Allen Ginsberg on the rooftop of his residence in New York City. The photographer was William S. Burroughs.
MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (Nov. 3, 2023) — I have had a hard time figuring out what to say about Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. It strikes me as both a celebration of and commiseration with those mainstream society has deemed unfit. They are the hustlers, the wanderers, the free spirits, the drunks, the junkies, the freaks, the sexually adventurous, the mad (both clinically and otherwise), and anyone else who refused to conform to what society considered normal: man with a 9-to-5 job marries a woman who aspires solely to become a homemaker; a couple where each sleeps in separate beds yet that somehow merges—only in the missionary position and only with one another—to produce the requisite 2.1 children; a couple that proudly displays its devout observance of Christianity on Sundays; a couple whose only mind-altering substances are cigarettes, coffee in the morning, and a highball or beer after work.
One could say that Ginsberg’s world—the Beats’ world—was a deviant world. But who defined it as deviant? People weary of a world at war, fearing existential threats from enemies they didn’t really know or understand, people trying to shake off more than a decade of hardship and sacrifice in a rush for what was for many an illusory dream everywhere but the newfangled technology of television. McCarthy had us scared shitless of Reds, seeing a subversive around every corner, so scared that we ratted on each other for crimes no more serious than exercising our First Amendment rights. We had fought—and were fighting again—brutal wars to defend “freedom” while a significant portion of our society was forced to eat at restaurant back doors. And we acted as pillars of sexual morality despite the fact that Kinsey’s reports showed that we were far more freaky—in the Rick James sense—than most of us wanted to admit.
Yet Ginsberg’s people were the deviants. Why? Because the square world had defined Ginsberg’s people as deviants. As Michel Foucault wrote in the preface to Madness and Civilization: A History of History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, it is the act of defining madness/deviance/insanity that makes an act so, not any aspect of the act that existed prior to the definition:
. . . we must renounce the convenience of terminal truths, and never let us be guided by what we may know of madness. None of the concepts of psychopathology, even and especially in the implicit process of retrospections, can play an organizing role. What is constitutive is the action that divides madness, and not the science that is elaborated once this division is made and calm restored. (Foucault 1973, ix)
One example of the phenomenon—and one that had some effect on Ginsberg himself—was the scientific community’s definition of homosexuality as pathological. Homosexuality was listed as some form of sexual disorder in the first two editions of the psychological guidebook Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I, 1952, and DSM-II, 1968; Drescher 2015). The definition started to soften with the seventh printing of DSM-II (1973) and homosexuality was removed from the DSM completely in the third edition (DSM-III, 1980; Drescher 2015).
Ginsburg notes that the dominant classes of society eats its young (and old) among the working classes and outcast minorities, repeatedly referring to society as Moloch in the second section of the poem. He begins the section with the following:
“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? / Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! . . .” (Ginsberg 1959). His vision of America, seen as almost perfect among those who would prosecute him for prosecute the publishers of his poetry as purveyors of obscenity, suggests that America is not the nation the propagandists try to sell to the world.
The third section of the poem speaks to and about Carl Solomon, the poet for whom Howl is dedicated, whom Ginsberg met in a mental institution in New York—but Pilgrim State is not in Rockland County despite the repeated references to Rockland. Two men, treated and confined as mentally ill for reasons that might have had more to do with social norms than with solid science.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally written for an American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College on Nov. 3, 2023.
When suitably inspired I will write something, maybe about a breaking story in science, maybe about my career as a scientist (specifically, a biogeographer). I may wage war against the forces of ignorance from the dubious bully pulpit of this blog. Or I may just tell some war story from my past in which I should have ended up dead as a result of my own stupidity.
The Castaways
Posted by AbyssWriter on 11/03/23 • Categorized as Commentary,Literary Criticism,The Beats
MECHANICSVILLE, Va. (Nov. 3, 2023) — I have had a hard time figuring out what to say about Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. It strikes me as both a celebration of and commiseration with those mainstream society has deemed unfit. They are the hustlers, the wanderers, the free spirits, the drunks, the junkies, the freaks, the sexually adventurous, the mad (both clinically and otherwise), and anyone else who refused to conform to what society considered normal: man with a 9-to-5 job marries a woman who aspires solely to become a homemaker; a couple where each sleeps in separate beds yet that somehow merges—only in the missionary position and only with one another—to produce the requisite 2.1 children; a couple that proudly displays its devout observance of Christianity on Sundays; a couple whose only mind-altering substances are cigarettes, coffee in the morning, and a highball or beer after work.
One could say that Ginsberg’s world—the Beats’ world—was a deviant world. But who defined it as deviant? People weary of a world at war, fearing existential threats from enemies they didn’t really know or understand, people trying to shake off more than a decade of hardship and sacrifice in a rush for what was for many an illusory dream everywhere but the newfangled technology of television. McCarthy had us scared shitless of Reds, seeing a subversive around every corner, so scared that we ratted on each other for crimes no more serious than exercising our First Amendment rights. We had fought—and were fighting again—brutal wars to defend “freedom” while a significant portion of our society was forced to eat at restaurant back doors. And we acted as pillars of sexual morality despite the fact that Kinsey’s reports showed that we were far more freaky—in the Rick James sense—than most of us wanted to admit.
Yet Ginsberg’s people were the deviants. Why? Because the square world had defined Ginsberg’s people as deviants. As Michel Foucault wrote in the preface to Madness and Civilization: A History of History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, it is the act of defining madness/deviance/insanity that makes an act so, not any aspect of the act that existed prior to the definition:
One example of the phenomenon—and one that had some effect on Ginsberg himself—was the scientific community’s definition of homosexuality as pathological. Homosexuality was listed as some form of sexual disorder in the first two editions of the psychological guidebook Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I, 1952, and DSM-II, 1968; Drescher 2015). The definition started to soften with the seventh printing of DSM-II (1973) and homosexuality was removed from the DSM completely in the third edition (DSM-III, 1980; Drescher 2015).
Ginsburg notes that the dominant classes of society eats its young (and old) among the working classes and outcast minorities, repeatedly referring to society as Moloch in the second section of the poem. He begins the section with the following:
“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? / Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! . . .” (Ginsberg 1959). His vision of America, seen as almost perfect among those who would prosecute him for prosecute the publishers of his poetry as purveyors of obscenity, suggests that America is not the nation the propagandists try to sell to the world.
The third section of the poem speaks to and about Carl Solomon, the poet for whom Howl is dedicated, whom Ginsberg met in a mental institution in New York—but Pilgrim State is not in Rockland County despite the repeated references to Rockland. Two men, treated and confined as mentally ill for reasons that might have had more to do with social norms than with solid science.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally written for an American literature class at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College on Nov. 3, 2023.
References
Drescher, Jack. 2015. “Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality.” Behavioral Sciences 5 (4): 565-575. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs5040565. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4695779/.
Foucault, Michel. 1973. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books.
Ginsberg, Allen. 1959. “Howl.” In Howl, and Other Poems, 9-20. San Francisco, California: City Lights Books.
Share this: