The Philosophy of the Beats

Two Ways of Enduring the Flames

213 tWo Ways of endurIng the flames The Existential Dialectics of Love in Kierkegaard and Bukowski Andreas Seland To attempt to place Kierkegaard’s and Bukowski’s work into the same context may on the face of it seem like an odd, maybe even forced maneuver, something along the lines of a deconstructive tactic. The dialectical complexities of a nineteenth-century dandy-martyr and Romantic, and the crystalline, modern prose of a run-down Los Angeles drunk. That seems like a tough fit. But if one takes time to reflect and look at it from a bird’s-eye view, it becomes apparent that they actually share a lot of principal motifs: Both emphasize the solitary individual; both turn their back upon the values and mores of their respective societies and embrace a more elementary view of life, seeing themselves as cutting into life’s real core (or lack of such); both focus upon and describe the irrational sides of man; and, as I will argue in this essay, both understand love in a distinct dialectical manner; an understanding that has its roots in Romantic thought. The Romantics, one has to remember, were a strong influence on the Beats. As Eberhard Alsen has noted, the Beats were part of a wider intellectual movement that in the 1950s reevaluated the notion of the Romantic, a movement that redefined the Romantics’ characteristic aloofness and outof -touchness with common reality, giving this characteristic a new, positive dimension, instead of the negative meaning it had had up to that time.1 The Beat figure, as we know, is a person who throws himself into the cracks of middle-class morality. He is attached to drugs, booze, and sex, along with Oriental philosophy and jazz, out of a wish to expand his mind—to escape the box, to think, feel, and see differently. “[They] demanded,” as John Lardas 214 Andreas Seland has noted in regard to the Beats’ aesthetics, “that the process of art become a springboard into a world elsewhere.”2 Bukowski does not quite fit the Beats’ mold in this sense. While the archetypal Beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs) came from relatively affluent backgrounds (middle-class and higher), Bukowski was born into a poor family. He pretty much grew up in the cracks that the other Beats later sought out. Hence, though he shares the proper Beats’ preoccupation with the marginal and the immoral, Bukowski has a different orientation from them. This shows itself, for example, in his aesthetics. While the Beats all commonly utilize elements of surrealism in order to short-circuit the flow of thought in their texts and thus open up the reading mind to original aesthetic experiences, Bukowski writes clearly, with a level tone, and a linear narrative structure. While the Beats attack the way in which we commonly think, and break with what they perceive as normality; Bukowski uses ordinary , everyday language, and ordinary, everyday scenes in order to show the extraordinary that lies at the bottom of them. Still, these differences aside, Bukowski and the archetypal Beats are united in their depiction of man as essentially an outcast and an outsider, and this motif is a proper Romantic one. Moreover, the motif leads us right into the notion of Romantic love mentioned above. For the concept of love developed in the Romantic tradition revolves around the persona of a young, yearning man, somehow set aside in life and full of angst and uncertainty as he doesn’t know if he ever will obtain his heart’s desire (the typical example being Goethe’s Werther).3 My idea in this essay is to briefly delineate this notion through a recourse to Shelley, Kierkegaard, and Emerson, and then explore aspects of Bukowski’s novel Women in conjunction with Kierkegaard ’s philosophical work Fear and Trembling, in order to show that their differing treatments of love can be read as variations of the same Romantic thought. The thought in question is the view that the object of love is really a dialectical entity composed of a subjective/fantasmatic element and an objective /real element, and that, because of this, there exists, in the beloved object, an essential gap—a discord between the subjectively projected properties and those that are objectively present. What I aim to show is that Bukowski’s and Kierkegaard’s treatments of love ought to be read as specific responses to the presence of such an essential discord. And also, in the case of Bukowski, that his...