Playing Moloch’s Advocate

There is a fairly accepted theory of literary analysis that it is possible for a text to have a thematic effect apart from the goals of its creator. Hermeneutics aside, authorial intent cannot feasibly be fully reconstructed in most cases, because the interpreter doesn’t possess a totality of knowledge concerning the author. It’s with this in mind that I’ll start this by making a stand about Part I that runs in direct opposition to what Ginsberg likely intended, before I discuss the other parts. Part I was pretty clearly meant to celebrate “The best minds of [Ginsberg’s] generation” as being the dissidents and rebels that the conservative elements of his society labeled as the worst. I think that the text read a different way can completely contradict that. To elaborate, this section of Howl seems to me to be dripping with an odd irony or sarcasm. Amidst Ginsberg’s celebration of all things counter-culture, he makes frequent reference to his great minds’ depravations (a fact that the cynic in me insists is included simply to make this thing edgy, but that my rational side insures me is deeper). That’s not what I’m talking about. But when I read lines referring to these characters like, “Who studied…bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,” I can’t help but sense a wave of accusation from the text. For lack of a better term, these characters seem like poseurs. They come from Kansas because they felt an arrogant centrality and gathered to The City to have that feeling pandered to by philosophies and by the people with the talent, by Ginsberg and so forth. No lack of drug references in this part of the poem further suggests that this feeling is drug induced, not genuine. I’ll counter the response that this generation celebrated drug use as enlightening rather than debilitating by saying that I realize that this interpretation views the poem through a modern lens and I’ll ask: why shouldn’t it be viewed that way?

Of course, this interpretation suffers when the poetic ambiguity of Part I is clarified (or castrated) by the Footnote. I can’t find any way to interpret Ginsberg’s cacophonic “Holy’s” as anything but worship of his companions and himself. That fact actually makes me wonder whether the sections inclusion is partly intended to ensure that those misinterpreting Part I, where things are less explicit, are set straight (or to destroy the possibility of the very interpretation I’m positing). The popular wisdom suggests that the footnote answers Part II, and admittedly, the parallelism is pretty obvious, but I think that it interacts with Part I as well. Its list, “Holy Kerouac holy Huncke Holy Burroughs Holy Cassady,” and so on is clearly exonerating the same people that are called best minds. Still, the sectionalism itself could be viewed as a thematic suggestion of viewing. Why are these things broken into sections, and why is the footnote separate (excluding the obvious literal reason of it being written later, I’m talking purely about theme here). Why is the footnote so far from Part I, where the interpretation it needs to debunk can be formed? If you come to the footnote with the cynical sense of irony that the interpretation I’m taking about breeds, even the Footnote itself can seem ironic. Like a sad little mockery of the “Holy” philosophies, those ones that above caused the poseur to continue his charade. That interpretation wouldn’t be possible if these texts weren’t sectioned off and presented in precisely the order they are.

If this darker interpretation is accepted, than these two parts become a condemnation of a false enlightenment, an accusation against the untruth of the whole movement. Coupled with Part II, which essentially attacks everything else, the whole piece becomes somewhat nihilistic. I don’t know if that’s in tone for a Beat poet, but I don’t think it is.

Ferlinghetti on San Francisco

It’s so easy, with the jaded attitudes of the modern day, to write off some of the things that Ferlinghetti says about San Francisco (in his essays, but sub-textually in some of his poems) as a sort of naiveté. Not the ignorance of youth or lack of experience, but the naiveté of someone who has seen a great time and thinks that it is possible for such a time to exist again. His railing against automobiles and tourism for instance; it’s hard for someone who never witnessed what I guess could be called the beat age to imagine the City like that, and even harder to imagine it ever being like that again. It’s in that vein then that I’ll say what the most profound effect of Ferlinghetti’s poetry was on me. It was the way it represented the city with such light as to banish, if even just for a moment, those thoughts and inspire a vision of San Francisco not as a place with a frighteningly bad ratio of income to living cost, but as, well, his “far-out city on the left side of the world.”

Without going into too much detail on any particular work, I think there is one major accomplishment throughout all these poems that helps to bring them home. You could call it accessibility, but I want to risk disagreement and call it simplicity. One could argue that these poems are anything but simple, and I wouldn’t say they’re not thematically complex, but the colloquial dressings of language that they employ I think represent a literal, textural resistance against the cars and tourism, against postmodern convolutedness. And yet, within what would seem to be the limitation of his simple language, the words themselves are beautiful. A North Beach Scene, which is my favorite poem in this compilation, is dripping with imagery of aesthetic loveliness, yet its artistry is still found in simplicity. I can only describe it as elegance.

If there is one way these poems describe San Francisco, it is with hope. They suggest that there is still hope for the City to go back to the way Ferlinghetti clearly remembers it. Even if they weren’t also great poems, that would be enough to justify their writing.