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| Moloch from Metropolis (1927) |
Fuck the Man!
Let's just cut up these texts like Burroughs would do and get right down to punchy protest slogan...
Howl was literally just that - a howl of anguished frustration at the invisible strictures that society was placing on people in the US after the Second World War. The freedoms that were integral to the idea of the US were being squeezed by ideas of what was normal and what was acceptable, restricting them. Howl was at the cutting edge of the Beat generation and these guys were furiously frustrated and angry, howling at the Man, or worse the invisible Machine that society had become, gathering you up and spitting you out. A lot of it came from the turmoil of the war - the new generation had had the veil lifted on what other humans were capable of.
Burroughs came later, after Watergate when the corruption could finally be seen to have reached the highest levels even of American society, and so with it cynicism, but the Machine was even more entrenched, and so had become better hidden, more pervasive.
After Lefebvre and all the rest, the spitting energy of Howl is exhilarating to read but even better to listen to. Its polemical, and needed to be performed. It is an unrelenting vomit of words poring out from Ginsberg who said afterwards that he thought it would never be made public, so felt totally unrestricted to write what he felt. And that was the success of the piece, as it tuned perfectly with the times, as young people were looking for that unrestricted honesty and a break from the tightly bound up rules of society. Ginsberg did a pretty good job of smashing most of those up.
At first he describes the new Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac and all his friends, amazing people, but trapped in a society that ostracised them for their sexuality, lifestyle, drug taking... none of which harmed others, but was seen as dangerously subversive in McCarthy's America. In the middle section he talks about Moloch, as the society which devours everything and this goes back to that early black and white film Metropolis which brilliantly shows the Moloch as the God/Machine, devouring the working citizens of the underworld, while the free upper classes played around in pleasure gardens above. This rings even more true in the horror following the discovery of all that happened with the Nazi holocaust.
Finally he talks about Carl Solomon and being 'with him in Rockland' - this is the final uplifting bit, and there is hope here, after the frustration and the horror. Here they can plot revolution, even if its a weed-hazed kinda plot which will probably end in a game of pingpong at 4am.
What is brilliant about Howl though, is its lack of cynicism. Ginsberg was discovering anger and frustration with the 'system', but he still had hope. He thinks things can really change. I'm re-reading Catch 22 again at the moment which was written just four years later. By this time, the early 1960's, but writing about the Second World War, Heller's central theme is the implacable and impossibly paradoxical nature of this system. He was saying that the you're not just going to get into conflict with the system if you try and do something different like Ginsberg, but that the system was rigged, and you're screwed whatever you do.
Burroughs seems cynical of the system to say the least, and it's not surprising, following the Watergate Scandal. His criticism of society's structure goes much deeper, beyond the up-front rules and visible aspects of its structure, to saying that language itself is a tool used by the Man to limit and control people and hold them down. Its a virus, harming us from our natural state. Some of this maybe exaggerated, but the point holds and, a bit like Heller, he is resorting to mocking sarcasm, although a lot more bitter, while Ginsberg I think thought there was some hope for change. And clearly, for the changes Ginsberg saw since Howl was written, he was right. For Burroughs, I'm not sure he will have seen any resolution.... its probably got worse.
