michaelpotts

The field of English is in shambles, and the Modern Language Association is a gaggle of voices for various interest groups based on race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Dissertations in English appeal to Derrida and Foucault long after they became passe in France. A presentation on any topic by any writer at a conference sponsored by a college or university English Department that does not mention the four “code words” listed above will be considered quaint and out of date by most of the audience. Much of the radicalism in academia stems from English Departments (although other departments can be guilty as well–philosophy, with its analytic bent, may be narrow in methodology, but at least it eschews the relativism of many people who call themselves “postmodern”). Although many English professors are old-fashioned social democrats who are liberals, not radicals, the radicals have a missionary-like zeal in pushing their agenda. This agenda is anti-Western Culture, anti-traditional Christianity (and Muslims take note–if Christianity were to falter in the West, Islam would be the next target of the radicals, who are engaged in a “divide and conquer” strategy now). When radicals take over, ideological diversity dies, and the departments become as one-sided, closed-minded, Puritanical, and bigoted as religious Fundamentalists.

I long for the days of John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and T. S. Eliot. They may have failed to give psychological and sociological factors sufficient treatment in literary criticism, but their focus on a close reading of the text is surely a better approach than seeking the alleged hidden motivations of the authors. From the New Critics I have read, I see no evidence that they denied the existence of polysemy, but they limited their discussion of polysemy to what was suggested by the text and various historical and mythological allusions found in the text. Postmodern criticisms of the New Critics seemed to confuse the New Critics with European Structuralists–Structuralism was more narrow in approach than the New Criticism, must more Platonic than Aristotelian in approach, much more abstract than concrete. Structuralism deserved the scathing critique of Derrida. The New Criticism was a horse of a different color.

With the emphasis on “newness” in academia, the decline in the New Criticism had to be replaced with something, and that something included Marxist, feminist, womanist, African-American, and queer approaches to literature. Some approaches (such as Marxism) were not necessarily subjective, but the other approaches I listed are largely subjective. Since the advocates of radical theories consider themselves social reformers, including reformers of the academy, they push their agenda like a Fundamentalist preacher pushes being saved from hell fire. The resulting cultural rot spreads to other humanities departments, to the extent that it is difficult to blame students who do not want to major or minor in the humanities. Frankly, I cannot blame them–the New Criticism probably offered more that is relevant to their lives–Shakespeare’s plays concern the universal human experience of revenge, pain, suffering, and happiness. The New Critics could at least point out where the text does relate to students’ lives. Poststructuralists focus so much on polysemy and a political reading of the text that students walk away in disgust. They should be disgusted. Let’s bring out some “New New Critics” to restore intellectual coherence and sanity to English Departments.

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) deserves a place in the literary canon. As a traditionalist on the role of literature in human culture, I presuppose that one important purpose of literature is to reveal reality in a unique way. A good story can force an individual to reconsider his or her world-view and be more open to others.

Historically Russia has been an enigma. Situated mostly in Asia, it desires to be European. Before the October Revolution of 1917 Russia was one of the most openly religious nations in Europe; after the revolution atheism became the official viewpoint of the new Soviet state. Solzhenitsyn shares the ambiguity and mystery of Russia. He changed from a person firmly committed to the Soviet State to a traditionalist defender of the old monarchy. He hated the tyranny of Soviet Communism but overlooked the tyranny of the czars. He was a staunch defender of human dignity, yet his attitude toward Jews was ambiguous. He approved of a Western emphasis on human rights, yet he hated what he considered to be the libertine excesses of American culture.

Sometimes it takes a paradoxical figure to awaken a reader from his or her “dogmatic slumber,” and in such stories as “Matryona’s House” Solzhenitsyn shows reality in a different light than the optimistic mainstream of much post-Enlightenment Western culture. Although World War I destroyed the illusion of a perfect world through science in Europe, such an attitude remains in the United States, even after the horrors of World War II. And after World War II, Western Europeans wished to live la dolce vita and eschewed the prospect of suffering. This process led to rapid secularization in formerly religious countries such as The Netherlands, which eventually accepted physician assisted suicide and euthanasia as a way for the terminally ill to avoid suffering.

Solzhenitsyn’s works challenge the idea, common to both Western Europe and to the United States and Canada, that suffering and death are the ultimate evils. His works are a prophetic call to his own nation to be willing to find redemption through suffering, but are also an invitation to other nations and to each individual to find redemption in the same way. He calls readers to return to an older way of viewing reality that was once common in both Roman Catholic Western Europe and to Eastern Orthodox Eastern Europe and Russia: that by suffering, a person is sharing in the sufferings of Christ. Such a view is utterly foreign to secular Western Europe and to the optimistic and positive-thinking United States. It seems to hark back to an earlier, less enlightened age. But an examination of “Martyona’s House” reveals a view of the positive value of suffering that is so powerfully presented that it can challenge the Western aversion to suffering and death as the worst of evils.

Martyona is a woman who gives her entire self to the good of others. She has been expelled from working on a collective farm due to illness. But the residents take advantage of her, even though she is destitute and not well. They ask her to run errands and to do chores for them. She may complain briefly, but afterward goes about her task of giving her time and effort to other people, even though they are only using her. She suffers from illness and physical pain, yet still gives to others. She even helps her selfish relatives who remove a room of her house to help construct another one. But this choice leads to her death when she is killed by a train. By Western post-Enlightenment standards, her life seems a waste.

But Solzhenitsyn reverses expectations—it is clear that the narrator, who serves as a doppelganger for Solzhenitsyn himself, is moved by Martyona and considers her suffering to be redemptive. This includes her own redemption (and presumably her eternal salvation) but also sets an example to the Russian people under the tyrannical Soviet Union. They are to suffer, to redeem Russia from the mistake of the October Revolution of 1917, to save Russia from her sin of rejecting God. Only through saints such as Martyona and people who follow her example can Russia be saved.

Such a view of suffering strains modern sensibilities which would consider Martyona to be a “sucker” who did not have the courage to stand up to the people making her suffer and to tell them to stay away since she was sick and not able to fulfill their demands. How, then, can the Western reader make sense of the narrative? Perhaps the reader can consider that oftentimes the most memorable events in life are those that involve suffering. Suffering may be essential for what philosopher John Hick, quoting John Keats, calls “soul making,” a development of character that can only take place through suffering. Or the Western Christian may consider the sufferings of Christ which are considered, even by Western Christian theology, to be redemptive. “Suffering is good” seems oxymoronic, or at least paradoxical, but the mind tries to make sense of the seeming contradiction—and through that process, similar to the processing of a metaphor, the reader can gain insight into the role of suffering in human life that could not be gained in any other way than in reading “Matryona’s House.” If someone reads Solzhenitsyn’s other works such as Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago, one sees the image of suffering in Solzhenitsyn himself (in the former) and the suffering of the Soviet Union under Stalin’s brutality (in the latter). Suffering could be the only way that the Russian people could understand the evil of Communism and rethink their own world view. In the Western world in which people seek happiness through money and possessions, a happiness that eludes them, perhaps the only way they can learn better is through suffering. Even the idea of a martyr to a higher cause is not absent from Western Culture; Solzhenitsyn places that image into an ordinary life in and ordinary, though unjust, world, and thereby reinterprets the idea of the martyr in a way that makes the martyr’s sacrifice understandable to contemporary readers.

Solzhenitsyn’s works give the reader new insight into reality and into human life that cannot be gained from history or through science—and they do this exceptionally well. His works clearly belong in the canon of great literature.

The first point to notice about Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Matryona’s Home” is the name “Matryona.” The similarity to the word “martyr” is obvious. Matryrdom is the ultimate end of the road of self-sacrifice. This is a Christian notion that fits into Solzhenitsyn’s Russian Orthodox faith. A similar notion is found in Dostoevsky, who focuses on the suffering of Russia as a means to its redemption.

Matryona works in an inefficient and exploitative collective farm system, from which work she has been excluded due to illness. Other members of the collective farm take advantage of her, asking her to run errands and perform jobs that drain her remaining energy. Yet she complains, and then very little, during a short period of time after she is asked to perform a task. Then she goes over and above the call of duty without any further complaint. When her in-laws tear down her upper floor she bears the suffering with dignity. Thus she suffers willingly, as Russia must suffer. In the Orthodox faith, suffering is ultimately redeemed eschatologically. The fundamental problem of Eastern Orthodox Christianity is death and the suffering in this life (as opposed to the Western Christian emphasis on sin). The problem is ultimately solved via the general resurrection at the end of time, with the suffering righteous receiving an eternal reward in Heaven. Solzhenitsyn, as an Orthodox Christian, accepts this world view, but he also believes that the only hope for Russia to survive in this life (given its suffering under the Communists of the Soviet Union at the time he was writing) was to suffer. Matryona’s suffering is part of the general suffering of Russia as a whole, and she is the holy martyr, a saint who can set the example of how the Russian people should bear their suffering under an oppressive realm.

Denis Johnson’s short story, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” concerns a man who witnesses a deadly car crash while high on amphetamines, hashish, and alcohol that three people he met on the road gave to him. At first, he tries to help the victims, not fully knowing the difference between appearance and reality (he claims to have known in advance that the accident would happen). He carries a baby from the accident scene and watches a dying man with blood escaping his mouth with each breath, figuring that he could not help the injured man. In looking upon the man, the narrator says, “He wouldn’t be taking many more [breaths], and therefore I looked down with great pity of a person’s life on earth. I don’t mean that we end up dead, that’s not the pity. I mean he couldn’t tell me whether he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.” In a situation in which a man faces the ultimate reality of his own extinction, Johnson is so dazed by drugs he does not know what reality is.

The narrator transforms from a helper to someone looking at the accident scene, someone who had an identity as helper but loses that identity because he is just one face in the crowd. After being taken to the hospital and hearing that the injured man is dead, he notices the man’s wife, who had not yet been told of her husband’s death. Her not knowing, ironically, is “what gave her such great power over us.” I confess I do not understand that statement. How does her ignorance of her loved one’s death translate into power over those who know—how does ignorance grant a person power?

When the woman is taken into a room to see her dead husband, “She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it. I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.” Why would the narrator want to have the feeling associated with a cry of grief? Is it because he feels dead, taking drugs to deaden feelings that he desires to have once more. Even a negative feeling may be better than no feeling at all. Yet the box of cotton screams “Help us, oh God, it hurts” as the narrator hears a voice referring to himself. How can he desire to have the woman’s pain and ask for help for his own hurt? This seems self-contradictory, but self-contradiction can make sense when a person is high enough.

A nurse gives him a shot of “vitamins,” which were clearly not vitamins, and the narrator dreams about rain, a forest on a hill, a creek rushing over rocks. Then there is the final sentence: “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.” This could refer to the people in the accident, but I believe that it refers primarily to the reader of the story. The story is not a catharsis, not a balm to calm a person before going to bed at night, not a story with an implicit moral or theme. And since we all may be in a dream, how can the narrator, in the midst of his drug-created dream, help anyone, including the person reading his story?

I understand the image about the dead man’s wife having power over the others since she was yet to react to the news of her husband’s death. The narrator and the doctor already know and have lost the power to react; their course has already been set by circumstances. The burden of consciousness of her husband’s death will crush the wife, just as the burden of our knowledge of our own future death can impair us. The narrator hides his burden of consciousness with drugs which only work to mask the problem rather than to help the narrator deal with it.

Johnson is attacking any moral or didactic purpose to literature—but what, then, is its purpose? Or does it have a purpose? Literature must meet some need of humankind; otherwise so many people would not have enjoyed reading it for thousands of years, going back to the ancient epics that were first recited, then put to paper. It is true that obviously moralistic or didactic literature is not good literature: “show, don’t tell.” I am not convinced that there is no moral or didactic purpose, at least by implication, of literature since, by the very nature of writing, a writer’s product will reflect his or her world view.

Snowbanks North of the House
by Robert Bly

[from http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p109g/bly.snowbanks.html ]

Those great sweeps of snow that stop suddenly six
feet from the house ...
Thoughts that go so far.
The boy gets out of high school and reads no more
books;
the son stops calling home.
The mother puts down her rolling pin and makes no
more bread.
And the wife looks at her husband one night at a
party, and loves him no more.
The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls
leaving the church.
It will not come closer
the one inside moves back, and the hands touch
nothing, and are safe.

The father grieves for his son, and will not leave the
room where the coffin stands.
He turns away from his wife, and she sleeps alone.

And the sea lifts and falls all night, the moon goes on
through the unattached heavens alone.

The toe of the shoe pivots
in the dust ...
And the man in the black coat turns, and goes back
down the hill.
No one knows why he came, or why he turned away,
and did not climb the hill.
[Bly, Robert. 1981. The Man in the Black Coat Turns.]

Robert Bly’s poem, “Snowbanks North of the House” is a meditation on the trials of human relationships as well as on the ultimate end of all relationship, death. Relationships only go so far, just as snow banks only reach to within six feet of the house and no further. A boy’s relationship with books ends after high school; “the son stops calling home,” the mother no longer prepares meals, a wife realizes that she no longer loves her husband, (communion) wine spoils, “the minister falls leaving the church”—all point to loss of precious things. I wonder if “leaving the church” has a double meaning—does the minister also literally leave the church and reject religion?

In the second stanza, a father grieves for his dead son while ignoring his unloved (and presumably unloving) wife—love has died long ago in the marriage. The universe goes on and does not give a damn, and we are but feet buried in the dust of death. Death, “the man in the black coat” leaves, but “No one knows why he came, or why he turned away, and did not climb the hill.” Death’s arrival and departure are arbitrary, without meaning, as are all losses in an indifferent universe.

The image of the communion wine spoiling was poignant. My late archbishop used to say that communion wine could not transmit disease because it is the body and blood of Christ. But what if it did? What if Bly is right and the communion wine in a Catholic Church does spoil? No Aristotelian theory of substance and accidents could explain how the blood of Christ, the God-man, spoils. If even sacred things spoil, what becomes of everything else? The universe reveals no evidence of transcendence, but only “change and decay.” All human hopes and dreams, no matter how simple, in the end fail since, as Qoheleth (the author of Ecclesiastes in the Bible) says, “Time and chance happen to them all.”

Eating Alone
by Li-Young Lee

(from http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/eating-alone/)

I've pulled the last of the year's young onions.
The garden is bare now. The ground is cold,
brown and old. What is left of the day flames
in the maples at the corner of my
eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes.
By the cellar door, I wash the onions,
then drink from the icy metal spigot.

Once, years back, I walked beside my father
among the windfall pears. I can't recall
our words. We may have strolled in silence. But
I still see him bend that way-left hand braced
on knee, creaky-to lift and hold to my
eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet
spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.

It was my father I saw this morning
waving to me from the trees. I almost
called to him, until I came close enough
to see the shovel, leaning where I had
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.

White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas
fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.
What more could I, a young man, want.


Li-Young Lee’s “Eating Alone” is an elegy to the poet’s father. The poet begins, from the first person point-of-view, to describe the end of the harvest of young onions. The rural scene, beautifully described, has a hint of mournfulness (the ground as “cold, brown, and old”), which is expressed in more detail in the remaining stanzas.

In the second stanza the poet remembers waling with his father “among the windfall pears.” He remembers that it may have been a silent walk. His father bends down on one creaky knee (thus, I assume that the poet’s father was elderly), and holds a rotten pear with a spinning hornet inside. Perhaps the rotten pear symbolizes decay and death, and the hornet the hostile hum of time as it tears away all things, including life. Perhaps it reminds one of the insects who feast on the remains of the dead. The sharply contrasting images of “slow” and “juice” (when is “juice” “slow”) could symbolize the slow march of life as time and chance drink it away.

The third stanza makes it clear that the poet is talking about his father’s death. The poet sees his late father wave to him in the trees, but the apparition ends when the poet finds his shovel in the “flickering, deep green shade.” The poem ends with an image of green peas, rice, and shrimp prepared for dinner—along with the poet’s loneliness which is understood in terms of acceptance of death and a new beginning rather than only mournfulness.

When I first read “Eating Alone,” I remembered walking barefoot through cold, hard, clay soil at my grandparent’s place. The chill reminded me that the harvest was at an end. Then I’d put on my shoes and walk through brown grass and briars in the watermelon patch, desperately seeking one hidden melon—when one did not appear, the garden became a symbol of death and decay. The first stanza of Lee’s poem evokes similar feelings—the images were so real as I read them I could feel them in a tactile way.

I did not note initially the obvious imagery of the hornet eating alone and the poet eating alone. I thought the suggestion in class of the poet continuing to drink his father’s wisdom was an interesting one. The metaphorical associations in Lee’s images are rich, evoking multiple and sometimes contradictory (or at least mixed) meanings.

One of the few contemporary novels that has had a major effect on culture and on language is Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Not only has the name “Lolita” become a symbol of the “nymphet,” a young girl who is sexually “street wise” for her age (another Nabokov coinage that has slipped into the English language), no parents, as Nabokov, would today name a daughter “Lolita.” The story contains interesting contrasts: Humbert Humbert’s civilized European mannerisms contrast with his pedophilia, and his description of his affair with Lolita is filled with French quotations and erudite language that serves to hide or soften his actual crimes. One of the strangest and most disturbing aspects of the book is that the reader begins to see reality in Humbert’s way, even to the point of rooting for him despite his twisted sexual urges and actions. This reminds me of Stanley Fish’s interpretation of Milton’s Satan, who causes people to re-experience the Fall of Adam and Eve by admiring Satan and rooting for him as the real hero.

The story reads like one of Poe’s confession stories, in which a mad character confesses to a murder, such as “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe’s characters also used erudite language to hide their madness even though the reader can immediately sense the character’s underlying insanity. There are a number of references to Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee,” in Humbert’s first child-love, Annabel Leigh and in the term “The Kingdom by the Sea.” Scholars speculate that Poe’s Annabel Lee may refer to his cousin and child-bride, Virginia Clemm, whom he married in 1835 when she was thirteen years old and who died of tuberculosis in 1847. The preface of Nabokov’s novel states that Lolita also dies young while giving birth to a stillborn baby. Poe’s characters were often insane; Humbert has a severe mental aberration in his pedophilia. Poe marrying his cousin may have constituted incest (at least in some jurisdictions); Humbert is guilty of incest with his stepdaughter. Both Humbert and Poe had romantic relationships with children, though some scholars doubt that Poe’s marriage was ever consummated, or at least was not consummated early in his marriage. Humbert had no problem consummating his relationship with Lolita—multiple times.

Lolita comes across as a wisecracking, street smart, northeastern girl who is sexually sophisticated beyond her years. Not only does she sense Humbert’s sexual attraction, she initiates the first act of sex between herself and Humbert. Later, she bribes him for sexual favors and continues her game until she is taken away by Claire Quilty (the similarity of his last name to “guilty” is surely not coincidental). Humbert’s sexual behavior moderates during that time, and he gets married again. Eventually, however, Humbert hunts down and murders Quilty in revenge, for which reason he is in prison hoping that he will avoid execution. The moral monster accuses Quilty of sodomizing Lolita, an ironic and hypocritical twist.

Humbert truly is a self-centered evil person, as Nabokov himself recognized. He hopes for the death of his second wife, and thanks fate when she is run over while running in grief and anger over his desires for Delores Haze (Lolita). The only thing that keeps him from being a sociopath or psychopath are his pangs of guilt over child rape. He also gives Delores, who gets married, money even though she refuses to return to him. These forays into conscience serve to soften the reader’s hostility toward Humbert.

As for the controversy over Lolita, I do not consider it to be an erotic or pornographic work. What sex there is is described sparingly using the most restrained and general terms. This spares the reader from certain aesthetically displeasing mental images, but serves to show that Nabokov is more interested in characterization than in writing a lewd novel.

One of the most interesting aspects of Lolita is the unreliable narrator. I gained so much sympathy for Humbert that I could not see him for the scoundrel and liar he is. I also have gained a new appreciation of the level of Humbert’s guilt. Not only is he responsible for the death of his wife, Lolita’s mother, but ultimately of Lolita herself. She marries someone who is not necessarily the best catch, someone who lacks intelligence, and moves to Alaska, where she dies giving birth to a stillborn baby far from adequate medical care. Since the causal chain to Lolita’s death goes back to Humbert’s holding her back from school and from interactions with people of her own age, in a sense he murders Lolita. His hiding her mother’s fate from her and then coldly telling her, along with his lying in his claim to be her biological father makes Humbert a thoroughly evil man. But evil comes in levels; in his own twisted way Humbert loved Lolita. This is not the case with Claire Quilty, who is a psychopath who wanted to use Lolita in his pornographic films. Humbert, at least, has a conscience, and executes Claire Quilty for his crime against Humbert’s beloved—although Quilty may have been a stand-in for Humbert’s self, for his own guilt, so that in a sense he is murdering both himself and his guilt in one stroke.

Another interesting aspect of the novel is the dialectal movement back and forth between Humbert’s doing a good deed and his doing something evil that confuses the reader who is caught between condemnation and sympathy. Still, my overall reaction to Humbert was more sympathy than condemnation, which is a good part of the discomfort the novel brings.

Finally, there are the various meanings of Humbert being an “outsider.” He was (1) an intellectual, (2) a pedophile, (3) a European on American soil, and (D) permanently displaced without a home. The outsider, though often condemned in real life, becomes the hero of American novels and of American myth. A common Western movie theme is the outsider riding into town to save the day. I think of Clint Eastwood’s movie Pale Rider. Han Solo in Star Wars, a smuggler and criminal who in the end defeats the Empire and marries a princess is another example. So Humbert becomes the outsider antihero who overcomes obstacles to capture and keep his beloved. This is another disconcerting aspect of the novel—not only can the reader gain sympathy for Humbert; the reader can consider him to be a hero.

[The story is found online at http://www.usfca.edu/jco/whereareyougoing/ ]

Joyce Carol Oates’ story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is justly famous—the ambiguities in the story leave the reader food for hours of thought. It is a story primarily about identity—one’s identity as a child, one’s identity changing as one moves to adulthood, and one’s identity as good and evil. In a way, it is a recapitulation of the myth of the Fall in Genesis 3—but is it a “fall down,” a “fall up,” or both? Connie is not really a bad girl as teenagers go; she is merely typical for her age, looking down on her mother and sister, vain about her looks, and self-absorbed. The antagonist, Arnold Friend (perhaps meaning “are no friend”) is clearly evil, but in asking her to engage in an adult act (sexual intercourse), he represents the “leaving of father and mother” and cleaving to someone else in a sexual sense. There is ambiguity throughout the story—is Connie bad, good, or both? Is Arnold Friend totally evil or does he represent a necessary passage into a world in which the innocence of childhood is lost and the difficult and dangerous transition to one’s identity as a sexual being begins? Is Connie going to be killed by Arnold? The story is based on a series of murders by a manipulative young man very much like Arnold Friend. Or is Connie kidnapped and trapped in a new world which she does not understand, but which will be thrown at her soon? To me, Arnold is the snake, manipulative and evil, calling Connie out into a world of sexuality. The story makes me uncomfortable, for it seems like a Gnostic story that looks down upon sexuality as not only adult, but also evil—or at the best, ambiguous. Connie comes across better in the end by going with Arnold to protect her family from being hurt or killed—thus she grows beyond her self-centeredness—but at what cost to herself?

The distant father also plays an important role in the story—this is clearer if one watches the movie “Smooth Talk,” which is based on the story. Where is his acceptance of his daughter in a painful transition period of her life? At the very least, he shares guilt with the mother whose jealousy and favoritism blind her to Connie’s struggles with identity and growth into adulthood.

The movie presented one possible outcome to Connie’s encounter with Arnold Friend—“consensual” sex and a return to her family—although it seems more likely that Arnold would kill her, at the very least to save his own skin. “Smooth Talk” brought out Connie’s vulnerability more clearly than the story—despite wanting to grow to adulthood, in some ways she is still a child. Her growth takes place when she looks beyond herself and sacrifices herself for her parents and for her sister. In that respect, the story contains a Christian motif.

[The poem is found online at http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/america.html ]

Allen Ginsberg’s poem, “America” is a biting, sarcastic attack on the American war machine, on capitalism, and on traditional morality. Against the war machines Ginsberg penned the famous lines, “American when will we end the human war? / Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.” On economic policy, Ginsberg’s views tend toward Communism, though not to Stalinist communism: “When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?” Ginsberg prefers the allegedly more benign Communism of Leon Trotsky. His belief in absolute freedom of expression, including sexual expression, would not put him in favor of the officially Puritanical Communists of his day. His drug use “I smoke marijuana every chance I get,” would not enamor him to Communist leaders, who would have difficulties with someone who has “mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.”

Ginsberg goes on to protest economic injustice against the poor, injustice against immigrants (Sacco and Vanzetti), and injustice against Black Americans (“America I am the Scottsboro Boys”). Ultimately, though, Ginsberg is not interested in anyone seizing political power by force to make America better. He champions cultural nonconformity—including homosexuality and drug use—in order to loosen up the strings that he believes hold back the American people from truly expressing themselves in opposition to Moloch, the capitalist machine.

The poem’s title, “America,” is itself audacious, and Ginsburg takes this seriously, at times addressing himself as “America.” The utopianism of Ginsburg reveals itself in this poem, although I had not thought of him as a romantic before class discussion. The poem has a bit of rebelliousness—at times there is a childish quality to “America,” as in the line, “I smoke marijuana every chance I get.” Although I have no problem with the morality of smoking marijuana, the line above sounds like a child whining to his mother, “I’ll go outside anytime I want.” There is sarcasm throughout the poem that varies in how it comes across to this reader. “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb” expresses my feelings exactly—those weapons of mass destruction should have never been made, and the fact that America used them in war deserves the greatest condemnation—which Ginsburg presents through rather colorful language.

Initially I did not take the words “holy litany” seriously. “America” does not have the rhythm of the Biblical Book of Psalms, and other than some of the shorter lines, it lacks the chant-like quality of most litanies. The form is probably not as important to Ginsberg as is his view that poetry is a quasi-religious activity in which Ginsburg is being a prophet. It is probably better to use the older word for prophet: “seer,” one who sees. Ginsburg sees American as it is, good and bad, and sees his own ambivalence about America. In doing so, he was a harbinger of events that would “shortly come to pass” (to quote the Biblical Book of Revelation).

[The poem is available to read online at http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Ramble/howl_text.html ]

Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” is a declaration of independence against the conformity characteristic of American life in the 1950s. But it is as much a search for meaning and for spirituality amidst what the poet considers to be the ruins of American capitalism as it is a statement of rebellion. It is clear that “Howl” is modeled upon Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” from the long lines to the incessant lists. Part I begins with one of the most famous lines in American poetry: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,….” The “best minds” to which Ginsberg refers are his friends who are associated with the beat generation; Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs are mentioned, and there allusions to others. Ginsberg describes their drug use, their sexual practices, both homosexual and heterosexual, the quasi-Communist political views (of some of them), and their restlessness in vivid detail. In the midst of “life as a nightmare,” their only redemption is found in art, in which they “dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 usual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus.” I doubt that Ginsberg is saying that art is the means to reach “Father Almighty, Eternal God,” (unless he is positing a nonanthropomorphic deity), but he is saying that the artist is a kind of Demiurge who molds the preexisting material of language into a unique form.

Part II condemns “Moloch,” the machine of American capitalism that swallows up laborers and make the human being and consciousness into a robotic nightmare of cogs in factories, nuclear weapons, and boring middle class conformity. “Moloch” is a fitting image; in the Hebrew Bible Moloch is the deity to whom the apostate Children of Israel sacrificed their own children. It is up to Ginsberg and his generation to break out of the boorishness and willing slavery of middle-class American life. How can Americans avoid being sacrificed to a machine?

Part 3 contains references to Ginsberg’s mother’s insanity that functions as an image of the madness of the Beats as they struggled against mainstream American life. Part IV, an appendix, is a hymn of praise to the Beats, to Ginsberg’s mother, to the great cities of America, to our bodies, to those who fight Moloch, the false god of capitalism.

The poem is filled with religious imagery and imagery from the Bible, from both the Hebrew Bible and from the New Testament. By rejecting capitalistic materialism, Ginsberg and his companions have discovered a way out of the realm of Moloch into the realm of true transcendence.

I learned after I wrote the former that the building of the New Jersey Turnpike was the trigger for the “Moloch” section of “Howl.” I had forgotten the link between Moloch and lust for money. Ginsburg’s dislike of a freeway that is only for cars and not for people emphasizes his humanistic bent. The lust for money takes away from an authentically human life, since instead of focusing on other people the money lover focuses on gaining more “wealth,” which is not the kind of wealth that counts, the wealth that is human beings-in-community. Although he was way too far to the left to be a paleoconservative, his emphasis on small communities has much in common with the Southern Agrarians and the traditional conservatism of Russell Kirk. Ginsburg’s humanism softens his Marxism and is more important to him than Marxism, since he opposed any system that interfered with individual freedom. It would be interesting to see how Ginsburg reconciles his individualism with his emphasis on humans-in-community.