, dialogue etc. As late as Shakespeare you still see playwrights dropping in rhyme, alliteration, punning and scansion into their plays. The question is why? The answer is simple: memory. Performing arts have to be learned and reproduced. The epic poem was often used to pass on great stories and legends. They were the framework of oral tradition and folk history.

The latest revolution in the creation and recreation of art is recorded image and sound. Performing arts are no longer evanescent and peripheral to culture. Popular musicians are no more wandering minstrels; they are rock stars (and interesting take on the secularisation of culture: rock stars are worshipped as walking deities, the rock pantheon works in a similar way to the Greek gods or the Christian saints). If the modern day Shakespeare died with no manuscripts to hand (unthinkable now) his actors would not rush to remember and write their lines for posterity. His work would be available on video or DVD.

So what about poets?

Ginsberg was a poet. Poetry is fundamentally a performing art. Poetry is also a form of literature. It has access to the printing press and, therefore, a ticket to posterity. The rise of recorded image and sound meant performing arts could have their day in the sun. Film (and then television) came to dominate over theatre, the record over the live performance.

Literature and, in particular, poetry had to respond. The dominant trend in poetry when Ginsberg began to write had been set by the modernists, in particular TS Eliot and his landmark poem The Wasteland. The Wasteland is noticeably disjointed, multifocal (and multilingual). The Wasteland is, of course, the city. Eliot was getting to grips with, what he regarded as, a confused but striking environment. His poetry reflected that.

Howl was influenced by The Wasteland’s strong imagist lines and attack on form. Eliot poetry strived after objectivity, however. Nothing could be further removed from Ginsberg’s method. Howl also spontaneity in composition (a key attribute of performing art). Some lines from Howl:

Who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Batter 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 the 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

These aren’t sentences for you to read. These words should be performed. What’s more they can be improvised on. Take the second line quoted: “who sank all night in the submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat…” There should be a comma between Bickford’s and floated, creating a parenthesis. There isn’t. You can choose to add the parenthesis or not (and in the process make a strange noise).

The lines given are breath lines. You are supposed to pronounce each line in full before breathing again. Ginsberg is declaring the influence of contemporary jazz. Beat writing, especially the New York Beat, is saturated with jazz references. Kerouac may have written about jazz artists (Burroughs was more interested in film: image and sound), Ginsberg wrote like them.

The jazz that the Beats particularly loved was called be-bop. Compared to earlier big band swing music, be-bop was pared down. Musicians playing be-bop would perform in quartets or even trios. The body of the music would be a supporting platform for a soloist, who would improvise, often on a popular tune or classical air. The three-chord format handed down from folk and the blues was dramatically expanded by be-bop.

The Beats, with their take of free-expression and creativity, were drawn to jazz music. The friendship and alliance between mostly black musicians and mostly white authors and poets was an early sign of the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties (remember, these formative experiences were mostly from the forties).



Ginsberg was by far the most musical of the principal Beats. He went on to record and tour with numerous musicians. His recitals in the sixties were musical (if unusual) affairs. Let’s not forget his subjective, long-winded and graphic poetry set the tone for modern pop and rock lyrics.

Getting back to the poetry, Ginsberg rejected closed form poetry with deliberate rhyme and metre. He also steered away from the modernist technique of objective distance. He was pointed firmly toward common speech and thought. Within that seemingly limited framework he was able to use numerous poetic devices, alliteration, repetition, metaphor, juxtaposition and so forth.

These are common devices, especially used in public life. Examples JFK (we choose to go to the moon) or MLK (I have a dream), contemporary speakers, used such techniques to move people. In a way that’s not so different from what Ginsberg tried to do, with his poetry and in his life in general.

The politics.
Ginsberg’s social and political perspective combined with his spiritual pursuit to give his poetry the quality of jeremiad. By this I mean the prophetical warning, the seer burning with desire to bring the truth to the people before it’s too late.

The original Beats called their perspective the “New Vision”, shades of WB Yeats and Oswald Spengler. After his encounter with the spirit of Blake (and before his encounter with LSD) he realised the innate, interconnected one-ness of the universe.

Ginsberg in time was an LSD evangelist. He originally saw drugs as an accompaniment to artistic creation. The artist was required to derange his (or her) senses in order to perceive the rawest of emotions and the harshest of truths: drugs were the surest route.

His position eventually became similar to Timothy Leary. Every American over the age of 14 of sound mind and body was to take one hit of LSD in order to realise the spiritual wilderness of machine America. He worked hard to demystify drugs. He prescribed LSD to all his friends and acquaintances in a similar way to the Merry Pranksters, passing out hits.

Like most of intelligent Hippies and Beats, Ginsberg eventually tried to put his drug experiences in a suitable philosophical and spiritual framework. Ginsberg was drawn to Buddhism, a religion with a totalising perspective. We have talked before about the parallels drawn between the Buddhist and acid experience.

This perspective of cosmic consciousness complimented his original artistic and political urge. It makes sense for Ginsberg to celebrate the jazz soloist over the classical musician, the street punk over the lecturer and so forth. He borrows their language (be it the saxophone riff or the babble and slang) in order to elevate them from obscurity. Each individual is a facet of a beautiful (or potentially beautiful) whole. As the footnote to Howl says: Everything is holy! Everybody is holy! It’s this passage (the footnote) that apparently granted Howl a pass in it’s obscenity trial.

While this meant Ginsberg was politically no Lenin (was Lenin artistically a Ginsberg?), he was well placed to participate in the sixties upsurge. He was driven to bring the truth (a tribune of the oppressed) to a shrouded and repressed society, be it the nature of LSD or the nature of the war in Vietnam.

He was often exceptionally brave. In one particular instance he negotiated with Sonny Barger, the leader of a chapter of the Hell Angels that had attacked an anti-war demonstration, so that further marches could go ahead. He won the respect and support of the chapter through meeting them directly at Barger’s home.

A more general example: Ginsberg often travelled to communist ruled countries. He did so on order to promote cold-war solidarity between peoples. In 1968 he was crowned King of the May Day parade in Prague, for example. The governments often welcomed him as an American radical with connections to native communism (which could have easily marked him out for persecution in his home country). They usually expelled him pretty quickly for being a troublemaker (as did the Czech government a week later for being an “immoral menace”).

Ginsberg frequently harnessed his seemingly boundless energy for his friends benefit. We’ve discussed the encouragement, editing and promotion he gave to Kerouac and Burroughs, gratis. He always carried copies of poems by kindred writers, fighting tirelessly to get them into anthologies.

His help also extended to writing explanations, introductions and defences of other works. When fellow Columbian Norman Podhoretz (later to become an avid neo-conservative commentator) wrote of On The Road:

There is a suppressed cry in those books [of Kerouac]: Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time… The Bohemianism of the 1950s [is] hostile to civilization; it worships primitivism, instinct, energy, blood… This is the revolt of the spiritually underprivileged.

Ginsberg responded to his incisive, deep and thoroughgoing criticism with:

The novel is not an imaginary situation of imaginary truths — it is an expression of what one feels. Podhoretz doesn't write prose, he doesn't know how to write prose, and he isn't interested in the technical problems of prose or poetry. His criticism of Jack's spontaneous bop prosody shows that he can't tell the difference between words as rhythm and words as in diction ... The bit about anti-intellectualism is a piece of vanity, we had the same education, went to the same school, you know there are 'Intellectuals' and there are intellectuals. Podhoretz is just out of touch with twentieth-century literature, he's writing for the eighteenth-century mind. We have a personal literature now – Proust, Wolfe, Falkner, Joyce.

It was this spirit that recognised Bob Dylan as a kindred artist. It was this spirit that moved Ginsberg to get up and dance to I Want To Hold Your Hand in a New York nightclub, shocking his friends.

Footnote to Ginsberg.

Ginsberg, like the rest of the Beats, can appear anachronistic these days, but, then, we are supposed to be at the end of history, everything is supposed to be anachronistic. If it was anything the literary output of the Beat Generation was an attempt to escape from a cul-de-sac, the dead end of literary culture and, at the same time, the dead end of late capitalist society. In terms of artistic form the Beat Generation borrowed and used heavily techniques from the new performing arts, popular film and music. In terms of content they tried to put forward examples of a future, liberated society.

Modern day Norman Pohoretzes (we all know who they are) might sneer at their utopianism (for example Ginsberg’s attempted respiritualisation of art) and brand them as failures. So long as we remember who The Beats were and why they did what they did they will have been nothing but successful.

Labels: Beat Generation, Ginsberg, Literature, Poetry

Beat Primer, part 2: Burroughs posted by Adam Marks

Who monopolised immortality?
Who monopolised cosmic consciousness?
Who monopolised Love Sex and Dream? …
Who took from you what is yours?
Now will they give it back?
Did they ever give anything away for nothing?
Did they ever give any more than they had to give?
Did they not always take back what they gave when possible and it always was?

The purpose of writing on this blog is to expose and arrest the Nova Criminals… We show who they are and what they are doing and what they’ll do if they are not arrested. Minutes to go. Souls rotten from their orgasm drugs, flesh shuddering from their nova ovens, prisoners of the earth to come out. With your help we can occupy The Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and Monopoly.

Burroughs is an idiosyncratic but politically committed writer. He is the most modern of the key Beats. If Kerouac is hipness was then we make Ginsberg into hipness is and Burroughs, in his most utopian moments, hipness to be.

Burroughs was an exceptionally consistent writer, true to who he was. In life and in work he was the perfect declassed bourgeois anarchist, as likely to appear on the left or right wing spectrum. He could hold very advanced views on personal liberty as well as be a vile misogynist. He was bitterly opposed to bureaucracy and coercion but scornful of anything beyond individual organisation. He could work up a stinging satire on militarism on one page and denounce the welfare state on the next. Despite being, arguably, more sophisticated than his contemporaries he was never active in social movements, unlike, say, Allen Ginsberg.

Personal and Political Bio

Despite the dazzling narrative and linguistic devices, Burroughs content is personal. In this respect he is like the other Beats. So what well was he drawing from?

Burroughs was older than the rest of the Beat Generation. He was born in 1914 into a well to do family. The family fortune was built on grandpa Burroughs patented refinement of the adding machine, the early computer. The Burroughs became idle rich. William was due to inherit part of the wealth.

By most accounts, including his early autobiography, Burroughs was a strange child. He describes his earliest memories being coloured by fear of nightmares. He was conscious of his sexuality, a key form of difference, from an early age. He was acutely but passively aware of his alienation. Alienation is felt keenly by wageworkers, but they aren’t the only ones touched by it.

When the bourgeoisie was the middle-class, young, pioneering and revolutionary, it had a life-affirming link with the world. Its members were industrialists and merchants, its advocates lawyers, doctors and journalists. The average bourgeois was seen in the thick of the workplace, anxiously directing the work going, pouring over facts and figures, profit and loss.

With the arrival of modern capitalism, the capitalist retreated from active life. Capital grew and concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Capitalists could no longer marshal their empires. They delegated to a new class of managers, executives, foremen and so on. They became, as Rosa Luxemburg once described, “coupon clippers”.

Young Burroughs lived an essentially pointless life. He went to university, graduated in 1936 with a degree in English literature and a $150 a month trust. At the height of the depression he didn’t need to get a job. He drifted around Europe for a while, with enough money to “buy a good percentage of the inhabitants… male or female”. He came back to America, diddled around with graduate courses and eventually fell into drug use.

The questions, of course, could be asked: why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in any other direction… Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience.

We don’t have to take his word about addiction but his early life does confirm the archetype of the poor little rich boy. In the prison notebooks Antonio Gramsci, at one point, compares typical attitudes of American and Italian wealth. In America there is the legend of the pioneer, the bootstrap capitalist who builds an empire from dust and, importantly dedicates his life to hard work. In Italy, by comparison, it was considered bad form for a wealthy family to keep working.

This led Gramsci to draw conclusions about the quality of bourgeois life and politics. If the bourgeoisie play no active role in public life they will surely lose the knack for rule, the generations that scrapped for power will be replaced by decadent dullards.

There is a degree of truth in that observation. Gramsci wrote his notes in Mussolini’s prison. Mussolini was a fascist, the leader of a lumpen middle class movement of students and ex soldiers, which rose to power, in part, on the incapability of the Italian bourgeoisie to rule.

There is also a degree to which the observation is false. Capitalism is still here. There are many great leaders of politics, industry and commerce left. While the modern bourgeoisie may have Paris Hilton and Pixie Geldof they also have Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch.

Back to Burroughs: his encounter with heroin was the start of his downward spiral (for one thing, it meant he had to take up manual labour). It was also became a focal point for his literature.

On cue, here come the appetisers!



We’ve already had a couple of snippets from his early work. It’s time to introduce some of his books. Meet Junky and Queer.

In many ways they are his only two novels. Two short books about his overriding preoccupations: sex and drugs. You can read them and understand most of what he was driving at.

Their fate as books tells us something about contemporary politics and taste, particularly in publishing. Junky was first published as “Junkie: confessions of an unredeemed drug addict”, by a pulp novel publisher. Pulp novels were (and still are) cheap and sensationalist fare, designed to excite. Yet Junky is flat and matter of fact about its subject and, as the original title suggests, the subject pays no regard to traditional moral positions on narcotics. Junky was paired with another tale, a balancing story about a narcotics agent, in a super-cheap 2 for 1 deal. Queer was originally part of the same manuscript, but the material about homosexuality was hived off and allowed to gather dust until 1985.

Part of the reason for the strange, dead tone was (at least for Burroughs) his ongoing opiate addiction. Burroughs made many interesting extrapolations from drug addiction, the trade, and the nature of narcotics generally. One of the first, and clearest, was his distinction between front and back brain drugs, stimulants and depressants.

Burroughs considered opiates to be depressants. They work on the back of the brain, suppressing the emotional and social centres of thought. This for him was part of the addiction. An addict does not need society, feels no love or hate. Once they get a habit they shift to junk time, their mind and body become regulated by their addiction. While their appetite is sated they can happily sit and stare at their shoe for eight hours.

What remains of brain function is rational and fact orientated. Junkies can absorb large amounts of information uncritically and without emotional response or diversion. A famous addict, John Lennon was an avid reader. Around the time of his heroin addiction he apparently developed the knack of reading piles of newspapers from top to bottom, front to back.

To return to Burroughs, And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks title came from Kerouac and Burroughs sitting in a bar listening to a report on a fire in a zoo. The newscaster was audibly distressed. What Burroughs latched onto was not the emotion in the voice but the striking phrase.

Here you can see the building blocks of his theory of control and domination. But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves.

When asked to define himself in print Burroughs wrote Junky and Queer. What’s so striking about them is they are honest but untroubled accounts of what were then (and to an extent still are) supposed to be painful subjects. The subculture Burroughs found himself in felt like home. He built on this conclusion, later expelling straights of all kinds from his pirate utopia, Interzone.

How are radicals made?

Radicals are made in response to radical situations. People make history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. Why did Burroughs become an individualist anarchist while others of his class and circumstances, say James Joyce or Charles Dickens (criteria: bourgeois fallen on hard times) turn to a different types of politics?

The society we live in creates determining pressures on individuals. People are developed and shaped so they can fulfil certain roles in the perpetuation of that society. People are defined in certain ways (we are common because of X: we are different because of Y). This lays the basis for common perspectives, points of view from which to view society.

Ideology is a collection of ideas based around a common point of view. Politics is a method through which those ideas can be realised. Class is a crucial defining factor in any society. In a democratic capitalist society ideology and politics are openly contested. The contest usually takes place along class lines, through parties, trade unions, chambers of commerce, newspapers and so on.

The vital classes in our society are the capitalists and the wageworkers. There are capitalist ideas and there are working class ideas, based around their perspective on society. Each class has different ways of advancing those ideas, different politics. Current capitalist politics is a competitive synthesis between neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism. Working class politics is less well defined but still divided between those who want to fight for reform within the system and those who see struggle as a process leading beyond into a new society: reform versus revolution.

What about anarchism? Where does that fit in?

Anarchism is unlike other politics. It doesn’t struggle for power but against it in total. There have been many anarchist movements, but they’ve all suffered from the same problem. Social change doesn’t make sense without taking into account power (the history of all hitherto existing societies). Probably the greatest anarchist movement, the CNT union federation in Spain, at its crucial moment couldn’t ignore the question of power. It joined the republican government during the civil war.

It’s sometimes traditional to file anarchism under the label “petty bourgeois”. This tends to be a bit of dustbin for Marxists to chuck anomalous movements and social phenomena. A better description would be to say anarchism is a permanent fringe movement on mainstream politics.

There are two factors that can raise anarchism to prominence. The first is obvious, a dominant, all-pervasive state. The second is a lack of clear opposition politics, especially if the opposition is compromised or absorbed within the system.

Back to Burroughs

Before we go out further on a limb… The above scheme certainly applies to Burroughs political development. He left university and bummed around Europe, politics caught between the rise of Hitler and the decline of the two internationals. The labour movement in America in this time went through the popular front period followed by McCarthyism before it fell into endemic corruption.

The post-war period was characterised by witch-hunts and climb-downs. Two huge military-industrial complexes dominated the world, dominating politics and absorbing life. Given this background and his own personal history the limitations of his politics are understandable. Within this framework, however, he shows great insight.

The main course



1. Never give anything away for nothing.
2. Never give more than you have to give (always catch the buyer hungry and always make him wait)
3. Always take everything back if you possibly can.

These are Burroughs principles of monopoly (take them and apply them to the means of production, what do you have?). They are the premise of The Naked Lunch.

Naked Lunch is what Burroughs is most famous for. More than any other writer (except perhaps James Joyce) a page of Burroughs stands alone and obvious. He took the basic themes of Junky and Queer and began building on them.

He builds through a new method of ‘routines’. The Naked Lunch can be consumed in any order. The chapters do not lead into each other or explain each other. There is a hero (of sorts) but no moral or redeeming message.

Psychology and morality have been banished altogether. Instead there is a much broader picture arising from the general collage. Naked Lunch is in many ways post-literature. It is an attempt to come to terms with new visual media, such as film and television. Parts of the book are written in script form. There are graphic scene changes, fadeouts etc. Parts of the book flip between short, graphic sentences, creating strong images.

Another comparison might be with music. Rock and roll took the very precise terms of the folk/blues lyric (I woke up this morning… My baby done gone now… etc) and broadened it out. Instead of a quick-fire narrative you have a broad appeal to the senses and the emotions. You can’t say what “a-wop-bop-a-loo-bop” literally means, you just know. This is what Naked Lunch tries to do.

What does Naked Lunch mean? It was a phrase coined by Jack Kerouac. It is the moment when you realise exactly what’s on the end of your fork. Put it another way. The French have a phrase, jamais vu, never seen. It means to regard a commonplace object with an unaccountably fresh eye.

In Naked Lunch Burroughs draws our eye toward the carefully hidden underbelly of modern capitalism. The true satire and obscenity is that madmen and perverts don’t just dine at the same table as the rich and powerful, like the pigs and men in Animal Farm, they are the one and the same: be they Doctor Benway, A.J or the County Clerk.

But Naked Lunch is more than just straight satire. It is set in a city called Interzone. It is a completely unaccountable pirate utopia where the people expelled by society as freaks gather and turn the tables (you know something is happening/but you don’t know what it is/do you/Mr Jones?). Interzone is a rich and ambivalent setting, suited to Naked Lunch’s cast of anti-heroes. It is based on the city of Tangier.

The prelude to World War One and climax of the imperial period was an incident in 1911 where Germany tried to assert its dominance over the Gibraltar straights. Part of the settlement was the division of influence in Morocco. Tangier was declared an international zone, officially (mis)administered by several European powers. For over forty years it effectively had no government. After the war it became a popular bohemian location. Many writers and artists (Mohamed Choukri, Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet, Paul Bowles) made their way to Tangier: a little rough and tumble but cheap, laid back and with plenty of freely available keif.

Naked Lunch may never have reached print without help from his friends, Ginsberg, effectively his early agent, and Kerouac, who typed up the manuscript (which had spent months or even years scattered around Burroughs Tangier abode) at the cost of having vivid nightmares. It was published in 1959, in the face of outrage and obscenity trials. Naked Lunch is the literary revenge of the alienated and marginalized. Burroughs once described his writing as purposefully obscene, “shitting out” his Middle American background. The powers that be were right to fear Burroughs writing as it pointed out the ultimate nightmare was essential to the system itself.

Cheese and biscuits

Naked Lunch is a slim book drawn from a fat deposit of pages. The “word hoard” built up in Tangier, became the basis of his sixties output. He developed and sharpened the political thrust of Naked Lunch. Inspired by the artist Bryon Gysin, Burroughs attacks the sentence, very unit of meaning and communication through the cut-up method.

He severs and reassembles sentences, developing motifs (no bueno, c’lom Friday, minutes to go and so on) and even appropriating other authors’ works (TS Eliot’s The Wasteland is used heavily). His abiding metaphor became the word as virus.

Religion, politics or philosophy, human systems of power and control, are designed to win acceptance and reproduce themselves. They are all built on texts. Burroughs assault is deconstruction. Deconstruction has become debased in the hands of postmodernists, a deeply cynical tool (Burroughs wasn’t above cynicism). It’s easy to forget that people once saw it as a radical, emancipatory tool. In a way Burroughs anticipated the socialist/situationist outburst of May 68, the manic desire to raze stale, state philosophies to the ground.

Bureaucracy is built up from text (red tape); ever multiplying and self-justifying text. Into this mix he chucks Inspector Bill Lee of the Nova Police, in hot pursuit of the Nova Mob, a gang of protean criminals bent on hooking populations on the word (word as drug) as a means of control and eventually destruction (word as virus). In the motif of the “nova ovens” Burroughs brilliantly conveys the horror of the century, the nazi holocaust, and the potential final holocaust, nuclear war. The Nova Mob books were written during and after the Cuban missile crisis, adding an extra dimension to the criminal gang bent on destruction.

Inspector Lee’s programme is one of “apomorphine and silence”. Lee’s department is the only non-bureaucratic police force. It does not perpetuate crime. Like apomorphine (which Burroughs credited with helping him beat his addiction) it does its job and departs.

Will Inspector Lee succeed and catch the Nova Mob? In every sense its up to you.

Coffee and mints

I hope I have shown, in a not too round-a-bout way, that Burroughs is a modern and engaging writer.

Labels: Beat Generation, Literature, Naked Lunch, William Burroughs

Beat Primer posted by Adam Marks

Shortly before midnight on September 4th 1957 Jack Kerouac and his partner Joyce Johnson were waiting on a street corner for delivery of the following day’s New York Times. In it was a review of Jack’s second published book On The Road, which hailed its publication as “an historic occasion”.

Kerouac’s life was changed forever by the review. He’d go to sleep that night and wake up famous. Yet, as Johnson noted in her autobiography Minor Characters, “he couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t happier than he was”.

Part of the reason was the six-year gap between the novel’s genesis and its eventual publication, during which it was edited down from its original 120-foot long manuscript. He came to regret compromising his vision for publication.

But Kerouac and the Beats have touched virtually all modern culture. Seriously. Some immediate examples:

Pop music: prime Bob Dylan, stream of consciousness lyrics with long breath lines or David Bowie’s persistent sci-fi fascination and adoption of Beat language (listen to Ziggy Stardust... and think Beat Generation). Literature: JG Ballard, William Gibson, The Liverpool Poets, Irvine Walsh, Charles Bukowski, Douglas Coupland, Hunter S Thompson to name but a few.

Method: cut and paste, recontextualising old material, dead phrases, to create something new. Add nihilism and/or anarchism a la Burroughs, what do you get? Punk. The terms “rap” and “riff”, central to popular culture today, were crucially developed by the Beats. Before the Beat Generation the riff was the obligatory part of a song. After the Beats it meant to improvise and generally build on a foundation. The Beats would meet and “rap” long, improvised, semi-poetic monologues. A fine, recorded example is Jack Kerouac’s narration to the film Pull My Daisy or Lenny Bruce’s stand up (virtually all stand up comedy comes from Bruce).

Random names and references: The Soft Machine, Steely Dan, The Subterraneans, Interzone, The Subliminal Kid, Exterminator (XTRMNTR), Howl of the Unappreciated by Lisa Simpson (the line "I saw the best minds of my generation..." has been recycled so many times), The Dharma Bums, Pretty Girls Make Graves, and, never forget, The BEATles.

I could go on.



Of the principle Beat writers Kerouac had the longest pedigree, claiming to have written his first novel aged eleven. There is still a large portion of unpublished writing from his early days. However, Kerouac didn’t make his breakthrough until he abandoned proper fiction for “spontaneous prose”. He was an excellent typist and would write continuously, sometimes for days on end, allowing his thoughts to flow directly onto the page.

Kerouac would justify this approach in mystical terms. Born into a Catholic family and spent many years exploring the grey-area between Christianity and Buddhism. He saw a link between the beatific (hence “beat”) vision and the Buddhist concept of revelation, or satori. To him writing was holy.

Mysticism was the root of Jack’s later conservatism. He saw self-emancipation as an inner journey (perhaps also a habit borne from living under the military/industrial project). When later generations took up the Beat credo of free expression, giving it a political twist, he reacted and headed rightward.

But was it that the kids were picking up on? Why did J Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, list the three main threats to the American way of life as “communists, eggheads and beatniks”? It was what Kerouac wrote about.

On The Road is about a studious young man called Sal Paradise and his adventures in America’s underground, a self-sustaining network of junkies and jazz fanatics, homosexuals and career criminals… people pushed to the margins.



The hero of the novel is Dean Moriarty, a bisexual car thief. Like many an angelheaded hipster he’s not exactly reliable, but he’s full of life, a zest he transmits to everyone around him. Moriarty was based on Neal Cassady, an icon of two generations of counterculture, who drove Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters in bus around America, handing out free LSD and performing “acid tests”. Cassady was also the inspiration behind One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest hero McMurphy.

Before On The Road polite America only heard about this world through pulp fiction and films like Reefer Madness (Burroughs’ first book, Junky, was first sold as a pulp novel, called “Confessions of an Unredeemed Junkie”). Not only were these people not deluded or depraved, to Kerouac they were modern-day saints. For a country still to go through the shock therapy of the sixties, when McCarthyism was a fresh memory, this was strong stuff.

It’s worth dwelling on McCarthyism and the Cold War in general. There is a wonderful, short passage about an encounter between Sal’s “battered boat” and a military parade headed through Washington DC. “There were B-29s, PT boats, artillery, all kinds of war material that looked murderous in the snowy grass…” The contrast is almost comic. The powerful, sleek hardware of death parading past a tiny group of raggedy, sarcastic youngsters. We see the inhuman, invulnerable machine up against fragile humanity. Luckily, humanity wins out. Last in line of the parade is a pitiful little boat. That must be Harry (Truman’s) boat, says Dean.

The end of World War Two saw the rise of two military superpowers. Despite the hope of 1945, civil society had lapsed under the military/industrial complex. As Jack and his friends were whizzing around America in cars a dying George Orwell was writing 1984, where repressive power was so overwhelming it bent truth to its will (2+2=5). Liberals (in the broadest sense) feared secrecy and repression. But, with repression for some, there was repressive tolerance for others.

The post war boom meant stabilisation, a decline in the bloody purges of the CPSU as well as the paramilitary class war in America. Social movements were quelled. The triumphant momentum of 1945 subsided. There was no longer an urgent need to exile or murder rebels. They could be picked off. Individuals who refused or were unable to find a place within the system, accept the prevailing ideology, could be safely pushed to the margins (with a degree of psychologising and pathologising). In the case of Russia, dissidents were often sectioned as insane.



In America the common caricature of the Beat was the Beatnik (a portmanteau of Beat and Sputnik). The Beatnik was a workshy coward, unfit for the factory, office or army. Nothing could have been more opposed to the average Beat. For example, the three main Beats: both Ginsberg and Kerouac served in numerous manual jobs (Kerouac once listed them in the intro to the Lonesome Traveller collection, he also served in the Merchant Navy during WW2). Although Burroughs had a trust fund he was also, at one point, a farmer.

That’s all good, but why care about On The Road, Kerouac and the Beats today? Although secrecy and surveillance dog our society we also face a contradictory but connected problem. Orwell thought we’d be suppressed by a distortion of truth and lack of information. In his Brave New World, Aldous Huxley thought we’d be swamped with information, desensitised and unable to sort trivia from significance. Revolutions in culture, technology and communication have greatly accelerated our society, bringing Huxley’s vision partway to life. One place where these two ideas meet is in political management, in spin (“it’s a good day to bury bad news”).

Society has never been more ‘democratic’ or ‘meritocratic’. We have never had greater access to information, government or power. However, the connection between people and their rulers is more carefully controlled than ever before.



We read On The Road with a different eye and ear to Kerouac’s contemporaries. On The Road is a defining moment in the birth of modern youth culture, as well as the end of literary culture. We read it for great historical flavour, as part of why we are who we are.

Labels: Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac, Literature, Pop Culture