Notes
193 Notes Introduction: Rethinking the Beats 1. The attention now paid to women Beats is long overdue. This trend started with anthologies such as Richard Peabody’s Different Beat and Brenda Knight’s Women of the Beat Generation that introduced readers to women Beat writers often elided from discussions of the Beats and whose works are unfortunately sometimes difficult to find. A collection of scholarly essays on Beat women has also appeared: Ronna C. Johnson and Nancy M. Grace’s Girls Who Wore Black. Along with their collection of interviews , Breaking the Rule of Cool, Johnson and Grace’s work forms the core of literary scholarship on women Beat writers. While I draw heavily on their work to position Beat women as precursors to a later second-wave feminism, I am more interested in what Beat women can tell us about the moment. Works that deal with race and the Beats are even scarcer. Reconstructing the Beats, edited by Jennie Skerl, aims to remedy this lack and includes several chapters on previously marginalized writers (including women). Manuel Luis Martinez’s Countering the Counterculture castigates the Beats for a neoimperialistic relationship to Mexico that is “less aggressive” but “serves much the same psychic and nationalistic purposes as the Mexican-American War” (96). Amiri Baraka’s literary success has meant more scholarly attention, though his period with the Beats still receives less interest. Lesser-known Beats like Bob Kaufman are not as fortunate because he is hardly recognized at all, though Maria Damon includes a chapter on Bob Kaufman in her study The Dark End of the Street. The omission of race is a problem for Beat studies, not only because African American Beats deserve to be heard but also because what they say illuminates issues that studies of the Beats often take for granted. 2. This trend can be seen in numerous studies. Perhaps the most noteworthy in this regard is Timothy S. Murphy’s Wising Up the Marks. Murphy combines close readings of Burroughs’s work with theoretical considerations, all the while keeping an eye open to cultural context. Oliver Harris’s William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination likewise uses theory to help explain Burroughs’s early writing. And Skerl’s Reconstructing the Beats sets itself the goal of “re-vision[ing] the Beats from contemporary critical perspectives” (2). 3. Here one immediately perceives a slippage in terms that plagues discussion of this topic. There is a difference between “modernity” and the “modern” on one side and “modernism” and the “modernist” texts it produces on the other. Modernity is rife with totalizing gestures—witness the appeal of the logic of marxism, which posits a complete and finalized utopian society at the end of teleological time. Yet, modernism and modernist texts that address the question of the “modern” likewise engage Mortenson Notes.indd 193 9/9/10 2:35 PM N O T E S T O PA G E S 5 – 2 3 194 in the logic of totality. While modernist texts, especially those within the rubric of the avant-garde, might appear to inhabit a postmodern world that derides meaning, the difference is one of intent. Even at their most fractured, modernist works still rely on a belief in the past greatness of grand narratives or in their possible resurrection. Postmodernism, however, sees even the nostalgia for a totalizing past as untenable. 4. Both Tony Trigilio’s “Strange Prophecies Anew” and Allen Ginsberg’s Buddhist Poetics argue for the importance of the postmodern in understanding Ginsberg’s poetic strategies. In her article “‘You’re putting me on’: Jack Kerouac and the Postmodern Emergence,” collected in The Beat Generation: Critical Essays, Ronna C. Johnson characterizes Kerouac’s work as “pre-postmodernist,” positioning his work as a movement from the “ideologies of late high modernism to those of the nascent postmodern” (37). And Murphy’s work subtitled The Amodern William Burroughs, claims that Burroughs’s work lies somewhere beyond these two periodizing concepts. Capturing Immediacy extends this discussion in greater depth, believing that the modern-postmodern split is essential for an understanding of the Beats and their conception of the moment. 1. Being Present: Authenticity in Postwar America 1. The term “existentialism” is, of course, highly contested. The danger here is collapsing a disparate group of thinkers under one simple rubric. Unfortunately, such labels are necessary if larger trends are to be traced. Thus I follow Cooper in his assessment that what unites thinkers as diverse as Martin Heidegger, Maurice...
OR
Buy This Book in Print