Summary: Today we will look at postwar literature and the arts, focusing on the work of Jack Kerouac and touching on the artwork of the Abstract Expressionists. We will ponder the following question: Are literature, intellectual work, and the arts "the most intense expressions of an age"? We will look at how postwar literature, and particularly the work of the Beats, resisted dominant cultural conventions of the postwar moment. We will look both at contemporary responses to On the Road and at the novel itself. Criticized for its irresponsibility and lack of structure, the novel is actually carefully structured around the friendship of Sal and Dean and the understanding of "good-and-evil" which Sal's shifting impressions of Dean afford.

I. Introduction: Are literature and art "the most intense expressions" of the postwar age?"

II. Beat Generation

A. Characteristics of Beat literature

1. Kerouac's concept of "beat"

a. "beat" as rhythm

b. "beat" as being broken down, pushed to the margins of existence

c. "beat" as religious experience, as beatitude

2. "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose"

a. attacked the concept of revision and denied the artist's traditional selectivity

b. compared the writer to a jazz saxaphonist

3. Ginsberg's "Howl" (1956) as example of this

a. moves from intense assertion of personal identity to a merger with larger forces of the universe

b. obsessive quest for experience similar to Kerouac's On the Road

c. Ginsberg's formal breakthrough: the long line

4. relation of Beat literature to postwar American values

a. seeks to retain the ability to feel in numbing times

b. insists on a transcendant social vision

c. stresses spirituality in opposition to materialism

B. Critical opinion of Beat literature in the 1950s

1. characterization of Beat movement as undisciplined and irresponsible

2. extent to which contemporary criticism reflects cultural anxieties about youth

C. Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957)

1. structure of the narrative

2. narrative structure offers rhetorical alternative to postwar culture of consensus

3. theme of novel is freedom and Kerouac's writing style was "the vehicle for this freedom's expression and vision" (Omar Swartz, 1999)

4. catalyst for Kerouac's vision of freedom is Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty)

4. Kerouac challenges conventional notions of selfhood, of good and evil, and of time

5. Privileges life at the margins:

a. idealizes Dean Moriarty's madness

b. idealizes racial otherness: "wishing I were a Denver Negro..."

III. Other Topics:

A. The Beats and jazz expression

B. The Beats and drug use

C. The Beats' relationship to youth culture in the fifties and sixties (Neal Cassady as a transitional figure)

D. Relation between Kerouac's notion of "spontaeous prose" and Pollack's notion of "action painting"

E. Kerouac and Pollack as countercultural figures of the postwar era

 

Norman Podhorets comments in 1958 on the Beats' relation to postwar juvenile delinquents:

"[T]he spirit of hipsterism and the Beat Generation strikes me as the same spirit which animates the young savages in leather jackets who have been running amok in the last few years with their switchblades and zip guns."

Kerouac explains the influence of jazz and "boip" in his work:

Yes, jazz and bop, in the sense of, say, a tenor man drawing a breath and blowing a phrase on his saxaphone, till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his sentence, his statement's been made . . . that's how I therefore separate my sentences, as breath separations of the mind.

 

[F]or a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into the timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiances shining in the bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. . . . . I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. (143)