THE MADMEN OF ALLEN GINSBERG'S "HOWL" AND THEIR BLAKEAN ROOTS

Abstract

This paper considers the cultural reflection of William Blake 's literary madness in the shaping of the identitary image of "Howl"'s Beats, with the word beat interpreted as meaning beatifically mad. I underline the effect of this type of madness upon the hipsters who inspired and became inspirational trough Allen Ginsberg's groundbreaking American poem and the latter's portrayal of madness as both a consequence of social stigma and a source of prophetic self-confidence.

Headnote

Abstract: This paper considers the cultural reflection of William Blake 's literary madness in the shaping of the identitary image of "Howl"'s Beats, with the word beat interpreted as meaning beatifically mad. I underline the effect of this type of madness upon the hipsters who inspired and became inspirational trough Allen Ginsberg's groundbreaking American poem and the latter's portrayal of madness as both a consequence of social stigma and a source of prophetic self-confidence. Keywords: Allen Ginsberg, beatitude, madness, the Beat Generation, William Blake

1. Introduction

In Allen Ginsberg's "Howl", there seems to be a sense of self-confidence driven by the affirmation of madness and the association with people who are mad. This paper tackles the Blakean madness that Beat Generation, as reflected in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl", assumes as one of its main identity markers. I am going to analyze the manner in which this type of madness is reflected in Ginsberg's manifesto-poem, as it affects what he calls the members of his generation on multiple levels, putting them down and making them beat, but also giving them the strength to persevere by fuelling their visionary beatitude.

Carrying on William Blake's legacy and extending it into the context of Cold War America, Allen Ginsberg set himself as one of the leaders of a youthful, rebellious generation that was mad in a struggle to assert its individuality and make a change in the "asphyxiating apathy of the fifties" (Tytell 1976: 10). It all started with Allen Ginsberg meeting Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs at Columbia University and together coming up with "a manifesto called the 'New Vision' (based on W.B. Yeats' The Vision), a radical statement of artistic intent which praised experiment, discounted conventional morality and, at heart, responded to the psychic crisis of a world torn by conflict" (Warner 2013: 24). The three core members of the Beat Generation gradually included more kindred spirits among whom Lucien Carr, Neal Cassady, Herbet Hunkie, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder and John Clellon Holmes, and became a public phenomenon after Ginsberg's electrifying 1955 Six Gallery reading of "Howl" in San Francisco and the poem's subsequent publication by City Lights Books the following year, with an introduction by William Carlos Williams, who famously advised the readers that they would be going through hell while reading the poem. The rise to fame of the Beats was set in motion by the publicity generated by the obscenity trial involving "Howl" - which was won by the publishing house, after Judge Clayton Horn ruled in favor of public speech and determined that the work was "not without socially redeeming importance" (Peters 2011: 207). Upon overcoming censorship, the volume Howl and Other Poems became an international sensation, was eventually translated into more than twenty four languages, became part of school and college curricula worldwide and established itself as a true American literary classic. Public awareness of the Beats was further propelled by Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) and secured by William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959), both of which became referential, canonical works.

2. A Beat Generation of identity

The writers that called themselves The Beat Generation and were what critic Leerom Medovoi (2005: 217) called the "generation of identity", as their mission was to seek an identity that defined them and distinguished them from their predecessors and many of their contemporaries.

Yet there is a specifically modern discourse of generations, closely allied to romanticism, in which a generation is valued, less for preserving a received tradition than for articulating a historically new outlook. Such a modern generation takes a name (lost, beat, silent, X) that is meant to distinguish its cohort's situation or predicament from those of its predecessors. (Medovoi 2005: 215)

Thus, they called themselves "beat" and articulated their identity around this term. Jack Kerouac came up with the name and traced it back to a conversation he had had with John Clellon Homes - "I said 'You know, this is really a beat generation' and he leapt up and said 'That's it, that's right!'" (Kerouac 1959: 41) - and also to a statement made by Herbert Huncke: "When I first saw the hipsters creeping around Times Square in 1944 I didn't like them either. One of them, Huncke of Chicago, came up to me and said 'Man, I'm beat.' I knew right away what he meant somehow" (idem: 41-42). Their 'beatness' was identified with "a combination of both exhaustion and empowerment" (Russell 2002: 11), as they acknowledged their oppression, yet defied it through mad, spiritual protest. The term was also inextricably connected to Blakean madness, since both entailed being broke and marginalized, exhausted with a disenchanted world, but also rejoicing in the freedom, protection and inspiration of beatific madness, as a spiritual, uplifting state. Consequently, "Howl" is analyzed as a poem that describes and simultaneously creates the beat identity though literary representation and acknowledgement that "the canon [...] is the principle underlying the establishment and stabilization of a collective identity" (Assmann 2011: 108). In this case, the identity seems to be formed on the premise of madness: "The anonymous hero of Howl - the 'who' that appears throughout the first section [...] is an archetypal madman" (Raskin 2004: 92). But what generated their madness and why where the members of the generation eager to embrace it?

3. A mad generation of struggling Blakean spiritualists

Like Blake, Ginsberg was intimately familiar with madness and the socially alienating effect it produces. As a child and young adult, he witnessed his mother's paranoia, suicide attempts and extreme mood swings which led her to her being in and out of hospitals and eventually to her admission into Greystone mental institution, where she underwent a multitude of harsh treatments including the lobotomy that caused her death two days later, when her son was only twenty nine years old. Consequently, Ginsberg was very much affected and traumatized by witnessing his mother's insanity and even fostered a "fear that the hallucination [of Blake] was symptomatic of an inheritance of her mental illness? (K. M. Stephenson 50). Naomi Ginsberg would become ?the prototype of the persecuted and martyred visionary? (G. Stephenson 2009: 53) and she would be mentioned twice in ?Howl? and later, five years after her death, in ?Kaddish? (1961) - a poem in which Ginsberg vividly described her physical and mental pain, but also included a series of blessings addressed to the Lord, who guided over madness, death and Naomi Ginsberg among others.

Naomi, Naomi - sweating, bulge-eyed, fat, the dress unbuttoned at one side - hair over brow, her stocking hanging evilly on her legs - screaming for a blood transfusion - one righteous hand upraised - a shoe in it - barefoot in the Pharmacy - [...] In the madhouse Blessed is He! In the house of Death Blessed is He! .[...] Blessed be Thee Naomi in Death! (Ginsberg 2006: 223, 233)

In 1949, the American poet also experienced life as the patient of an insane asylum, where he met Carl Solomon, the man ?Howl? is dedicated to. However, in the case of Ginsberg, his time spent in Rockland was a legal option, taken in order to avoid a prison sentence, as he had helped his friend Herbert Hunkie flee the police in a stolen car. He was deemed mentally unstable, although the doctors would eventually renounce this diagnostic. Moreover, on a personal level, Ginsberg struggled with charges of madness on account of his sexuality and was hesitant to publically reveal and accept his homosexuality, since in the 1950s, this sexual orientation was still illegal and considered to be a form of mental illness that needed to be treated and healed. Realizing he did not fit the rigid heterosexual grid, Ginsberg started ?thinking and writing about madhouses, madmen, and madness? (Raskin 2004: 151): ?Madness! Madness! [...] Oh how often I hear that word in my brain [...] My mind is crazed by homosexuality? (Ginsberg qtd. in Raskin 2004: 152). Initially, he repressed his sexual instincts and underwent psychoanalytical treatment, but ?Howl? gave him the impetus to free his mind from self-imposed shackles and follow Blake?s path in terms of letting go of shame and guilt: ?the Beats enacted their desires, seeking a restoration of innocence by purging guilt and shame. The model was Blakean? (Tytell 1976: 10).

All these accounts of a socially constructed mental illness allowed Ginsberg to see that being ?different? and not subscribing to the presumed homogeneity of American values in an era of conformity oftentimes triggered charges of deviance and insanity. If ?Trapped in Urizen?s world, Los appears mad? (Barr 2006: 748), trapped in a ?reasonable? world, in which World War II and the atomic bomb were marks of sanity, the Beats preferred to deprive themselves of that reason and embrace madness instead, which made them seem ?illogical, emotional, and irrational? (Peters 2011: 209). In a similar manner to ?Blake [who] often lamented that madness was a label invoked by the uninspired to marginalize true inspiration? (Barr 2006: 747), Ginsberg stressed the injustice behind the attribute ?mad?, assigned pejoratively to a group who merely sought to reveal their inherent spiritual capacity for transcendence: ?I am saying that what seems ?mad? in America is our expression of natural ecstasy? (Ginsberg 2001: 209). This is reflected in ?Howl? in lines such as ?who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy? (Ginsberg 1956: 12), with the last word being indicative of both spiritual experience and the drug of the same name that induces it and modifies consciousness inwards. In other words, the Beats often induce their madness by means of drugs. If the alternative of pacifist madness was violent sanity, then the former state was to be preferred. As Ginsberg himself stated: "I really will go mad and that's what I half hope for" (qtd. in Raskin 2004: 83). Admittedly, the American poet-prophet considers 'madness' to be an ambivalent concept.

Madness [...] has always had that connotation, among bohemians, of inspiration or enthusiasm. It also has the connotation of irrationality and ugly physiological symptoms. I'm steering a middle path here (laughter), but at the same time I am being sympathetic to the people who are disoriented. The whole point of the poem is sympathy to the disoriented rather than rejection of them as being outside of the social pale. (Ginsberg 1989: 97)

Ginsberg's half measure sprang from a personal understanding of the fact that assuming madness implied fighting against Moloch's apparently "invincible mad houses" (1956: 22) and suffering "the consequences of the reformatory, the insane asylum, public ridicule, censorship and even prison" (Tytell 1976: 10). It also meant that his transcendence, like in the case of Blake, brought legitimacy to the vision, but alienation to the visionary (Youngquist 1994: 120). Therefore, it is no wonder that the first line of "Howl" - "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked" (9) - initially defines the Beat Generation in terms of insanity and its negative, ostracizing facet that leads its subjects to poverty and delirium. However, this enforced madness is immediately countered by the sacred quality that turns only the best members into "angelheaded hipsters" (9), which alludes to their inherent spirituality. What follows is a series of long, prose-style free-rhymed verses that define the members through the lens of the various enactments of their insanity, with twelve overt references to the notion of madness, which prompts critics to declare that "madness is at the heart of his work, and especially at the heart of Howl" (Raskin 2004: xxiii). As the author himself maintains, all three parts of "Howl" revolve around establishing how and why he is part of a "Mad generation" (23).

Howl is an 'affirmation' of individual experience of God, sex, drugs, absurdity etc. Part I deals sympathetically with individual cases. Part II describes and rejects the Moloch of society, which confounds and suppresses individual experience and forces the individual to consider himself mad if he does not reject his own deepest senses. Part III is an expression of sympathy and identification with C.S. [Carl Solomon] who is in the madhouse - saying that his madness basically is rebellion against Moloch and I am with him, and extending my hand in union. (Ginsberg 2001: 217)

Choosing an alternative lifestyle that did not involve getting married, securing a stable, well-paying job, wishing to advance in one's career and leading average, confortable, yet "unathentic, prepackaged lives" (Huddleston 2012: 1), the Beats refused 'domestication' and remained wild, untamed, howling wolves that willingly took a stand against what they perceived to be a deadening stagnation, normality and lack of individuality on the part of their contemporaries. Thus, they delighted in 'exploding' all of society's taboos (Russell 2002: 7), from taking drugs, drinking and displaying schizophrenic behaviour to getting involved in petty crimes and publically asserting their casual homosexual, or at least homosocial encounters as preferable to committed, traditional heterosexuality: "who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night/ with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls" (Ginsberg, 1956: 10). It should be noted that all of the activities of this "generation of extremes" (Clellon Holmes 2001: 226) subscribe to Blake's (1988: 10) indication that "the road of excess leads to a place of wisdom" and are also permanently accompanied by a vision of eternity - in this case the act of taking drugs represents "the mind's way of healing the wounds of alienation" (Wasserman 1982: 147) and the body's way of metaphorically going through purgatory in order to reach salvation. In an American society that was "split between the normal majority and the deviant minority" (Russell 2002: 9), the activities of the Beats were deemed insane, a role that they assumed, actively sought and turned into an integral part of who they were.

One of the most valuable advantages of being considered mad was that they freed themselves of the weight of a system they believed to be corrupt and unjust as it perpetually punished them with "eyeball kicks/ and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars" (Ginsberg 1956: 11). There are three mental hospitals mentioned in Ginsberg's poem and in Part I, they all appear in the same line and refer not to the mind, but to the soul: "Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid/ halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul" (idem: 19). It is the soul of the generation that these institutions wish to crash, although the spiritual connection of the soul with its Creator should raise above such profane ambitions: "the soul is innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse" (idem: 25).Viewed from this perspective, imprisonment by the government cannot be proof of defeat, but rather of freedom from an already confining society: "they thought inmates embodied the essence of freedom from the system" (Huddleston 2012: 7). It is this realization that makes the "the hospital illuminate[x] itself' (Ginsberg 1956: 26) and that drives the 'mad' Beats to "shriek[x] with delight in police cars" (idem: 13). Following Blake, who was "always calling for freedom, both at the political and spiritual level" (Viscomi qtd. in Galvin 2004), Ginsberg insisted on shaping the image of mad individuals oppressed by capitalism, militarism, industrialism, materialism and consumerism who were unjustly rejected, incarcerated, inflicted unnecessary, harmful treatments and driven to suicide by the 'squares' who considered them mad. The term 'square' is used by Ginsberg to refer to the conformist, spiritually blind members of his society and is roughly equivalent to Blake's 'Blockhead', signifying the faux 'sane'. "Howl" strengthens the association of the Beats with the alienated youth dismissed as crazy: "In it ['Howl'] I am leaping out of a preconceived notion of social 'values' [...] and exposing my true feelings - of sympathy and identification with the rejected, mystical, individual even 'mad'" (Ginsberg 2001: 209).

It is evident that the figure of the "madman" was not only forcibly attached to the Beats, but was also an image they used in their favor so as to assert their countercultural rebellion. Therefore, the following lines of "Howl" depict their ironic demand to be hospitalized and given a lobotomy.

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia.

(Ginsberg 1956: 18)

Through the above-mentioned protest, the hipsters wished to follow Blake's example in "deliberately challenge[ing] the standards of rationality prevalent in [their] culture, which entailed redefining the criteria of 'sanity' and the nature of reason" (Jesse 2013: 17), yet they were not understood, and, instead, they were taken to be literally mad, which unleashed an endless list of 'normalizing' treatments. Still, they persevered and, in a manner similar to Blake's, who "approached everything with a mind unclouded by current opinions" (T.S. Eliot qtd. in Galvin 2004), they made their own sanctity (Ginsberg 2001: 209).

The fact that the lyrical self of the poem profoundly identifies with the mad generation becomes clear in Part III of "Howl". Just as madness is the first word that describes the hipsters in Part I, the concept surfaces again as part of the first line of Part III, establishing its priority in the identity formation of the generation. In addition, a few lines below, the first pronoun "we" is used in reference to Carl Solomon, at the Rockland mental institution, uniting the "they" of the previously described beats, with the "you" of Solomon, "implicitly completing the interpellative production of an 'us': the beat generation" (Medovoi 2005: 248, 253). In this manner, cultural identity takes precedence over individual identity, as a social phenomenon (Assmann 2011: 112) and proves that a group can be held together by the shared consciousness of it (Assmann 2006: 67).

I'm with you in Rockland

where you're madder than I am . . .

I'm with you in Rockland

where you imitate the shade of my mother . .

I'm with you in Rockland

where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter . . .

I'm with you in Rockland

where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets. . .

I'm with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes.

(Ginsberg 1956: 24-26)

All of the three instances are connected with "madness" via the repeated name of the institution, as well as the early reference to Naomi Ginsberg and are linked to the identity of the generation via the pronouns "I", "you" and "we". While the last two references carry a message of love, sexual defiance and gnostic, spiritual illumination, the first one is overtly related to madness as a literary trope that helps express a prophetic dissatisfaction and anger directed at the world and foreshadows a subsequent spiritual rebellion.

The Beat-generated countercultural protest was a response to the post-war economic surge caused by what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" (qtd. in Gair 2008: 12), which asserted the industrial and commercial force of the United States of America as a military superpower ("Beat Generation Attitudes") in the context of the Cold War. Critical of their country's aggressive policies, large-scale use of violence, as well as "mass production and standardization" (Gair 2008: 19), and tired of the censorship and (sexual) repression that they witnessed and underwent as a consequence of what they perceived to be an almost totalitarian, one-sided system, the Beats used "poetry as a weapon of protest" ("The Beat Generation: the Causes") and created a poetics of resistance. However, their "howlings of mad prophecy" (Barr 2006: 748) were not aimed at destruction, and they took "no particular pleasure in tearing down a social fabric that they see as already ruined" (Parkinson 2001: 450). Instead of turning their rebellion into a Marxist revolution, the Beats reached out to the mysticism of William Blake: "the issue is never as simple as social justice; rather, the key words and images are those of time and eternity, madness and vision, heaven and the spirit" (Roszak 1969: 126).

4.The Beats' countercultural Blakean mysticism

The Beats shaped their countercultural protest in a manner that laid emphasis on the interconnection of literature, madness, justice, freedom and spirituality, reviving the cultural memory of William Blake. As Jan Assmann states, memory has a crucial role in creating a group's image of the self:

The constitutive role of memory in this process of self-image making identity formation was identified by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s and is constantly confirmed and expanded by modern psychology, psychotherapy, and brain research. (2006: 67)

It is in memory of William Blake that the Ginsberg-led Beat counterculture acquired a mystical character, teaching people to claim, like their mentor, that the world can be seen through a different lens than that of scientific exploration.

The primary project of counter culture [...] [is] to open ourselves to the visionary imagination [.] to claim like Blake [.] that there are eyes which see the world not as commonplace sight or scientific scrutiny sees it, but see it transformed, made lustrous beyond measure, and in seeing the world so, see it as it really is. (Roszak 1969: 240)

Thus, the English poet-prophet triggered Ginsberg's intense awareness of the inherent holiness of everything. He therefore expressed in his work that "Heaven . . . exists and is everywhere about us" (Ginsberg İ956: 22), as well as "I am living in Eternity./ The ways of this world/ are the ways of Heaven" (Ginsberg 2006: 41), echoing both William Blake's "Everything that lives is holy" (Blake 1988: 20) and Walt Whitman's "I hear and behold God in every object" (2009: 101). In "Kaddish", Ginsberg saw God in everything, whether it was something that was socially acceptable or not, reasonable or not: "Blessed be He in homosexuality! Blessed be He in Paranoia! Blessed be He in the city! Blessed be He in the Book" (2006: 233). He strongly underlined this stance in "Footnote to Howl" by reiterating the word 'holy' fifteen times, always followed by an exclamation mark, in reference to sexual body parts, friends, cities, virtues, emotions, music, and even Moloch's society. Of course, the act of (prophetic) writing and the state of being mad are not omitted and are, as always, linked with transcendence and visions of eternity: "The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!" (27) and "The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!" (27), "Holy my mother in the insane asylum!" (27). The literature that results from typewriting is indeed a social weapon, but it is holy because its message is a mystical one and the economically poor bum and the confined mother and spiritually rich and free through their madness.

In his famous 1952 article "This is the Beat Generation", that brought the denomination into the public sphere, John Clellon Holmes (2001: 224) insists that, as opposed to the 'lost' generation of the First World War, "the wild boys of today are not lost". Instead, they are a group linked by the need to revive faith: "it is [...] the first generation in several centuries for which the act of faith has been an obsessive problem" (idem: 226). They are always on the move and on the road, but their journey is inward, hoping to find belief on the other side (idem: 229). Therefore, at the very core of the Beat Generation lies a spiritually-based identity that "appear[s] as a counter-cultural value to Fordist materialism" (Medovoi 2005: 222). And if they are mad, they are mad to be saved, as Kerouac (1976: 5) put it and mad to be saviors (Verbrugghe 2015: 36), providing an example for the young Americans who did not see themselves reflected in the post-war culture.

Both Blake and Ginsberg refute the material empires they live in, embrace and advocate the arrival of an empire of the spirit instead (Stroe 2006: 8) and seem to be equally committed to becoming spiritual revolutionaries (Portugés 2002: 134). The predicament that the Beats see in society is essentially a spiritual one and it is very difficult to deny that Allen Ginsberg's protest is the result of a spiritual quest, a "an exercise in pop-cult mysticism" (Niemi 2011: 7) that reveals the "beatific" in the beat. As the American poet asserts, "the primary thing was a move towards spiritual liberation [.] [from] the mechanical assault on human nature and all nature culminating in the bomb" ("Online Interviews with Allen Ginsberg"). Therefore, even early critics realized that "to the average Beat their work is gospel" (Lawson 2001: 301). In this sense, "Howl" can be read as the religious sermon of the soul (Kozlovsky 2005: 42) announced at the end of "Sunflower Sutra".

Moreover, Ginsberg's mad hipsters are "crazy shepherds of rebellion" (1956: 28) because they "ate the lamb stew of the imagination" (idem: 15) and are deemed "Holy the vast lamb of the middle class!" (idem: 28). The prophetic image created is one that is derived from William Blake, who in turn drew inspiration from Biblical tradition (Diggory 2000: 105). This symbol, allows Ginsberg to carry Blake's work in the America of his time, as well as stress his (and the hipsters') belonging to the same line of prophecy and the same cultural identity reflected in the mirror of "Howl", which elicits awareness of a collective "we".

The notion of symbol forces us to transcend the frames of body and consciousness and to take into account the whole range of cultural expression, of texts, images, and actions, as carriers or representations of memory and identity expressive of time, selfhood, and belonging. (Assmann 2006: 68)

Just as we are unable to see our face except in a mirror, we are unable to see our inner self other than by reflection, and it is the latter that creates awareness. (Assmann 2011: 116)

Thus, the Christ-like innocence of the Lamb of The Songs of Innocence is projected on "Howl" and Ginsberg highlights the integral part of this figure in his poem, by connecting it to all of the three parts that help establish what defines his generation, what struggles it encounters and what measures it can take to overcome them: the first part is a description of the lamb, the second part represents the lamb's devourer and the third part depicts the lamb in its glory (Ginsberg 1994: 636).

Although "Howl" can be said to borrow mainly from Christian imagery, it is by no means a merely Christian poem. Instead, it affirms the spiritual nature of all the Beats, irrespective of their religious conviction, doubling Jack Kerouac's claim that he wrote for all religions "No, I want to speak for things, for the crucifix I speak out, for the Star of Israel I speak out [...] for sweet Mohamed I speak out, for Buddha I speak out, for Loa-tse and Chuang-tse I speak out, for D.T. Suzuki I speak out [...]. This is Beat" (1959: 41). In order to stress, as Blake had, that all religions are one, Ginsberg makes reference to three different religions in the same line: "who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated". While the word "Heaven" is more closely connected to the New Testament, "El" can refer either to the Hebrew God of the Old Testament, or to the Phoenician God "El" (Verbrugghe 2015: 28) and the Mohammedan angels make clear reference to Islam. In addition, throughout the poem, Buddhism and Hinduism are also connected to the generation: "who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey" (Ginsberg 1956: 11), "who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha" (idem: 18), "who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels" (ibid.). In fact, the Beats were all angels - "Everyman's an angel" (ibid.) - because they were inherently divine, although to them the word often acquired sexual connotations, referring to youthful, spiritually enlightened male lovers who "came to pierce them with a sword" (ibid.).

For the hipsters of "Howl", having spiritual visions was not a rare occurrence and they "drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity" (17). Once again, the pronouns, "I", "you" and "he" mark the "we" of the generation. But if to the uninspired "squares", these visions were a sign of madness, to the beats, they were proof of sane illumination and were mingled with everyday activities, just as they were for William Blake. To emphasize this aspect, Allen Ginsberg chose to employ "a language of the everyday and of Judgment Day - a language of the mundane and the apocalyptic" (Raskin 2004: xxi), juxtaposing ordinary experiences with mystical ones: a regular walk in Kansas would bring about "the cosmos instinctively vibrat[ing] at their feet" (Ginsberg 1956: 12), a game of pingpong would be perceived as "the actual pingpong of the abyss" (idem: 25), they would be "run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality" (16) and immersed "in the total animal soup of time" (19). In "Howl" language itself refutes the hegemony of reason and finds freedom beyond the confines of logic.

5.Conclusion

This paper has revealed the various manners in which to be "beat" meant to be "mad" in a Blakean sense - that is, not clinically ill, but metaphorically, literary, rebelliously, spiritually mad. In a society that labeled all nonconformists insane, in a technological era of science, technology, industrialization and war violence, experiencing visions brought about social alienation, attempts at institutionalization, normalization and domestication. Despite the difficulties they encountered, Allen Ginsberg presented an image of relentless Beat hipsters who were adamant in defying their contemporaries by taking on the role of the 'madman' and building their identity around it, yet redefining it and endowing it with positive, mystical significance. For them, as for Blake, whom they saw as a cult figure (Gair 2008: 33), to be mad entailed to have visions that illuminated the soul, yet were as immediate as everyday reality, to be confident in one's artistic power and individuality and to assume a divine prophetic mission of bringing about divine regeneration.

Sidebar

Andreea Paris-Popa is a Teaching Assistant at the University of Bucharest. She teaches English language, contemporary literary theory, as well as eighteenth and twentieth century British literature to graduate students. She holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Bucharest. Her thesis deals with the cultural memory link between William Blake and Allen Ginsberg, particularly between their mythological characters Urizen and Moloch. Other academic interests include Postmodernist theories and literatures and Reader Response criticism.

E-mail address: [email protected]

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