Comparing On The Road And Ginsberg's

Beatniks were growing in numbers from the 1950s to the 1960s. Beat is a term that we will be analyzing in the forms of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road and Ginsberg’s HOWL. We see the word in use literally and figuratively as a verb or in this case, internal conflict from the main and static characters in each novel. Often we will examine instances in each piece that do not have the word beat, but is defined by other words such as mad or generation. This is because the word ‘beat’ during the Beat Generation was not a word of single meaning, but rather individualistic meaning for cultural struggle in the 1960s of America. HOWL is a contrast in its literary form from On the Road primarily by its syntax and poetic structure whereas On the Road
is more novel-like providing readers’ with imagery and relatable, dynamic characters. Regardless, both proclaim non-conformity. Howl is the cacophony of Ginsberg’s time that made people cringe to the point of putting the book on trial. His life’s story in poetic form is a ballad to his generation. It is a ballad that does not hide the catharsis in it but rather highlights it. This is everything that Howl is. The connotation behind every line is difficult to decipher without knowledge of who Ginsberg was, what his generation was experiencing, and the mental state that he was in. His poems are epic and in a sense almost gothic. The most notable of his writing is how heavy figurative language is used in HOWL; it is everywhere. Satire, imagery, and personification make HOWL what it is, the stench in the most beautiful place imaginable. We will analyze how Ginsberg defines Beat through HOWL, what it means to be and not to be a Beat as well as the characteristics of a Beat. “…to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with same, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of though in his naked and endless head, the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death…(p.
20)” This is the only time the word beat is written in Howl and other poems, however repetitive words are an indicator of emphasis of each story. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…” is followed by seven breaks of ‘who’ signifying the protagonists of this poem: the best minds of his own generation, fellow Beatniks. To define Beat means to define the generation, the people. Ginsberg does this for us through figurative language after each portion of ‘who.’ “…who were expelled from the academies for crazy and publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull…who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol, and cock and endless balls…” The Beat Generation here is defined as men hungry for their writing to be heard, who indulge in drugs constantly to the point of where they dream and drugs are with them as well. With alcohol and other men, their enjoyments are black and white. They can speak their hearts desires with those who share in common the burden of being a Beat, “…who
talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to Brooklyn Bridge (p.11)” However if we look at it from the perspective of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, the word beat is used more often in terms of pain, exhaustion, or identity. Kerouac clearly defines the Beat Generation by first giving readers a glimpse of what they are becoming, “They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining (p. 48).” This is said after Sal gets done at the opera and goes to throw a party in an old shop. Tides turn and he says that it became a “fraternity-type party.” Sal before that says how much he wished Dean and Carlo were there only to remember that they would not fit in well- “they’d be out of place and unhappy (p. 48).” Sal finds himself drawn to the opera before the thought of Dean and Carlo cross his mind. “I was so interested in the opera that for a while I forgot the circumstances of my crazy life and got lost in the great mournful sounds of Beethoven and the rich Rembrandt tones of his story.” Figuratively, I took this as Sal separating himself from those who are not Beats. Everyone who is not a Beat has the almost average and ever-so distracting life-style. Proof of this is when Sal explains that he was just nobody, and a stranger in the beginning of his journey. “I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then that strange red afternoon (p. 14).” “Now I could see Denver loming ahead of me like the Promised Land, way out there beneath the stars…(p. 14).” Sal looks at the West and calls it the Promised Land, seeking a new venture in life that the West can offer that the East can not which is the freedom to be a Beat. With his experience, he informs the readers that, “This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do (p. 62).” This ties in with Sal’s experience at the opera and how even for him, struggling to be a Beat also holds the struggle of trying to not become a Beat. There is such a fine line that it is easy to find yourself away from Beatnik. In a way, HOWL and On the Road are so similar because of the time they were written in and because of the authors’ involvement with one another.
The Beats as the American culture at midcentury represented an evolution of freedom that can be seen clearly from the publishing and dispute of HOWL. American culture at midcentury is similar to the Beat Generation because both sides have obedient individuals or groups that are not only strongly opinionated but are dedicated to each culture. The differences are that women do not play an equal part in the Beat Generation that is reflected from these two works. On the Road heavily displays the role as a woman as one who bears children, satisfies sexual hunger and are there to support men. They are not spoken of as people who can express themselves through literary means or conduct in a dominant manner with the same sex. Ginsberg speaks of men highly in regard to all that they can do while Kerouac more simply gives the reader examples of a relationship with women. For Sal and Dean in Kerouac’s novel, women are represented as a cause that holds them back from pursuing their hope for freedom. At the end of every journey, the women help and take care of the men but are constantly abandoned. Dean is even married three times and every time he has left not only the women but the children as well. It is not until later into the novel that the women get to speak their mind and tell the two how irresponsible they
are. In HOWL, William Carlos William writes, “On the way he (Ginsberg) met a man named Carl Solomon with whom he shared among the teeth and excrement of this life something that cannot be described but in the words he has used to describe it. It is a howl of defeat. Not defeat at all for he has gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience, a trivial experience. Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated. The men of the Beat Generation were the voices heard the most and the fact that they were men perhaps pushed them even more to pursue a different culture than that of mid-century America.
Beat is everything in which post-war America was not. It was a movement that highlighted the prudery and taboos of America such as homosexuality, sex, drug use, materialism, capitalism, and corruption. It questioned the means and causes of the American Dream and those who claimed alliance to the Beat Generation, utilized their freedom of speech in the form of literary art.