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The Beat Generation According to Jack Kerouac, who originally named the Beat Generation (in a conversation with John Clellon Holmes in 1948) and who was its principal chronicler and representative, the Beat Generation had already begun to emerge during World War II. Kerouac recalled meeting hipsters in New York City in 1944 and feeling an affinity with them and sensing that some new consciousness was being born. Anyway, the hipsters, whose music was bop, they looked like criminals but they kept talking about the same things I liked, long outlines of personal experience and vision, nightlong confessions full of hope that had become illicit and repressed by war, stirrings, rumblings of a new soul (that same old human soul). And so Hence appeared to us and said "I'm beat" with radiant light shining out of his despairing eyes... a word perhaps brought from some midwest carnival or junk cafeteria. Kerouac added to the word beat his own special understanding of it "as being to mean beatific. " In his novel On the Road (written 1951, published 1957), Kerouac uses the word in this personal sense in characterizing Dean Moriarty: "He was BEAT - the root, the soul of Beatific. " In the same novel, Kerouac also applies the phrase Beat Generation to the group of disaffected young men and women that his protagonist encounters and with whom he identifies: "rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining" (Road, 46).
The life of the Beat Generation can be divided into two distinct periods or phrases: the underground period, from 1944 to 1956; and the public period, from 1956 to 1962. These dates are, of course, approximate, but they reflect something of the changing mood and character of the Beat movement and of the gathering and the dispersal of its energies. Following Kerouac's recollection, we might take 1944 as the point of beginning (though the roots of the phenomenon may be seen to lie even further in the past). Already in the early fifties, certain works of Beat literature, such as Kerouac's The Town and the City (1950), Holmes' Go (1952), and William S. Burroughs' Junkie (1953) began to appear (as well as works that dealt in part with hipsters or Beats, such as Chandler Brossard's Who Walk In Darkness [ 1951 ] and George Mandel's Flee The Angry Strangers [ 1952 ]). But it was not until after the Six Gallery reading in October 1955 and the publication of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems in 1956 that the Beats began to attract public and media attention.
It is more difficult to set a precise date for the end of the Beat era since it was not marked by any particular event, but certainly by 1962 it was very much on the wane, at least in the form in which it had existed up to that time. 1962 is the year in which Kerouac's Big Sur was published, marking an end to his personal quest and perhaps also representing an end to the Beat journey. An alternative terminal date might be the advent of the Vietnam War in 1965. Very shortly thereafter the Beats were to be succeeded by the freaks of the counterculture. The two periods of Beat activity that have been outlined above may be seen to correspond to the two phases inherent in Kerouac's understanding of the word beat as being the root and soul of beatific.
The first stage of this process is the Beat condition: weary, defeated, resigned, despondent, burdened with guilt and crime and sin, or caught in a blind search for understanding. This first stage was characterized by violence, desperation, confusion, and suffering among the early Beat group and their associates. During this period David Kammerer was killed; Lucien Carr, Neal Cassidy, and Gregory Corso were incarcerated; Carl Solomon and Allen Ginsberg were institutionalized; Bill Cinnastra and Joan Burroughs were killed; William Burroughs was addicted to opiates and lived in exile; Michael McClure underwent his dark night of the soul; and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac pursued their separate and solitary wanderings. The second, beatific stage of the movement is marked by the attainment of vision and by the communication of that vision to the human community. During this second period Kerouac and Ginsberg achieved, each in his own manner, their final spiritual orientations; Corso formulated and expressed his aesthetic and humanistic ideals; Burroughs rescued himself from terminal addiction and turned to active resistance against all forms of psychic parasitism; Michael McClure developed his biological mysticism; and Ferlinghetti found his voice and vision.
And other Beat writers emerged from their prisons (Ray Browser), from their private purgatories (Philip Lamantia), or from their underground obscurity (Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Diane Di Prima, Jack Micheline). They lifted their voices and they sang their visions. During this period the major works of the Beat Generation were printed and began to exert their transforming power on American and international art and society. Another vital influence upon the Beat Generation was the phenomenon of hipsterism.
The earliest hipsters seem to have appeared in the jazz clubs and tapas of Harlem in the late 1920 s, though the hipster identity is perhaps as old as jazz itself. The term derives from the slang word hip or hep, meaning knowledge or awareness; thus, the hipster is one who knows or who is aware, an initiate. Hipsters originally consisted of jazz musicians and their fans and followers (black and white) who cultivated a distinctive style of dress, appearance, language, and behavior. Hipsterism represented an outlook, a code, a way of life that, in its attitudes toward sexuality and drugs, was in direct opposition to the predominant puritanical, Anglo-Saxon ethic of the society around it.
Hip consciousness involved a necessary surface aloofness and imperturbability, a refusal to succumb to or to be affected by the agitations of the world, while at the same time it included a responsiveness, an openness to new and unusual experiences and ideas, together with the ability to let go, to lose oneself, to release the energies of the instincts and the spirit. It represented, in short, a sort of stoic hedonism. Hipsterism was centered upon the jazz experience, the ecstatic self-transcendence, the emotional catharsis, the exaltation and affirmation provided by creating or listening to jazz music (in something of the same manner that a tribe is centered upon a shaman or a cult upon a prophet). Hipsterism was contemporaneous with the Lost Generation but only tangential to it.
In contrast to most members of the Lost Generation who were of the middle class or the upper middle class, the hipsters were generally (though not exclusively) drawn from minority and working and the insipidity of contemporary life; the lack of spiritual values; the erosion of human ideals and goals by self-satisfaction, indifference, compliance, and complacency; the unchallenged excesses of the bureaucracy, the military, the police, and the intelligence communities; the technology mania; and the insidious hypnotic powers of television and other mass media. In the tradition of dadaism and surrealism, the Beat Generation cultivated extreme forms of artistic expression, employed radically experimental techniques, and broke the fetters of established taste, literary decorum, and legal censorship. Their ebullience and energy, high-spirits and wit, boisterousness and rambunctiousness, panache and zany humor are also reminiscent of the dadaists and surrealists; as is, too, their penchant for public provocation and outrage, for scandalous antics and controversy. And, of course, in the manner of dadaism and surrealism, the Beat Generation vehemently rejected traditional and conventional modes of thought and expression and sought instead to discover and explore, to reconceive and revalue, to invent new forms, and to create new visions.
The Beat Generation also has significant affinities with the transcendentalists, with Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, as well as a kinship with certain poets of the English romantic movement, most notably William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Finally, though, their direct and ultimate progenitor is Shem the Penman, the archetypal rebel writer of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The Beats are true descendants of Shem: the authentic expressions of the insurgent imagination and the embodiments of the prototypical refractory and outcast artist-hero who appears in every age and culture in opposition to the established agencies of materialism and convention. Like Shem the Penman, the Beats were outlawed, scorned, reviled, exiled, and driven to writing on their own bodies with an ink made of their excrement's, recording a "broken heaven talk. " Influences and ancestors notwithstanding, the Beat Generation must be acknowledged as a distinct, original, and independent phenomenon -a native and intuitive response to the particular artistic, social, and spiritual climate of mid century America. The character of the Beat Generation was a product of the conjunction of several maverick minds, and its spirit was a union of the individual torment and ferment of its founding figures.
The Beats were never (nor ever pretended or aspired to be) a homogenous or a consistent movement. They issued no manifestos, subscribed to no basic tenets, formulated no dogma, embraced no common theory, doctrine, or creed. Rather, their coherence was of another sort, one founded upon mutual sympathy and inspiration, upon affinity and a sense of kinship in personal and artistic matters. The Beat Generation may most accurately be characterized by a set of attitudes and values expressed with varying emphases and perspectives by the various writers identified with the movement. If there may be said to be an essential Beat ethos or common denominator of their writings, it would seem to be their concern with the issues of identity and vision -- that is, with the knowledge of the true self and with the discovery or recovery of a true mode of perception. Among the individual quests of the Beat writers to achieve identity and vision, there is a degree of overlap and intersection.
And if the Beats are considered as a group, it is interesting to note the ways in which their writings supplement and complement each other. In their writings the Beats share a sense that the crisis of Western civilization -- as evinced by the appalling slaughter and devastation of the world wars, by the breakdown of values, the decay of ideals, and by the spiritual sterility of the modern world -- is rooted in our culture's misguided faith in rationality and materialism, in the analytical faculties of the mind, in the narrow dogmatism of logical positivism and scientism, and in our identification with the conscious self, the ego. To redeem and revitalize the life of our culture and our individual lives, the Beats propose the cultivation of the energies of the body and the instincts, of the unconscious and the spirit. Accordingly, the literature of the Beats characteristically records a descent into the darkness and the depths of the psyche - a confrontation with the baleful and the benevolent forces of these deeper strata; a struggle, sometimes prolonged or recurrent; and then ultimately, a renewal of the self and an ascending impulse toward equilibrium or transcendence. This central and essential process of Beat consciousness - the downward quest for identity and vision, the beat-beatific movement, the journey through night to daybreak - may be seen to represent the foundation for certain common traits of the literature of the Beat Generation and for what may be termed the Beat aesthetic. The common traits to which we can refer include the treatment of the themes of criminality, obscenity, and madness in Beat writing.
These qualities are aspects of the shadow or id, expressions of the dark underside of the psyche - the realm of appetite and chaos; the region of obscure, fecundating agencies and influences; the refuge of forbidden desires and repressed impulses; the abode of powers at once destructive and creative; the dominion of "the dark forces which we must obey before we can receive the light of illumination. " For the Beats, the journey inward to the self inevitably means a passage through the "heart of darkness"; for it is there, strange to say, that the numinous may be discovered. Criminality, obscenity, madness, the breaking of boundaries, and the violation of taboos on the part of the Beats are not simply acts of rebellion against rationality and order; rather, these behaviors represent efforts to confront the destructiveness within and to transform it into creative energy. Like Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Graham Greene, the Beats apprehend the paradoxical affinity of the sinner and the saint; and like William Blake, they would effect a "marriage of heaven and hell" to reestablish a dialectic between the unconscious and the super conscious that we might evolve toward a true wholeness. The treatment of these themes by Beat writers has been misconstrued by some critics as an endorsement or justification or glorification of violence and nihilism, which it most patently is not. What the Beats have given us in their writings is the record of a condition of spirit, or a state of soul that is the image of our common disease. And, more importantly, their individual, self-discovered remedies are most pertinent to the cure of our malady of mind and spirit. (Thomas Mann once wrote that "certain attainments of the soul and intellect are impossible without disease, without insanity, without spiritual crime, and the great invalids are crucified victims, sacrificed to humanity and its advancement, to the broadening of its feeling and knowledge -- in short, to its more sublime health. ") Criminality, obscenity, and madness were, for the Beats, a necessary phase of personal, artistic, and spiritual development; and ultimately, these represented a mode of opposing the organized and collective criminality, the obscenity and madness of war, and the other social forms of human destructiveness.
The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centred around that city and which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetic avant-garde. The Beats liked California for its sun, beaches, liberal attitudes and closeness to Mexico, where most drugs came from. In North Beach the transcendent theories characteristic of beat literature could be put into practice. Love was set free from conventional norms and was often practiced in the same-sex and interracial relationships for which the Beats were so famous.
San Francisco also had a constantly changing population of sailor. As Newitz writes in her article: Sexual historian Gayle Rubin traces the South of Market queer leather boy culture back to these groups of young men, far from the restraints of family and home, who created an underground sexual community that lasted for decades. Moreover, post-war California was a state of upper-middle class people, which spear money and more relaxed lifestyle. Bibliography: Holmes J. C. : Go, New York: Scribner's, 1952 Kerouac, J: The Origins of the Beat Generation, Playboy, June 1969 Mann, T. : Introduction to The Short Novels of Dostoyevsky (New York: Dial, 1945) Newitz, A: Sex and Romance, San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, 2006 web Wikipedia: web
Free research essays on topics related to: upper middle class, jack kerouac, william blake, allen ginsberg, beat generation
Research essay sample on Upper Middle Class Beat Generation
