A poetry of confusion? A confused vision of Ginsberg’s “America”

Roberto Ponce CorderoJune 19, 2017September 27, 2017Historia, Inglés, Literatura

One of the most common reactions to contemporary art is to ask: “Wait a minute! Is this supposed to be art? But I could have done it, too!”. Like, you go to the Museum of Modern Art in St. Etienne or, in order not to be that snobby, to the Galerie der Gegenwart in Hamburg and you see those completely strange installations and pieces of wood all over the floor and you say “A-ha!”. I mean, you don’t ask the question loudly because you don’t want to sound like a Neanderthal, but sometimes you really think so.

The other way around. Let us say you are in the Museum of St. Etienne again, and you see the famous big installation of Buren that is literally full of mirrors, just like some kind of avangardistic version of the mirror house at the Hamburger Dom. You know you couldn’t produce such an installation by yourself, so it is somehow more understandable that it is considered art, but at the same time you have the uncomfortable feeling that it is your image in the mirrors that is supposed to be art, because if not that, then what else? Like, you are supposed to be art. Imagine thousands of people walking by, looking surprised at their image of dilettanti, if they are dilettanti at all and not some tourists of the stupid kind who have fallen into a trap (in that case the situation would be at least more ironical) and thinking “What is the point?”, or not thinking anything at all. Not even caring about themselves being used as pieces of art. They might even buy the postcard, after all, and go on talking about this “magnificent” installation to their friends and relatives without thinking further. But I am not that sure, and I think they are not that sure either, that they (and here I would like to include myself as a part of this “they”) could consciously argue that they as persons or as physical Erscheinungen reflected in a mirror are art.

The reason why I am writing something like this in a paper on Ginsberg’s “America” is, first of all, that there is so much literature on Ginsberg out there that it is almost frustrating to try to do the “line after line” analysis once more – even though this approach is usually tried with “Howl” and not with “America”, which is probably one of the least seriously studied works of Ginsberg. Another reason is that I want to establish myself from the beginning on as a kind of dilettant, because I am certainly no expert in modern art and no expert in Ginsberg’s poetry either. Nevertheless, I think I know that painting art –with the exception of Cezanne’s work- was not a major influence on his poetic production. This is essentially not my point, anyway, but I think that sometimes, when you are reading Ginsberg in the right mood, you really have the reaction of “God, I could have said that!” while you notice that his language-virtuosity is too much for you, being realistic. The father of a friend of mine in Ecuador (his name is Antonio Martínez, and he is a very respected historian over there, but probably a footnote on this would not be the right thing to do) once told me the same thing about the Beatles: “We all knew they were geniuses, but each time one of their songs came out we had the feeling that we already had heard the song in our head, that it had been there the whole time”.

Besides, knowing that Ginsberg became Ginsberg in the midst of the Cold War Era being a really not very good-looking American homosexual who came from a Jewish family in which the mother was a member of the Communist Party who ended up in a psychiatric hospital, and that -after having experienced some undoubtedly weird “revelations”- he decided to be a saint but became a religious dilettant, too, who could not really liberate himself from his self and had only a superficial knowledge of the religions he was talking about (like Kerouac said in Desolation Angels), you wonder if there was someone who, as a person, was less able to be socially respected art – and you wonder how it is that he became “as American as apple pie and the flag”, as Louis Simpson (1978) said.

This is just to say that my approach to this poem can only be an extremely personal one. I am a scientific person, however, and I somehow deplore the antiscientificism of Ginsberg and other highlights of his generation, but I also have to admit that, if we want to talk about an isolated poem of the period and not only about a sociological phenomenon, which would be easier, perhaps, but certainly not that defying (and, more importantly, which is simply not the task I got for this paper), we probably have to accept a margin of irrationality and spontaneity in our thinking, at least in order to do justice to the poem and to the method of writing and the philosophy that Ginsberg himself represented. That is of course no guarantee of success, but it is at least an excercise of anti-abstentionism in the living flesh of Ginsberg’s poetry. Because I have seen books about him with thousands of references to Lacan and Foucault which I respect but really do not understand and which I think are not really that relevant. Especially in the period when he was writing Howl and Other Poems, he was not mainly trying to address the intellect but to turn on – in both senses. He was really trying to communicate sexually with his public. And that is part of the reason why I will try to forget my ignorance of the signifier and just let the words roll out – or just try.

One of the most striking features of “America” is that, even though there is a lot of Ginsberg in it, with which I not only mean the many autobiographical clues but the occasionally loose syntax that enabled him to express complicated thought processes in a fast and very moving way (like in the verses “Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister” or “I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes”), I said, even though there is a lot of Ginsberg in it, the poem evidently lacks the epical tone of “Howl”, “Sunflower Sutra” or even poems like “In the baggage room at Greyhound” that were not conciped as manifestoes. But it is not one of the much more “calculated” early poems of Empty Mirrors either, in which there was such an enourmous influence from William Carlos Williams. The language of “America” is not a very flourished one, and the verses are short but again not that short, not that artificially short as the verses of Empty Mirrors or of “Song”, also published in Howl and Other Poems. There is nothing like the hyperbolic images of “Howl” of hysterical naked minds starving on the negro streets in the short, very simple, “natural”, “uncalculated” and colloquial verses of the kind of “America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies”. In fact, I could have written that! I feel sentimental about them, too!

The verse I have used as an example is one of the initial verses of the poem, or is at least included in the first stanza of it, if the four clearly but somehow arbitrarily separated parts of “America” can be called stanzas. They probably can, since there is a discernible structure underlying their arrangement, because the first and the last stanza are visibly the longest ones and the second and third are considerably shorter. There is no perfect symmetry, though: The first stanza is very much longer than the last one (with 37 verses to 19), and the second stanza with nine verses is also slightly longer than the third one with seven. But that probably does not matter. What matters is that there is a tendency towards longer verses, a tendency in the second half of the poem that culminates exaggeratedly enough with the marathon-verse “America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy” in the middle of the fourth stanza. It is precisely in these long verses where there is most of the Ginsberg I said we could find in this poem, by which, I repeat, I mean the loose syntax that enabled Ginsberg to write one single sentence with numerous assertions that are not connected through traditional punctuaction but through a poetic process of thought. But even in these extremely long verses there is no epic, even these verses are like a lot of “America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies” simply put together – in fact, the word “sentimental” is used again by Ginsberg in this longest verse of the poem, and the associations we are able to have are limited to a single vital experience (a communist meeting) or, with help of our imagination and historical background as well as from other verses of the poem, to the concrete history of the American workers’ movement and the traumatic defeat it experienced during the years of McCarthyism that were recent history by the time of “January 17, 1956”. You see the last sentence of the verse: “Everybody must have been a spy” and you may automatically remember the whole lot of early “leftists” who very easily became red-baiters (like Elia Kazan) and even somehow catch a glimpse of the perverse hands of the “machinery” as the source of all that suffering. But what I have stated is not to say there is no epic or greatness or worldwide importance in the history of the American workers’ movement, but that the tone Ginsberg uses for his poem is everything but transcendent, everything but associative and visionary in the form that Moloch and the blind windows and the jazz rythms of the underground were associative and visionary in “Howl”.

This is probably not as trivial as I am afraid I am expressing it. America as a concept has often been epically chanted by American poets of different political views in different times, and the beat generation which broke with so much of the cultural tradition of America fought at the same time to somehow redefine the epic dimension of a multinational and newly rediscovered America with a lot of spiritual potential but a frightfully evil material being. Hence, the obsession with the West of Kerouac & Co., Kerouac’s constant talk about the “American night” or the “American hipsters” in On the Road, the enumeration of American cities in “Howl” and the very last verse of that same poem (“I’m with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night”), etc. Even the hippies to whom Ginsberg was so closely related in the sixties saw themselves in the midst of an imperialist war being waged by America against an anticolonial national liberation fight as “the real Americans”, in counterposition to the “bad” and “hawkish” rulers of America. The “American dream” was by no means the dream of the beats, but their dream was very American, too, and they liked to see it and describe it and epically glorify it that way. It should be quite surprising, then, that precisely in a poem named “America” Ginsberg treats his subject with such a lack of passion, somehow, with such a lack of his usual poetic language-virtuosity in favor of a colloquial, sometimes distant, sometimes seriously despising and sometimes just very irreverent tone – which is perhaps nothing but the other side of the coin of his language-virtuosity, another form for him to express it (as in the –by the way pretty long- verse „That no good. Hugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.“).

But it does not seem really that surprising to me. The America Ginsberg is writing about, the America that Ginsberg is actually directly addressing in his poem is not the America of Whitman, the young bourgeois state that abolished slavery and in which the (finally failed but at its early days potentially revolutionary) Radical Reconstruction took place. The America of Ginsberg is a far more obscure one. Trotsky said once in fight against the Stalinists and the Socialdemocrats that the objective conditions for the socialist revolution were not only mature enough, but had already begun to rot. The ending of World War II with the inhumane, and only in the frame of capitalistic imperialist politics rational, dropping of the atomic bomb by the American army could only underline this conclusion. Of all the famous members of the beat generation, Ginsberg was the most political one, and it is well known that as a young man he even had promised to dedicate his life to help the workers. What he meant was being a lawyer and trying to help them within the system in some kind of idealistic and not very conscious right-winged Stalinistic fashion, but even that was in the coldest years of the Cold War reason enough to be considered, in one word, nuts. The fact that he was a Jew and a homosexual made it all, of course, only more difficult.

It is obvious that since the middle of the fifties, when he actually discovered the work of Whitman, Ginsberg was trying to become the new Whitman of American poetry (in the first draft of “America” Ginsberg even went so far as to end the poem with the verse “I Allen Ginsberg Bard out of New Jersey take up the laurel tree cudgel from Walt Whitman”[1], which was later omitted for publication), but he was talented enough to notice that he had to come to terms with his environment first, which was an almost diametrically counterposed environment to the one which Whitman could celebrate. To begin with, Ginsberg lived in an era of supermarkets – and it is precisely in his poem “A Supemarket in California” where he most clearly and probably most consciously states the tension lying between his wanting to be the prophet of a metaphysical “American and/or universal spirit” and his existence as a hated outsider in a paranoiac rotten America: “Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?”.

Needless to say, Whitman was an outsider in his condition as a kind of “lazy” gay man in 19^th century America, too, who faced intolerance and whose work was still often banned ad hoc from the academies until the impact of the… beat generation changed the whole face of literary studies (and of American culture) more than fifty years after his death. But even as an outsider, he was able to write the following historically conditioned statements, among others: “America, grandest of lands in the theory of its politics, in popular reading, in hospitality, breadth, animal beauty, cities, ships, machines, money, credit”; “The United States are essentially the greatest poem”; “The English language befriends the grand American expression”; “Here is not a nation but a teeming nation of nations […] Here is the hospitality that forever indicates heroes”; “but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors… but always most in the common people […] the President’s taking off his hat to them not they to him”[2]. The heroes in the America of Whitman are (in Whitman’s eyes) welcomed by an open nation; by the time Ginsberg came to write his poetry they were being driven to madness and locked in jail. And if the “United States” (which by the way is a much more political and conjunctural term as the almost mythological “America” of the beats – I mean, had Ginsberg written a poem called “United States” instead of “America” his approach would probably have been a much more hating and much less complex one), and if the “United States” of Whitman, I said, was (for him) a glorious unity, a nation whose genius was in its governers and its bureaucrats, too, but solely not “most” in them, and in which the President truly respected the people he governed and tried in fact to govern for them, the America of Ginsberg is a divided country in which oppression rules, a country whose only hope is the destruction or transformation of the dominant machinery through the spirited, oppressed people who “truly” represent the “real essence” of the country – a country whose only hope is to become angelic, he says.

What I am writing is not at all new, but I have not found that much literature in which this contradiction between the epically idealized America and the real existing obscurantist America in the imagery of the beat generation is analysed. Perhaps I have not looked well enough for it. But I think this is precisely the point one can make if one is trying to explain why Ginsberg was, for once, so minimalistic in “America”: It is a poem about the America he is living in, and he is oppressed enough to know that he has no respect for it and that there is nothing epic about it. More than that, it is a poem that is addressed at America, which implies first of all that he is not talking to the people who are suffering like him and with whom he therefore shares his life but directly to the beast – he is not howling with the other subterraneans and trying to affirm an alternative way of life as legitimate and holy but pathetically, I would even say consciously pathetically, trying to convince a monstrous and clearly decadent America to be “angelic”, to “take off” its “clothes” and even “to be worthy” of its “million Trotskyites”. Ironically, the word “million” in this verse about the Trotskyites is probably one of the only “epical” features I can find in this poem, because they were obviously not even a hundred thousand then. Thus, although he was not a Trotskyite, one of the only words of admiration and of positive exaggeration he writes in “America” is to elevate a handful of revolutionaries to fighters of an epical impact (a million!) against the very sad state of things that reigned in America, January 7, 1956.

But the fight Ginsberg is waging directly against the beast is a lost fight from the beginning on, and he has to admit pretty soon (in the first stanza of the poem) that America’s „machinery“ is too much for him and look for “some other way to settle this argument”.

But let us go back to the admiring words for the Trotskyites. There are words of admiration for other heroic fighters against the America of the capital (I have already cited the verse about the Wobblies) and somehow, coherently to the idealistic world conception of a genial political dilettant like Ginsberg, against the capital in general (the Spanish Loyalists, which remain unhistorically undifferenced as a heroic and compact bloc in one verse of the poem), too. There is even a verse about a young Ginsberg reading Marx (which is a very simple but a very fascinating image of real provocative moods).

And sometimes when I try to analyse a poem I have the feeling that maybe I am imagining things, but if you read closely, you see that there are only three times in the whole poem where Ginsberg uses the words “I am” instead of the colloquial and more usual contraction “I’m”: once in the fourth stanza of “America”, in the verse “America I am the Scottsboro boys”, which is a culmination of his moving “admiration verses” for some of the most well-known martyrs of the workers’ movement and immediately precedes the marathon-verse about a Communist Party meeting. The other two times are at the end of the second stanza, where after stating his obsession for Time Magazine the poet writes “It occurs to me that I am America. / I am talking to myself again”. Such a solemnity being shown by someone whose directly preceding verse ended with the declaration “Everybody’s serious but me” must have some kind of reason. Or can it simply be casual and spontaneous?

This brings me to an important digression. If there is a poem of Ginsberg which really looks very spontaneous it is “America”, because it is so colloquial and crude. Of course, images like “hydrogen jukebox”, “angry fix” or “who chained themselves to subways” from “Howl” are almost too visionary to be calculated and consciously worked out, but the structure of “Howl” and its desperate perfection denote a strong, truly poetic intention and a certain amount of serious literary discipline and mind effort. “America” could have been written by anyone as bored and as repulsed and as confused by his country as Ginsberg was, you think. It is only a question of writing down the first primitive thoughts that come to your mind, a question of being guttural. And that is why it is so amusing to look at the already cited Allen Ginsberg Journals and at the first draft for America that is inside it[3]: 13 verses, some of which were slightly changed for publication (like “America when will we end the war?” that became “America when will we end the human war?”); some of which were probably too pathetic to be published even in the frame of such a consciously pathetically poem (“America when will you give me back my mother?”; “America when will you send me a lover?”). My personal favourite is the way how the poet asked America in his first draft to be worthy of his “million Christs”, only for replacing “Christs” for publication with the word “Trotskyites”, that has a lot more to do with the final version of the poem and the cool glorification (it is not an extremely passionate or “hot” glorification, hence “cool”) of the workers’ movement and its implicit sad and a bit pessimistic comparison to the saints and the ones with “mystical visions and cosmic vibrations”. I guess Jack Kerouac would have been (or was, I do not know) angry at Ginsberg but appearances left out, “America” is in fact very far away from being a jazzy, spontaneous poem.

All I am trying to say is that these three solemn “I am” I have mentioned are more than probably conscious, especially because in order for Ginsberg to write “I am” instead of “I’m” in spite of the fact that he loved the language of the streets in which “I’m” is a must, there has to be a reason behind it, again. And the reason that comes to my mind is that Ginsberg was aware of the dicotomy between the real America and the America that he thought should be real, and that he positions himself, somehow epically I admit, but nevertheless only slightly epically, as the representative of this metaphysical spirit of a human America that is not serious and is able to finally end the “human war”. The Scottsboro Boys are representatives of this same “angelic” spirit, too, and Ginsberg saw himself so completely identified with them as spiritual forces (instead of with them as real historical figures with human and political failures), which means so completely identified with this latent spirit under the ugliness and cruelty of America, that he was just being sincere in the verse “I am the Scottsboro boys”.

Thus, this spirit is, in typical metaphysical fashion, an ideal entity that has no connection to the time and to the concrete circumstances in which it manifests itself but simply exists, and that unites all kind of angelic individuals that are touched by it in such a definitive way that they not merely become comrades or peers – they become equal elements of a higher order that irremediably belong together and are the same, because they are nothing less than revelations of this spirit on earth. Because they are after all just the same conscious, oppressed spirit, but disguised beneath unessentially different physical characteristics.

This way of thinking about the world and the causes of the Cold War can sound a little strange and even funny at the end of the nineties (at least it sounds almost tragically funny to me), but we shall not forget that this was written ten years before the counterculture of the sixties reached its peak as an influence that clearly helped to dramatically change -and that through its ad nauseam exaggeration and certainly naïve translation and celebration of cultural and religious goods of extremely oppressive societies probably not only helped to change for good- the conception of history and “saintliness” of huge parts of the Western intelligentsia, and especially of the artistic one. Ginsberg was a pioneer and a leader of this movement and of this “new” consciousness – he, as many poets of other previous generations, was very active in politics, but his politics were mainly to turn on, and to help you to somehow find the good old truly holy spirit of America inside yourself. And even to give flowers to the police and the Hell’s Angels that were charging against the students on peace demonstrations because they all were, after all, only misguided little parts of the Spirit…

That was certainly another digression. Now back to the three “I am”s. On January 17, 1956, Ginsberg was still not talking about giving flowers to the police but making a step towards becoming a great compromised poet by desperately trying to save the remains of the spirit of America in a rotten America right after the dark years of McCarthyism. He felt himself as being the same as the Scottsboro boys, and he felt the latent spirit of America as being the same as them, too. Ergo, he had to be America. But he was only a too good observer of the street life of his country to deny that at that time the spirit was, to put it softly, on the defensive, and that their representatives were mad outsiders with a great potential but still not much more than that. I guess that is why immediately after stating “It occurs to me that I am America” at the end of the second stanza of the poem, there is this very realistic verse “I am talking to myself again”. He was really close to the edge when he wrote “I am America”. He was a Jew, a homosexual, a “dirty” bohemian poet who dared to sympathise with the workers and was at least not an expressed enemy of the Soviets, and he was supposed to be America! In fact, he could have been lynched for saying that. So the verse “I am talking to myself again” comes as a sort of “calm-down-verse”, as an anticlimatic and (now that I am reading it all again) evidently carefully calculated turning point at the end of the first half of the poem, the most optimistic one, in which he has been settling his argument through the confrontational tone of someone who is convinced of his superiority, against all odds. This is not easy to deny in verses like “Go fuck yourself with the atom bomb”, as well as in the one on the sentimentalism about the Wobblies that is followed by nothing less than “America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry. / I smoke marijuana every chance I get”. As I have already said, he even has been childishly provoking the evil America with verses like “You should have seen me reading Marx”! And looking this evil face to face: “America stop pushing I know what I’m doing”; “I’m addressing you”; etc.

This leads to a climax of omnipotence and self-confidence, an optimistic and almost utopian “I am America” that sounds even more exciting because of the fact that it was written three years before the release of the film Spartacus. There is a kind of premonition of this climatic verse in the first part of the poem, where Ginsberg sees himself closely identified with a perfect America by saying “America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world”, but “I am America” has such a subtle power (and it is by far the most epical verse of this decolorised and sometimes just “don’t-push-me-’cause-I’m-close-to-the-edge” first half of the poem) that, immediatly after it, Ginsberg has to give up, fall into despair, and recognise that he is alone, for the time being, and then write the second half of his poem.

“Asia is rising against me”: Ginsberg goes schizophrenic. Because if the ugly real America is paranoic, and he is America, then he has to be paranoic, too, and he is, but he knows better. He knows that besides the America of Henry Ford there is the America of “two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions”. He knows better but his “national resources” are obviously not enough to end up with the evil he so well understands but cannot combat, the evil with a “silly mood” that does not let him “write a holy litany”.

But do not forget: Ginsberg is America. And with the word “schizophrenia” I did not only mean the verse about Asia rising but, of course, mainly the deliciously irreverent bloc of five verses about “them Russians and them Chinamen”, in which Ginsberg virtually forgets all syntactic rules and puts himself right in the middle of the cold brain of the really existing, technocratic (to use a very popular term of the sixties) America. I admit it: schizophrenia is probably too exaggerated a word to be used in this case, because this whole part of the poem is so obviously ironical that you know Ginsberg does not even share a little particle of the ideas expressed in it. But it is precisely the fact that a) he, such a prophetic/confessional, anyway extremely personalistic poet leaves his immense ego for a moment and talks in the first person from the perspective of an inconceivable bigger and stranger “ego” (an alter-ego?); b) that he, as we have seen, has stated, right before this change of perspective at the end of the second stanza of the poem, that in his visionary mind he is America; c) that the beat generation had this rather religious (and for the traditional Christian world classically heretical) understanding of America as being a dichotomical entity that is permanently shaken by inner struggle between “good” and “evil” spirits; and d) that Ginsberg was probably even more conscious of this understanding than many of his peers (as shown by the already cited poem “A Supermarket in California”, for example); it is precisely these facts, I said, which lead me to think that he fully understands this paranoia that manifests itself in war and in racism not only because he is such a brilliant man but principally because that is the world he is living in, these are the pressures he has been under his whole life (and probably not always only as a poor defenseless victim), these are the filthy rules of the game from which he cannot escape – so he knows he has to play, put his “queer shoulder to the wheel”, somehow manage to live through that. He is not invulnerable; in fact, he feels not even particulary strong after he has noticed that he has been talking to himself (“again”!), so he really understands.

And what comes out from this understanding is the work of a virtuoso who, for the sake of the poem, deliberately plays it low and uses his talent for the construction of short original images that, although they are sometimes even as visionary as the ones of “Howl”, do not have an epical power but a sarcastical, sad-satirical one. This may be due to the fact that they are not integrated in long-breath verses but isolated through an exaggerated punctuation and, on the last verse, by onomatopœias like “Ugh” and “Hah”. A “hydrogenic jukebox” may more easily become the start of a process of psychedelic free associations than “Her wants to grab Chicago”, for example, that is somehow sexual but obviously based on concrete geopolitical questions that are widely known. But, especially when you live at the end of the century and quite a lot of the discourse about “consumism” and “technocracy” is not much more than an awfully and boringly extended and vulgarised cliché, it is refreshing to see how a poet of the fifties was able to say a couple of the last important words on the matter without further ado: “She wants to take our cars from out our garages”; “Her needs a Red Readers’ Digest […] Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations”. Such an incisive conciseness demands virtuosity, indeed, and that is actually my entire point about this.

But there is perhaps something more that I can say. Ginsberg is joking about this horrible consciousness in which the only things that matter are the obligatory car in the garage and the Readers’ Digest, and his verses are certainly funny, but he is not mainly joking. It is a really tragical situation he is talking about, because this horrible consciousness is by far the consciousness of America on January 17, 1956. In fact, he is being “quite serious”. This ironical tone could be funnier just if the struggle between these two counterposed “spirits” of America was fair but, in spite of the fact that he has begun his poem in a very fighting mood, by the end of it Ginsberg has already realised how lonely he is, or how unequal the relationship of forces between the two Americas still is. And his desperate question “America is this correct?”, followed by the modest “I’d better get right down to the job” and the principled but resignated “It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. / America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.” sounds like a kind of brutal change of strategy for the time being: To work with the queer forces but whithin the machinery, not to collide with it.

One fundamental feature of these five irreverent verses about “them Russians and them Chinamen” that I have left untouched until now is the question of the “Him”s and “Her”s, both from a gender perspective and (principally) from the perspective of trying to somehow rationally explain why the voice of those verses sounds so similar to the voice of the Indians of the mainstream American Western films. This time I am afraid I will have to confess that I am unable to find even a vague hypothesis to answer these very interesting questions. Is it an attack against the American chauvinism that has produced those Western movies and that wants (but “not really” wants) to go to war? Is there a pattern in the use of the gender (I really cannot find any)? Is this kind of language coherent with the profound respect and perhaps even overestimation that the Indian cultures of America found among the members of the beat generation? Is it the flip side of the open irony against the arrogance of America? Does Ginsberg surrender to the social prejudice that goes “Indians are wild” in order to present a tragi-comical image of a wildly suicidal America? Is it “some form of practical joke”? Or does it all have a more universal meaning?

I do not have an answer for this, but I have of course noticed that the last verse is exactly about Indians and Blacks, and that it really demolishes the pretension of the ugly, square America of being a free and egalitarian country being menaced by the Soviets. With this I am trying to say that I do think that the use of this language is coherent with the usual approachment to old cultures of Ginsberg, but that either it is for once a truly spontaneous feature of the poem or (much more probably) that I simply do not get it. I could even try an explanation, and I will do it: Is it perhaps like this polemical characteristic of the exploitation film genre (especially blaxplotaition) of exaggerating prejudices (or even inventing new ones) in such a way that they sometimes become even more obviously stupid to the observers who are open and willing to look at the world face to face, although certainly not to those who want to deny it through politically correct word-games that lead them to arrogantly despise this kind of films a priori and even call them “racist” or “backward”?

A completely different (but somehow related) example is the following one: It is well known (at least to everyone who has heard hip-hop) that the hated hate-word “nigger” can be used in certain American black circles and between blacks as some kind of friendly word, an instrument to prove confidence, even though the same blacks that do not have a problem with being called so by a black friend would of course defend themselves physically (and rightly so) if a white person dare calling them that way. Can it be that Ginsberg’s use of the most repugnant cliché about Indian language of American culture to satirize the reality of exactly that American culture belongs to this range of phenomena of intense identification and shared pride with all the oppressed?

That was only an unsatisfactory attempt. But I have to go on and notice that there is another interesting point at the end of the poem: the mentioning of “the television set” as the one single source from which Ginsberg gets his impression of the state of things in America. One could think that that is the connection between the clichés being taken from Western movies and Cold War paranoia, but I am not so sure that at the time the poem was written there were so many westerns being shown on TV as today, when they are often used to fill the gaps in the program. Even if that was the case, it is not an automatical answer to the question about the reason for using a kind of language that comes from racists prejudices instead of, for example, using an exaggerated version of the very prepotent English dialect of some WASPs. But what I find interesting about “the television set” is that it is seen by Ginsberg as a tragi-comical medium that is far away from being a great invention (for Ginsberg, an open enemy of industrial development, it could of course not be seen as a great invention) but is somehow not exclusively a diabolic instrument that can be eternally used as an ideological weapon by the rulers, either. It is clear that in 1956 it is being used like that and that the horrible consciousness coming out of the media is so strong that it is not a step in a brainwashing process anymore but already the end of it – a reflection of the hegemonical consciousness of brainwashed, square America. And that is why he does not even have to go out from his house to get an impression of America, because even there, at home, he is surrounded by this terrible state of things, by this horrible fact, and that makes his isolation as a rebel or a representative of a higher consciousness only all the more visible.

But what I mean when I emphasize the word “exclusively” to say that “TV is for Ginsberg not exclusively a diabolic instrument” is that the following verses, which I have already mentioned in another context, show us a Ginsberg “going down to job” and putting his shoulder to the wheel. Is he talking about the media? Is he talking about changing the ideological charge of the cultural products that are coming out on TV and being published in Readers’ Digest, or perhaps about presenting an alternative, “truly” American spirit to them? Or is he being more general than that? My guess would be that he is being far more general than that, but that he certainly had the media in mind. For instance, he wanted to see his poems published. And with them he wanted to turn on.

So at the end of the poem there is no “Go fuck yourself” but a principled resignation to work for change within the system. Is getting to this conclusion the same as surrendering? Well, I think not if you think you are America. I think not if you think there is some kind of good latent “essence” or “spirit” under the bloody surface of your own imperialist country that is not historically conditioned but… geographically? Divinely? Some kind of spirit that at least has the same hated name “America”, for which that term (America) has to be somehow loved, too, even though it is so really hated. I think not if you are not writing agitational texts in the most concrete political sense but poems, and if you wanted to give your life to the cause of the workers but not even that anymore, and if you openly admit not wanting to “turn lathes in precision parts factories” (which does not have a directly antimilitaristic but plainly an anti-industrial meaning) because you are “psychopathic anyway”.

“America” is for me a very pessimistic and sad poem about coming to terms with the schizophrenia of the double-faced figure of America that was a key factor of the beat imagery, a poem that, in fact, works mainly because there is that almost respirable tension between two different ideal “American” entities going on the whole time, because there is this (ultimately religious) philosophical background that manifests itself through subtle verses and gradual changes of tone and not through divinely inspired pamphlets that are going to change the world through the already revelated truth, and because it is a poem that is still very much conditioned by the thorough confusion of the young Ginsberg. The tension is not to be resolved, at least not by the time the poet is writing his feelings down, calculating them and working whithin the given world in which he is living, until better times with a much better consciousness come. If these times eventually came, and if they can be said to be our times, is a question that I cannot answer: What I have written has tried to be a literary study and no sociological one. And while a systematic comparison to later works of Ginsberg about America (the obvious example being The Fall of America – Poems of these states – 1965-1971) would be fascinating and could help answer the questions I tried to deal with in this paper (and formulating new, much more interesting ones), it is also true that it would simply have to be a much more ambitious project than this superficial look at one of Ginsberg’s poems. I can say that I really like this poem because it came out from a kind of complex confusion that probably was not anymore there at the late sixties, as Ginsberg was probably much more optimistic about the old spirit of America and the new consciousness rising. So, maybe it is too good that there is confusion, and I think I could have said that, too.

Bibliography

Works by Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg Journals – Mid-Fifties 1954-1958 – Gordon Ball – London 1995.
Allen Verbatim – Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness – Gordon Ball – New York 1974.
Empty Mirror: Early Poems – New York 1961.
Howl and Other Poems – San Francisco 1974 (first printing 1956).

Works Consulted

The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Fifth Edition, Volume I – Baym, Nina (General Ed.) – New York 1998 (First Edition 1979)
Burns, Glen – Great Poets Howl: A Study of Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry, 1943-1955 – Frankfurt am Main 1983.
Kirsch, Hans-Christian – On the Road – Die Beat-Poeten William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac – Reinbek bei Hamburg 1995.
Merril, Thomas F. – Allen Ginsberg – Boston 1969.
Miles, Barry – Ginsberg – A Biography – New York 1990.
Simpson, Louis – Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell – London 1978.
Tytell, John – Propheten der Apokalypse – William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Gisnberg – Viena 1976 (translated from Naked Angels – New York 1976).

[1] From Allen Ginsberg Journals – Mid-Fifties 1954-1958 – Ball, Gordon (Ed.) – London 1995 – p. 207.

[2] From Whitman’s Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855) and Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson (Whitman’s 1856 Manifesto), as published in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Fifth Edition, Volume I – Baym, Nina (General Ed.) – New York 1998 (First Edition 1979) – pp. 2033-2047 and 2091-2097.

[3] Allen Ginsberg Journals – Mid-Fifties 1954-1958 – Ball, Gordon (Ed.) – London 1995 – p. 207.

(Trabajo escrito en el año 1999).

(Crédito de imagen de thumbnail: http://www.west46thmag.com/blog/it-occurs-to-me-that-i-am-america/. Crédito de imagen de inicio de post: http://popartwork.weebly.com/three-flags.html).