The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation

11. Conclusion

11 Conclusion Passage indeed 0 soul to primal thottght Walt WhItman "Passage to India" Diverse and variegated as they are i~ so many respects, the writers of the Beat Generation nevertheless possess a shared spirit and governing purpose that confers upon them a distinctive group identity. Among the most characteristic qualities and the most significant aspects ofBeat literature are the affinities it possesses with elements ofprimitive ritual and archaic thought and with archetypal patterns ofconsciousness. These affinities with the primordial and the mythic are central to the Beat enterprise and essential to a more complete understanding of the nature of Beat writing and of its pertinence to the life of our times. Since the time of the emergence of their writings during the late 1950s, the Beats have been assailed by critics for their primitivism. l Although the term has been applied invidiously to their writing, it is not inaccurate when it is understood in the context of the tradition of romantic primitivism that begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and in the line of the primitivist tradition in the visual arts which includes artists such as Gauguin, Picasso, Brancusi, Klee, and Pollock. The Beats manifest primitivist tendencies and sympathies in their writing by affirming instinct, feeling, energy, the unconscious, and nonrational modes of intelligence and perception. Their art, in common with that of primitive cultures, often centers on the spirit of myth and magic and engages primal forces both creative and demonic; it is, like the mythico-ritual art of the archaic world, shaped by inner necessity and directed toward the psychic needs ofthe community. Additional primiti1 Conclusion vist attributes ofBeat writing include its spontaneous and improvisatory character, its incorporation of elements of folk and popular culture, and its revivifying of the oral!aural tradition in poetry. The ends as well as the means of Beat literature are essentially primitivist for its fundamental aim may be said to be the recovery of the mythopoetic sensibility and sacramental vision as modes of relating to the world and to the cosmos. Unlike their earlier counterparts in the visual arts, the Beats did not seek to emulate primitive magico-religious models but endeavored rather to rediscover within their own minds and spirits the same source of motive power and creative energy that animated primal art. In so doing they inevitably kicked over the traces of established literary taste and decorum, challenging all the received values, the accepted forms and inherited conventions, all the neat boundaries of formal, official literature . The Beats sought not so much new modes of expression as ends in themselves as they did a new idiom of consciousness. Necessitously, of course, the latter made imperative and proceeded from the former, so that both in terms of technique and theme, the Beat movement served to expand the parameters of American literature. Before proceeding to a consideration ofcertain more specific aspects of Beat primitivism, it would be well to focus upon the particular juncture of circumstances to which their art is a response, the social and psychic conditions against which they reacted and rebelled. The twentieth century has been an age of constant crisis, a time of permanent emergency, but the post-World War II era has seemed to many to represent the culmination of all the negative forces of Western civilization in a final, desperate state of ultimate terror and destructiveness . This condition may be seen as being threefold in nature, an interrelated and mutually reflective complex affecting every level of life: physical, psychological, and spiritual. The physical menace is obvious and absolute: the impending danger of thermonuclear annihilation. The advent of the bomb seemed to represent the ultimate expression of Thanatos, the ascendancy of humankind's collective death wish, and seemed also to herald imminent apocalypse. Beat writing was (aside from science fiction) the earliest literature to register the new postwar, atomic malaise. Already in Jack Kerouacs first novel, The Town and the City (1950), the author presents a nightmare vision of the end of the world precipitated by "the atomic disease," a newly mutated deadly virus of decay: "The molecule will suddenly 173 Daybreak Boys collapse, leaving just atoms, smashed atoms of people, nothing at all ... " (Town, 198). In a similar manner, William S. Burroughs in his first novel, Junkie (1953), records a horrific vision of a postapocalyptic America. "One afternoon I closed my eyes and saw New York in ruins. Huge centipedes and scorpions crawled in...