Postmodern Supernaturalism:
Ginsberg and the Search for a Supernatural Language
Amy Hungerford
I. The Politics of Om
When Allen Ginsberg testified at the Chicago Seven trial in December of 1969, Judge Julius J. Hoffman and his
It was this spiritual practice of poetry that brought Ginsberg to the Chicago Seven trial in the first place, as I will demonstrate below. But more importantly, I will argue in this essay, it is the spiritual practice of poetry at the center of his testimony—a formal practice that relies on the supernatural to account for poetry's efficacy in the world—that defines Ginsberg's general significance in the sixties. My point will not simply be that Ginsberg must be understood as a spiritual or religious poet; indeed, this point has been made by others and comes as little surprise to anyone who has read Ginsberg's poetry. Rather, I will argue that the way Ginsberg imagined his poetry as spiritual, in the context of the trial and in the years leading up to it, reveals a set of beliefs about language and the supernatural that have remarkable affinities with, and also raise a challenge to, understandings of language emanating from other sectors of American culture in the sixties. Specifically, I will show how Ginsberg's spiritual poetry intersects with beliefs about language common to poststructuralism—which was at the time moving from European intellectual circles into American universities—and to a popular form of religious renewal that transformed American churches during the sixties and seventies. I will argue that [End Page 269] his use of what I will call a supernatural formalism for political purposes—epitomized by the acts that resulted in his appearance at the Chicago Seven trial—demonstrates, further, the social and philosophical implications of the conjunction between religious belief and language upon which his work relies.
As the prosecuting attorney pointed out in the
Grandiose as it sounds, Ginsberg was not exaggerating his public visibility or overplaying the relationship between his spiritual status and his political activities; he had become an instantly recognizable figure in "our whole political life" by 1969, partly because he had indeed come to be seen as a "spiritual leader" for the counterculture.2 That status was reflected in the degree to which he was hounded by police and border officials during his extensive travels over the preceding decade, but also manifested itself in more benign ways. His picture, projected to enormous size, was used to advertise the 1967 opening of a popular club in
For those unfamiliar with Ginsberg's role in the 1968 demonstrations that occasioned the trial of the activists known as the "Chicago Seven," it is worth reviewing the details. Ginsberg's help with—or to be more precise, his endorsement of—the Festival of Life had been sought by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin as they planned what they probably knew would be violent demonstrations.5 Though Ginsberg had reservations about the gathering, especially when Hoffman and Rubin were unable to get city permits for the Festival, he agreed in principle that there should be an alternative expression of political will to offset what he and others on the Left saw as a conservative and pro-Vietnam War Democratic convention. He did see his role as spiritual, or perhaps I should say that for him, the political was the spiritual. He had announced before the Festival, in a
In seeking to discredit those peaceful intentions as reflected in Ginsberg's conduct, Thomas Foran's cross-examination of Ginsberg attempts to cast the chanting of Om as part of a repugnant and sexually perverted hippie religious practice, as antisocial in its own way as the verbal abuse hurled at the police by other demonstrators. Foran accomplishes this in two ways. First, during Ginsberg's initial testimony, he objects to any mention of the Hindu and Buddhist contexts to which the
Second, Foran takes pains in his cross-examination to connect the chanting—now effectively emptied of its specific religious meaning—with Ginsberg's poetry. He establishes first that Ginsberg chants and reads his poetry regularly, at the same time and "for the same purpose," making the "poetry and chanting . . . part of that same religious experimentation concept."8 (Ginsberg points out, to little effect, that "religious" is the letterhead's term, not his own.) By linking chant and poetry so closely, Foran can, and does, then turn to the poetry to supply the meaning of the chant, in essence replacing the translation of Sanskrit to which he successfully objected with the text of some of Ginsberg's most sensational lyrics. For his examples Foran chooses "Night Apple," a poem describing a wet dream; "In Society," a poem describing a dream in which the poet chats with "queers," chews a sandwich of human flesh which includes "a dirty asshole," and denounces a woman as a "narcissistic bitch"; and "Love Poem on a Theme by Whitman," describing the poet lying down between the bridegroom and the bride and proceeding to have ecstatic sex with both. Foran asks Ginsberg, in each case, to explain the "religious" meaning of the poem. And Ginsberg does, with characteristic sincerity, though it is not lost on him that his exegesis will only stick if the court "would take a wet dream as a religious experience."9 Through Foran's triangulation of chant, poetry, and poetic exegesis, the content of the poetry is implied to be the content of the chant, and by extension, to be the substance of Ginsberg's religious practice and leadership.
Foran's effort to make the content of the poetry into the content of the chant was a distortion of Ginsberg's notion of chant, but only because, from Ginsberg's point of view, the chant transformed the meaning of poetry, rather than the poetry transforming the meaning of chant. Foran casts chant as gibberish and then fills it with the meanings he finds expedient from Ginsberg's poetry; Ginsberg takes the characteristics traditionally associated with Hindu and Buddhist chant—the ability to yoke body and consciousness, the power to dispel illusion, the capacity to transform the chanter into the god whose name he chants—and transfers them to his poetry, in part, as I will show, by making poems that aim (in theory, at least) to evacuate the kind of referential content that proved so useful to Foran. In doing so, Ginsberg uses the kinship between poetry and chant to advance an idea of poetry that moves beyond meaning into what I will argue had become, by the time of the Chicago Seven trial, a fantasy of supernatural efficacy centered on the power of sound.
Let me note, before going any further, that the fantasy I describe here is articulated throughout the sixties in Ginsberg's audacious and colorful style, a style that blends humor and irony with a penchant for [End Page 272] performance and the grandiose (this should be clear even from the court-room quotations above). Though the newspaper announcement about Om chanting, to take one example, holds out a fanciful image of chant's effects, the basic premise behind this use of chant is one, as I will argue, Ginsberg deeply believed. On other occasions, as we shall see, Ginsberg uses similarly exaggerated scenarios to spin out the implications of his poetic practice. Like the famous effort to levitate the Pentagon in 1967, or Jerry Rubin's idea of running a pig for president in 1968, Ginsberg's acts and statements are sometimes theatrically absurd. That said, this quality of his discourse does not belie his underlying beliefs, but rather (as he surely intended) makes those beliefs all the more palpable, their logic all the more apparent. Hence, despite the humor that is inherent in much of what I will quote here, I will suggest that a serious, and culturally important, understanding of language as supernaturally efficacious emerges from his writing in the sixties. Because Ginsberg jokes about himself as a holy man does not mean that he does not, at bottom, believe that he is a holy man; because Ginsberg is flamboyant about claiming supernatural powers for his poetry does not mean that he does not, at bottom, believe that the poetry does indeed have such powers. The personal pain of the crisis that occasions some of these beliefs attests to Ginsberg's ultimate sincerity. I turn to that crisis next.
II. Eliminating Subject Matter
The construction of an efficacious poetry had preoccupied Ginsberg since his return from India in '63, where he had gone to confront a spiritual and poetic crisis—a crisis occasioned, in part, by Ginsberg's encounter with his friend William S. Burroughs's cut-up method of composition. The poetic practice Ginsberg presents to the District Court in 1969 is produced by Ginsberg's eventual synthesis of Burroughs's linguistic theories and a corresponding supernatural structure transmitted within the traditions of mantra chanting he studied in
The "cut-ups" which had "stuck" Ginsberg "in the heart" were of course the new novels Burroughs was assembling at the time using his famous compositional method. Burroughs had developed the method with the collage artist Brion Gysin in
For Ginsberg the evacuation of authorial control and intention implied by the cut-ups was devastating. After all, his major poems to that point had been based on a powerful prophetic speaker who spoke an intelligible, if unorthodox, truth to a suffering nation. This was a speaker who, in a 1949 poem modestly titled "Psalm I," celebrated the "majestic flaws of mind which have left my brain open to hallucination" and went on to imagine his writings would be "rediscovered when the Dove descends."11 In "Howl," the speaker takes on the mantle of prophetic speech suggested by that early poem, and becomes a latter-day Jeremiah in order to catalog the corruptions of present-day
In "Kaddish," a more intimate vision—that of elegy—somewhat tempers Ginsberg's flights of rhetoric, but the notion of a single, powerful, embodied, and yet transcendent, poetic speaker remains, his role now to redeem the death of Ginsberg's mother, Naomi, by praying a new version of the traditional Jewish memorial prayer, the Kaddish. At the end of Section II Naomi becomes "Naomi of the Bible— / or Ruth who wept in
"Kaddish" is Ginsberg's last major poem written before his encounter with Burroughs in Tangier, and it is the speaker represented there that most closely resembles Ginsberg's sense of himself as poet at the moment of that encounter. For all the authority he had accrued to himself in "Howl" and "Kaddish," then, Ginsberg was bowled over by Burroughs's new method. Or, rather, he was bowled over precisely because of the authority he had accrued in the earlier poems, an authority whose very structure was rendered meaningless by his friend's innovation. He took the cut-ups as proof that his old ways of writing were mistaken, and that he must think anew about his poetic methods. (It remains a question why Ginsberg accepted Burroughs's method as a revelation, why he took it up as a major challenge to his poetic practice.13)
A week before the journal entries I cite above, Ginsberg discusses his poetic methods at greater length, the occasion being his lover Peter Orlovsky's birthday and a birthday poem Ginsberg composes. "To P.O.—July 8, 1962," a small lyric poem, sonnet-like on the page, describes their room, the objects cast about, Peter coming in, wet-haired, from a shower. After a break in the page, Ginsberg goes on to reflect upon the poem in the context of what he calls "Poetry XX Century." Twentieth-century poetry, he argues, is
devolving into examination-experiment on the very material of which it's made. they say 'an examination of language itself' to express this turnabout from photographic objectivity to subjective-abstract composition of words a la Burroughs. . . . Now poetry instead of relying for effect on dreaminess of image or sharpness of visual phanopoeia—instead of conjuring a vision or telling a truth, stops.14
By his own lights, Ginsberg's conclusion—that poetry "stops" when faced with its materiality—seems inaccurate, for he goes on to list writers who have successfully "eliminat[ed] subject matter altogether," including Stein, Kerouac, Ashbery, Burroughs, Corso, and Artaud.15 [End Page 275] He also cites spiritual practices, such as Tantric Buddhism, which he takes to be doing the same thing. Thus, though Ginsberg is discoursing upon poetry in general, that last claim about poetry stopping is more self-descriptive than diagnostic of the century, and the self-description demonstrates the depth to which he has been affected by Burroughs. In fact, it resembles the satirized description of the writer in Naked Lunch, called in to be the "Artistic Advisor" for "Doctor Berger's Mental Health Hour." "'Send in the cured writer'" the technician calls; "'He's got what? Buddhism? . . . Oh, he can't talk.' . . . He turns to Berger: "'The writer can't talk. . . . Overliberated, you might say.'"16 Ginsberg feared that the liberation from subject matter that he himself imagined and desired would nevertheless leave him as speechless as Burroughs's cured writer.
The fear of abdicating authorial intention was not a problem for Burroughs, or, oddly enough, for Norman Mailer, who invoked precisely this aspect of Burroughs's method when he was called to testify on behalf of Naked Lunch in the novel's 1966 obscenity trial. In the "Atrophied Preface," which comes at the end of Naked Lunch, Burroughs describes personal and authorial agency as a battle between demonic possession and alien moral control. He begins by espousing a kind of documentary realism, claiming that "There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing . . . I am a recording instrument. . . . I do not presume to impose 'story' 'plot' 'continuity.'"17 But this in fact looks more like the condition of "possession," which he uses as a foil to refine his notion of authorial agency:
"Possession" they call it. . . . Sometimes an entity jumps in the body—outlines waver in yellow orange jelly—and hands move to disembowel the passing whore or strangle the neighbor child in hope of alleviating a chronic housing shortage. As if I was usually there but subject to good now and again. . . . Wrong! I am never here. . . . Never that is fully in possession, but somehow in a position to forestall ill-advised moves. . . . Patrolling is, in fact, my principle occupation. . . . NO matter how tight Security, I am always somewhere Outside giving orders and Inside this straitjacket of jelly that gives and stretches but always reforms ahead of every movement, thought, impulse, stamped with the seal of alien inspection. . . . 18
For Burroughs, realism is demonic possession. The power relations so vividly evoked by his patrolling consciousness, exiled from the body, striving to prevent the body from performing the most horrific of crimes, translate in Naked Lunch into the junky's relationship to junk, the police's relationship to the deviant, the psychopathic murderer's relationship to moral constraints. And it is this fraught relation of power that generates writing: "The writer sees himself reading to the mirror as always. . . . He must check now and again to reassure himself that The Crime of Separate Action has not, is not, cannot occur. . . . .[ . . . ] when the reflection no longer obeys. . . . Too late to dial P o l i c e."19 [End Page 276] Writing here always threatens to disobey, but this propensity was understood by Burroughs as the very essence of verbal art. It is this conception of art that led Burroughs to the cut-up method in the first place, evidenced by the fact that Naked Lunch was written prior to his discovery of the new method.
Indeed, these were the terms Norman Mailer used to describe Naked Lunch in his testimony before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in the summer of 1966. The compositional method Burroughs used, especially its seeming evacuation of authorial agency, was, for Mailer, what allowed Borroughs's prophetic visions to emerge. Mailer explains that "one of the mysteries" of writing is the fact that "one's best writing seems to bear no relation to what one is thinking about." The "work" of great writing "is done while you sleep; the discipline of writing is almost to keep from interfering with that creative work that is done by the unconscious."20 Though Burroughs takes his terms from the power relations of the culture and from the supernatural—from madness and the straightjacket, from junky and police, from demonic possession—and Mailer finds his in psychology—in the conscious and the unconscious—both find the engine of creativity in the abdication of intention, or at least, in the struggle between intentions arising from different or opposed origins within or outside the body. Tellingly, Mailer also argued that "William Burroughs is in my opinion—whatever his conscious intention may be—a religious writer," clearly calling on the status of religion (just a Thomas Foran did) to legitimate his claims about the novel's value. Naked Lunch, according to Mailer, thus revealed "the destruction of the soul" and gave a "simple portrayal of Hell," a "vision of how mankind would act if man was totally divorced from eternity."21 What seems to be a qualification to his claim that Burroughs is a religious writer—that he is so "whatever his conscious intention may be"—is really more like a qualification for that status, revealing that Mailer, like Ginsberg after his Indian crisis, finds the religious in the moment when intention is evacuated.
So, while Burroughs defied Ginsberg's conclusion that abandoning intentionally generated meaning and subject matter would make writing "stop"—producing in short order a trilogy of novels using the cut-up method—Ginsberg did not immediately find a way to embrace the end of subject matter so conceived. Though he felt that "nobody can seriously go on passionately concerned with effects however seeming-real they be, when he knows inside all his visions & truths are empty, finally," he nevertheless cannot see beyond visions and truths. He takes Peter's birthday poem as a case study:
I seem to be delaying a step forward in this field [elimination of subject matter] and hanging on to habitual humanistic series of autobiographical photographs (as in the last writing on Orlovsky's Birthday)—although my own Consciousness has gone beyond [End Page 277] the conceptual to non-conceptual episodes of experience, inexpressible by old means of humanistic storytelling.
As I am anxious or fearful of plunging into the feeling & chaos of disintegration of conceptuality thru further drug experiences, and as my mind development at the year moment [at the turn of the year] seems blocked so also does my 'creative' activity, blocked, revolve around old abstract & tenuous sloppy political-sex diatribes & a few cool imagistic photo descriptions (which contain some human sentiment by implication)—
I really don't know what I'm doing now.
Begin a new page. 22
Ginsberg's poetic impasse coincides, then, with a spiritual one he had reached in recent visionary drug trips: he repeatedly encountered a serpent-figure that seemed to threaten his dissolution during the trip. He fears stepping across that line into "disintegration" and "chaos," and he aligns such a step with a poetry empty of meaning. To embrace that condition would be to embrace the disoriented moment of waking in which he has "no name for
III. Make Mantra of American Language
The answer Ginsberg finds in
Other poems, in The Fall of
This belief is rooted in his understanding of how consciousness and breath work: as vibration and sensation come and go in the body, as thoughts (another kind of sensation) come and go, the body and the consciousness now yoked together through the practice of yoga are both transformed.25 The listener or reader is then imagined as functioning not unlike the tape recorder, responding mechanically to the [End Page 279] vibrations produced by the poet's spoken words, reproducing also the cadence of breath in which those words were originally spoken. (One might recall here Burroughs's image of the writer as the "recording instrument" of reality, cited above. In Ginsberg's version the reality emanates from the poet.) Ginsberg is less interested in producing particular thoughts in the mind of the reader or listener than he is in producing what he calls, in interviews, "the movement" of thoughts in a certain cadence through another's consciousness. The poem taken thus by the listener or reader as a mantra, to form and direct the movement of consciousness and the vibration of the body, replicates the poet himself. To put the point in Ginsberg's own words: he describes the line of poetry as "not so much a unit of sound as a unit of thought . . . it also turns out that if you vocalize the thought's also a unit of sound and that somehow or other the squiggles for the units of sound are identical to the squiggles of thought. And they're just as interesting as units of sound as units of thought."26
The transmission of these squiggles is precisely the mechanism Ginsberg describes when he talks about how his political poetry might affect people. He wishes not to persuade his listener, but to make the listener arrive at a consciousness that coincides with Ginsberg's but that nevertheless appears to arise from the reader or listener himself. "It isn't necessary for my word to like quote overwhelm or convince, unquote, anybody else," Ginsberg explains to Paul Carroll in an interview, "it's just necessary for me to place my word out there, not to overwhelm but to clarify other people's sane thought, or to make it conscious or to bring it to the surface of their minds, so they say: Oh, yeah! That's what I think too! Why didn't I say that before?"27 The squiggles that denote the unit of sound, identical to those for the unit of thought, bring the thought into the listening mind viscerally rather than intellectually. What is more, as he explains to Michael Aldrich, those squiggles can sometimes achieve an effect in and of themselves. "The rhythmic . . . units . . . that I'd written down [in "Howl" and "Kaddish"] . . . were basically . . . breathing exercise forms . . . which if anybody else repeated . . . would catalyze in them the same pranic breathing . . . physiological spasm . . . that I was going through . . . and so would presumably catalyze in them the same affects or emotions."28 Indeed, with all their rhythmic pauses it is as if even Ginsberg's words in the interview can recreate the physiological spasm that constitutes, for Ginsberg, a thought.29
Michael Aldrich, in this same interview, restates Ginsberg's claim in such a way that the separation of sound and meaning, as well as their absolute identity, becomes apparent. "If you're going Dumpty dumpty dumpty dumpty dumpty dum it's different than if you're going daahh, duhhh, dummm, duh-dummm," he suggests. Ginsberg, as if to show just how much difference sound can make, offers his own sonic example: [End Page 280] "Or, if you're going Bum! ba-ta TUM, BUM: BUM, ba-da-DAA . . . / BOM, bata BOM BOM, BOM bata DAA . . . ."30 Ginsberg seems to feel he has made the point stronger with a far more imaginative example, and this is the case despite the fact that neither "dumpty dumpty" nor "Bum! ba-ta TUM" can be said to mean in any intellectual sense. In the methedrine trip poem from Planet News, "Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward that Death Chamber," we see a comic vision of such an effect: Ginsberg jokes that the "macrocosm-machine" hooked up to the brains of the "human dragons" who fly bombers, "picks up vibrations of my thought in this poem—the attendant / is afraid—Is the President listening?" (276) The vibrations of sound have a power in and of themselves, regardless of their semantic meaning.
For all its clanging political invective, then, Ginsberg's political poetry is meant to produce a desired outcome not by asserting a principle or policy in which one can believe, but by producing people in the image of the poet's mind. The trip poems—especially the frequently incoherent methedrine poems—attempt the same thing, bringing the expanded consciousness of the trip directly to the reader's mind. These poems are imagined as a kind of ontologic reproduction, closer to birth than to representation because they bring about a state of being rather than simply transmitting thought. They are imagined as taking the existing person and bringing them into being as Ginsberg's double.
Political content raises a question, though, about why what I am arguing is an anti-representational poetry often seems so obviously thematic. The obviousness of Ginsberg's poetry in the sixties may well account for why most studies of his work break off just as he leaves Tangier for India, why "Howl" and "Kaddish," both of which are more linguistically and metaphorically complex and thus more consistently repay the practice of close reading than many of his later works, are often argued to contain within them already the whole trajectory of Ginsberg's poetic development in the sixties and beyond.31 Indeed, Planet News and The Fall of America were received with tepid reviews, most of which looked for the distinctive prophetic and lyric language of "Howl" and "Kaddish" and found it only sporadically, if at all.
"Wichita Vortex Sutra" makes the case for the thematic content of an anti-representational language by casting itself as a speech act. In the poem, Ginsberg declares the end of the Vietnam War, a speech act he imagines has the power to effect the historical situation it declares. This is not a speech act in the Austinian sense (about which more later), where convention and other conditions surrounding an utterance make speech into an act, but a religious speech act, which is imagined to have supernatural effects. As Ginsberg explains to Michael Aldrich in 1968, to make mantra of American language does not mean [End Page 281] (as Aldrich had suggested) that "we should literally start chanting the lines for mantra purposes." Making language into mantra instead involves sound that is the thing itself.
One function of a mantra is that the name of the god is identical with the god itself. You say Shiva or Krishna's name,
Obviously not strong enough, in 1965 when the poem was written (or rather, spoken to the tape machine), to end the Vietnam War. Of course, there is an element of play and humor in Ginsberg's audacious claims, here as elsewhere, but the empirical failure of his word, humorously intended or not, did not deter Ginsberg from pursuing a poetics of mantra. Ginsberg does give varying explanations during the sixties for how poetry works, what it does, what effects it can have on the listener, the reader, and the one who speaks the poem. In some cases he calls the power of chant, and by extension the power of poetry, a scientifically explainable phenomenon, having to do with the stimulation of certain nerve centers in the body. In a 1968 Playboy interview with Paul Caroll, Ginsberg describes the elements of his early poetry that he thought of as transcendental or visionary as being, in hindsight, "really literal realism, simple common sense," what Carroll rephrases as "prophetic perceptions rather than visionary imaginings."33 Ginsberg agrees: "Although there are all sorts of intellectual-mystical-theological potentials involved in chanting a mantra, on its simplest, most Americanesque level, it's just like singing in the shower or an interesting phys. ed. that can get you high."34 Describing what he called a "trance" that he achieved after chanting
Ginsberg's account of his physiological experience notwithstanding, within the same interview he describes using the Om to effect a "complete formal exorcism of the [Democratic] convention" at the moment when a priest in the convention hall begins to pronounce a [End Page 282] benediction upon "all this massacre and hypocrisy."36 "I stood up and went into some kind of fit of total ecstasy and started chanting
The variety of Ginsberg's explanations for the efficacy of poetry and chant reflects not only his own scatter-shot, syncretic, and continually evolving approach to spiritual practice (he was, indeed, an experimenter) but also an ambiguity at the heart of Hindu and Buddhist practices. While some strains of these traditions present chant as a physiological exercise, whose spiritual effects are the result of or coextensive with physical effects, other strains emphasize the ways mantra embodies a divine or supernatural being or force that is then transferred, though the sonic medium, into the devotee. While some scholars of religion cast these traditions as "natural" and thus distinct from the "supernatural" theistic religions, such distinctions have always been difficult to maintain. Ginsberg himself shifts back and forth between natural and supernatural versions of poetic efficacy. The return to the body announced in "The Change"—where he resolves to live comfortably in his own mortal, homosexual skin—ostensibly ruled out the search for the supernatural or the divine, replacing these with acceptance of self and what is clearly, in that poem, a deeply psychologized version of Hindu and Buddhist meditation traditions.38 Previous commentators on Ginsberg's post-India transformation argue that he is liberated to write in a new way when he abandons what one critic, Paul Portugés, calls the "supernatural" visionary paradigm—derived from Ginsberg's vision of Blake and his readings of the Bible and Christian mystics—that defined his early poetry's religious vocabulary.39 I would argue that abandoning Blake's supernatural visions or [End Page 283] those of the Old Testament is not the same thing as abandoning the supernatural altogether. "Wichita Vortex Sutra" and the poems surrounding it in Ginsberg's two sixties collections clearly contradict any claim that the supernatural is fully replaced by the "natural" of Buddhist practice. Instead, supernatural poetry of the kind proclaimed in "Wichita Vortex Sutra" makes ever grander claims that require a conception of language as magically, supernaturally, efficacious.
Thomas Foran's effort in the Chicago Seven trial to use the representational content of Ginsberg's poetry to fill in the content of the chants he recited during the Festival of Life reverses the process Ginsberg intends to set in motion when he declares that we must "make Mantra of American language." Ginsberg uses the supernatural structure of mantra to make a "white-magic" poetry—a poetry efficacious even (or especially) in the moments where narration and traditional structures of meaning (representations, narrative logic, the seeming-real he writes of rejecting in his Indian journals) fall away. This makes it possible to sustain the nonsensical elements of a poem like "Television Was A Baby," overtly political poems like "Wichita Vortex Sutra" and dream transcription of the kind he defends under Foran's cross-examination within a single poetic project, within one linguistic understanding. This move is only made possible by the abandonment of reference in the indexical sense in favor of what must be understood as a formal notion of meaning. Ginsberg may ultimately be best described as a formal poet, despite his protests against High Modernist poetic form, since it is the literal form of the sound, the particular assemblage of "syllables," that carries the weight of what Ginsberg imagines the poem to do. We might call this a supernatural formalism.
There are several points to be made, then, about the story of Ginsberg's poetic transformation in the sixties. It should by now be clear to readers familiar with poststructuralist theory that his transformation relates directly to Derridian, de Manian, and Lacanian understandings of language. While the materiality of language for these theorists represents a challenge to meaning construed in an idealist paradigm and to what Derrida called, in Of Grammatology, the metaphysics of presence, it does precisely the opposite for Ginsberg.40 His rediscovery of the material word—particularly its sound—through Burroughs's cut-ups, and the elimination of subject matter that for Ginsberg goes along with that rediscovery, ushers in a poetics of absolute presence, and a metaphysics that has more in common with Hinduism's Brahma or the incarnate Word of St. John's gospel than with the seemingly secular world of deconstruction. I say "seemingly," because I have argued elsewhere that both Derrida and de Man, far from evacuating human presence from language, instead personify language in the most radical sense, imputing to language, in Derrida's case, mortality, and in the [End Page 284] case both of Derrida and de Man, a consciousness and autonomy only imaginable in personal terms. In this sense one might argue that deconstruction already entails a kind of supernaturalism—or, if you will, a kind of animism.41 The case of Ginsberg suggests that it is a mistake, then, to see the materiality of language as being any challenge at all to an idealist conception of language—at least, that is, when the letter or the sound is fortified with supernatural power.
Of course, Ginsberg was not the first poet to posit an identity between word and thing, nor to turn to sound as the carrier of a distinct ontology that goes beyond reference, and neither was he the first to suggest that the effect of the poem on the listener was not to persuade but to formulate well what the listener already thought. Alexander Pope famously brings sound and sense together to explain the latter effect of poetry: "The Sound must seem an Echo of the Sense, What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest." William Carlos Williams, a mentor of Ginsberg's, imagined a poetic language (especially in Spring and All) that aspired to the status of things, and Ezra Pound, also important to Ginsberg's development, spoke of the "audible forms" of poetry as aspiring to the condition of sound as distinct from speech. In modernism, then, but also as far back as the eighteenth century and romanticism, poets have attempted to reimagine the relevance of poetry by turning to its objectness and, in some cases, imbuing that materiality with occult significance. What is perhaps most interesting about Ginsberg's version of this move, then, is first the way it translates into a politics of coercion even in the context of the counterculture's legendary tolerance. The idea that a poem's sound will render listeners as passive as tape machines and inspire not thoughts but a replication of the poet himself, reveals a political contradiction at the heart of Ginsberg's practice, which is ostensibly about freedom and self-expression and the value of all persons. The contradiction stands despite the poetry's evident failure to have the effects Ginsberg (sometimes playfully) wishes, and the fact that he insists he is not trying to "overwhelm" his listeners. The second significant aspect of Ginsberg's version of the modernist move towards the poem as object, as I will show in the final section of this essay, is how it intersects with a resurgent mysticism in American religious life in the sixties, a resurgence that also suggests, in another sector of the culture, a certain interchangability between coercion and tolerance.
IV. Sixties Religious Formalism
In the early seventies the popular spiritual writer Alan Watts might have been ventriloquising Ginsberg when he criticized the Roman Catholic Church for abandoning the Latin mass for a vernacular liturgy. Writing in a 1971 preface to his newly reissued spiritual classic, [End Page 285] Behold the Spirit (1947)—which had urged a mystical understanding of religion—he argues that in translating the mass the church made liturgy an occasion for "filling one's head with thoughts, aspirations, considerations and resolutions."42 The substitution of English for the Latin, which many parishioners did not understand (though the use of Latin-English missals had been widespread since their introduction in 1925), allowed the content of the liturgy to be apparent over and above its purely verbal form. For
Alan Watts was not the only religious thinker in the 1960s to advance such a position. Indeed, a significant movement in American Christianity during that decade centered on the spiritual gift of glossolalia, and, as I will show, evinced an equal disregard for propositional content in the matter of religion. This "charismatic" movement within Christianity (called by some scholars "Neo-Pentecostalism"), distinct in history and practice from what are called the "classical" Pentecostal churches, such as the Assemblies of God, and from the black and Latino Pentecostal strains that had emerged in the early twentieth century, was touched off in 1960 at an Episcopal church in Van Nuys, California.43 The priest of the parish, Dennis Bennett, prayed with some of his parishioners and received what is known as "the baptism in the Holy Spirit," a second baptism or conversion experience usually signaled (as it was in Bennett's case) by the manifestation of spiritual gifts, most notably glossolalia. In his enthusiasm for that powerful new experience of faith, Bennett preached on the subject to his congregation; soon after, amid some uproar from the parish and the diocesan leadership, he resigned from the church to pursue his charismatic ministries outside the institutional structures of the Episcopal church. The Bishop of Los Angeles quickly banned speaking in tongues under church auspices. [End Page 286]
Bennett's experience demonstrates one reason why the charismatic movement was important in American culture in the 1960s. Speaking in tongues was for the first time being practiced by white, middle-class and elite church-goers—epitomized by the traditionally upper-class Episcopal church in which Bennett served. No longer the province of a small (if rapidly growing) white, working-class minority in classical Pentecostal churches, or of Blacks in holiness churches, the experience of Holy Spirit baptism and of speaking in tongues spread even as far as blue-blooded Yale University.44 In October, 1962, after two campus visits by the charismatic preacher Herald Bredsen, members of the evangelical Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship prayed for Holy Spirit baptism and began to speak in tongues. (They were soon referred to as "GlossoYalies."45) Given Pentecostalism's social rise, it was reported on by mainstream national media and claimed a newly prominent place in the American cultural landscape.46
The fact that Dennis Bennett left the Episcopal Church soon after his charismatic conversion belies a critical, and perhaps surprising, characteristic of the new movement that then spread out from California to Christian churches—both Protestant and Roman Catholic—around the country. Typically, charismatic converts were advised to remain within their own church traditions, to use the baptism of the Holy Spirit to enliven those traditions. After Holy Spirit baptism the believer was not to leave his or her church but rather to become a better member of it. This stance was facilitated by the fact that Charismatics rejected many of the cultural practices of previous revivalism, especially the "clean living" ethic (no smoking, drinking, dancing) and the disdain for contemporary culture. The Charismatics focused instead on the "attitude of heart" of the believer.47
What is remarkable about the movement, then—and has been well-documented by one of the movement's most prominent historians, Richard Quebedeaux—was its ability to bring together doctrinally various believers, to offer them a transforming experience of God, and to send them back, seemingly unchanged on doctrinal matters, to their own churches. Quebedeaux writes that "apart from specific theological and behavioral expectations a given church or fellowship group may impose on its own adherents, Charismatic Renewal as such has no mandatory or even optional statements of faith, and does not require compliance with any set code of conduct. Neo-Pentecostal unity is unity in a great deal of diversity."48 He goes on to cite several well-known charismatic leaders who explicitly argue against the importance of doctrinal agreement. Ralph Wilkerson, for example, pastor of
Quebedeaux also speculates that the very generality of the Holy Spirit became useful not only in the cause of ecumenism but also in solving problems within main-line churches themselves. Noting (as many Catholic scholars and historians have) the centrality of the Holy Spirit to the framing and deliberations of the Second Vatican Council, he suggests that "One can, perhaps, argue that Vatican II's stress on the Holy Spirit was the result of the failure of all other legitimations for doctrine, social policy, etc. When legitimations (papal infallibility, for instance) fail or become suspect, then the Holy Spirit might be a very useful (extremely general and unspecific) legitimation for any cause or policy."52 This suggestion would certainly meet with opposition within some Catholic circles, but it is also clear that Rome embraced the charismatic revival in its own ranks and looked upon it as a central building block of ecumenism during the early seventies at exactly the moment when, as the Catholic sociologist of religion Andrew Greeley has shown, American Catholics were responding negatively to the Humanae Vitae encyclical (1968) banning birth control, and leaving the church in droves.53 While I cannot claim that the two phenomena are causally linked—that Rome embraced charismatic renewal to compensate for the unpopularity of the encyclical—the historical coincidence suggests that the non-doctrinal appeal of charismatic renewal balanced other forces in the church that were severely dividing Catholics on doctrinal matters.
The very doctrinal pluralism of this intense and overwhelming Christian experience—so intense that, as I have noted, it was likened to first conversion at baptism—was echoed in the practical matter of glossolalia and its role in the church. St. Paul had been wary of its misuse [End Page 288] in the Corinthian church, urging believers there to desire prophecy over the gift of tongues, because the former addresses other people, the latter only God, and thus the former builds up the church while the latter builds up only the individual. He proclaims that he would thus rather "speak five words with my mind, so as to instruct others also, than ten thousand words in a tongue."54 Given this history, many contemporary believers considered it an inappropriate gift to exercise within the public rites of the liturgy, though some churches permitted it when the speaking was accompanied by translation, as
It should be said that the lore of the movement always included counter-examples, where a person began to speak in tongues and, as in the Pentecost described in the Acts of the Apostles, he or she happened to be telling God's good news in the language of a foreign person who happened to be listening. But these stories were sometimes discredited even by participants in the movement, and those who did believe them nevertheless did not think that commitment to glossolalia as a spiritual gift in the contemporary church required that one believe that all tongue-speakers were actually fluently speaking, without training, a language foreign to them.
Both the disinclination to demand translation of glossolalia in practice, and the lack of emphasis on the claim that glossolalia functioned in the same way it had for the apostles in Acts, echo the movement's broader lack of emphasis on the propositional content of belief. That is, while glossolalia was, for the charismatic movement, language without a meaning intelligible to the person who spoke it, the experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit was a moment of conversion largely without doctrinal consequences. This is not to say that those who underwent this second baptism did not change, nor is it to say that the charismatic movement had no consequences for the churches in which it took root. Indeed, the response of Dennis Bennett's bishop, in banning glossolalia, is indicative of the repugnance with which [End Page 289] many who did not embrace Holy Spirit baptism responded to their newly enthusiastic tongue-speaking brethren. Rather, it is to say that a single movement, and a single, identifiable religious experience, served to motivate and promote a variety of doctrines, many of them (as in the case of Roman Catholic and Protestant doctrines) conflicting. At the same time, Holy Spirit baptism represented a religious experience that looked like ecstatic possession, where the believer is completely overwhelmed, and his or her tongue taken over, by the power of God. If this doesn't seem as distasteful or coercive as the idea of Ginsberg taking possession of his listeners, it is only because God is God, and Ginsberg is not, his holy protestations notwithstanding. Like Ginsberg's vision of a supernaturally efficacious poetry, the Charismatic movement combined the ultimate experience of supernatural possession with an evacuation of content from language such that pluralism of belief could continue to thrive in the face of a common subjection to God.
What we might call the linguistic and doctrinal logic of the charismatic movement and the arguments about language that we find in the writing of Alan Watts thus share central characteristics with Ginsberg's beliefs about poetry and language in the sixties despite the obvious, and important, differences in world view between strictly Christian believers and syncretic believers like Ginsberg and Watts. Ginsberg's embrace of language as non-representational coincides with Watts's appeal to mysticism as the engine for the church's renewal (though by the 1970s,
I would note that J. L. Austin, whose performative language can look so similar to the formal and supernaturally efficacious language I have observed in Ginsberg, Burroughs,
Ginsberg himself, starting out on the cross-country drive that would occasion the poems of "these states" in The Fall of America (1972), registers how the understandings of language I have been describing were, literally, in the American air in the sixties. The poet, driving south from the Canadian border down to
Reproducing the multiple simultaneous radio broadcasts Ginsberg reinforces the feeling that the words in the air are somehow beyond intelligibility even when the speaker is not "hollering in tongues." He leaves intact sentence fragments—such as "almost like thinking," above—and in general presents the reader with language torn from the context that would make its sense apparent. The formal unintelligibility and fragmentation of language is a constant presence in the poems of this collection and culminates in "Wichita Vortex Sutra," where the words of politicians and others are said simply to be "language," signaling how, in that poem, language is emptied of content in order to display the occult power of the word itself. At this early point in the cross-country poetic journey, however, the content of fragmented [End Page 291] speech remains in play. Content matters in this poem because Ginsberg is out to suggest how clear and grammatically complete speech might also be unintelligible, not formally, but politically. On one hand the poet hears glossolalia and detached sentence fragments, which are formally unintelligible, on the other hand, he records propositions, such as the claim that
In this poem the formally and the politically nonsensical are not yet rendered utterly, and utterly formally, alike as they are in "Wichita Vortex Sutra," where the speech of all is rendered simply as "language," and we are not told what, exactly, each voice says. We see the two kinds of nonsense here in the process of coming together, as debate between incompatible positions is given over to formal inclusion. Not only are the glossolalic voices of
Both satire and good will are on display in Ginsberg's poetic version of glossolalia; Ginsberg takes the voices of an American holy night and attempts to redeem them by incantation, by taking the syllables of that "Aether," in all their incompatible, nonsensical glory, and putting them into the poem under the sign of the incarnate Word. If there is political critique in the Christmas greeting—and I think there is meant to [End Page 292] be critique—it is critique of a peculiar kind, in keeping with the version of pluralism on display in the Charismatic movement. It is critique that does not argue against, seek to unite, or seek even to interpret, opposing points of view. Rather, the incantation of cosmic good will—the poet's whimsical "Merry Christmas"—is left as the sole counter to the claims of Lodge and MacNamara and their like.
I want to suggest, in closing, that Ginsberg's success as a public figure in the sixties has to do with the supernatural and indiscriminate good will embodied in this poem's Christmas greeting. And so, while Ginsberg's fame in the sixties no doubt has many sources—among them his relentless schedule of public readings, his willingness to grant interviews, his embrace of the counterculture, his tireless promotion of his friends' work, and his growing political vociferousness—I think his fame is also linked to the popular mystical understandings of language that so closely mirrored his own conception of poetry. While the poetry he wrote after his return from India would never achieve the literary respect that his earlier work had garnered, and continues to receive, it was nevertheless the poetry that fueled his fame (Ginsberg won the 1974 National Book Award for The Fall of America, which is considered by many critics, even those who admire his entire ouvre, as a less successful collection59). This is precisely because, in the context of increasing interest in both mysticism and the materiality of language, his poetry held out a view of language that allowed it to become mystical to the same extent that it became primarily material, to escape the baggage of propositional content without losing its worldly—and otherworldly—power. And as The Fall of America itself demonstrates, Ginsberg's poetry acquired this power at a time when the impossibility of reconciling opposing visions of reality on the Left and the Right was shaking American politics to the core. Just as supernatural formalism allowed for both tolerance and coercion to coexist in religious experience and in Ginsberg's poetic vision, it also became a technology through which political critique could trade argument for incantation.
Amy Hungerford is the author of The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (
Endnotes
I wish to thank Sean McCann, Michael Szalay, Langdon Hammer, Pericles Lewis, Elliott Visconsi, Elizabeth Dillon, Diana Paulin, and Peter Chemery for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
1. Chicago Seven Trial testimony, in Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958–1996, ed. David Carter (
2. See, for example, Ginsberg's interview with Bob Elliot, for the
3. Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in
4. On the relationship between the counterculture and political activism in the sixties, see Rossinow. Rossinow shows how student groups like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), who in the early sixties disdained the counterculture as simply frivolous, drew closer to the "freaks" as they embraced culture—as distinct from institutions and government—as a legitimate realm for and target of political action. This shift made someone like Ginsberg seem political even when he was simply reading poetry.
5. Rubin and other organizers of the festival anticipated the violence but had not communicated this to Ginsberg, probably because they knew that Ginsberg would not participate in a demonstration intended to be violent. See the account in Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), esp. 510.
6. Quoted in the context of the Chicago Seven trial testimony, Spontaneous Mind, 234.
7. Chicago Seven Trial testimony, Spontaneous Mind, 214. Judge Hoffman was notoriously hostile to the defendants and defense witnesses in the trial, and was later rebuked when the verdict in the case was overturned along with his many contempt of court rulings regarding the participants in the trial. See Doug Linder, "Famous American Trials: The Chicago Seven Trial" at http://www.umkc.edu/famoustrials (c. 1995–2004).
8. Chicago Seven Trial testimony, Spontaneous Mind, 235.
9. Ibid., 238.
10. Ginsberg, Indian Journals, March 1962–May, 1963: Notebooks, Dairy, Blank Pages, Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1970), 42-43 ("everything random"), 45 ("I should write").
11. "Psalm I" from the collection Empty Mirror: Gates of Wrath, in Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947—1980 (New York: HarperCollins, 1984), 18. Collected Poems hereafter cited parenthetically.
12. See To Eberhart From Ginsberg (Lincoln, Massachusetts: Penmaen Press, 1976), 32.
13. It seems plausible that Ginsberg could have simply disagreed with Burroughs and carried on with the poetics he established in "Howl" and "Kaddish." It may have been his relationship to Burroughs, and the latter's forcefulness and charisma, that persuaded Ginsberg that the cut-up method must be taken seriously. Indeed, Ginsberg took most things (ideas, novels, poems, etc.) seriously if they emanated from a beloved friend.
14. Ginsberg, Indian Journals, 38–39.
15. Ibid.
16. William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, with foreword by Terry Southern (1959;
17. Ibid., 200; original emphasis and ellipses.
18. Ibid., original emphasis and ellipses.
19. Ibid., 202; original emphasis, spacing, and ellipses.
20. Transcript of selected testimony, from "Naked Lunch on Trial," in Burroughs, Naked Lunch, xv (all quotations). This last reflection seems to conflict with Mailer's assessment, a moment earlier in the trial, that on a second reading he "began to feel that . . . there is more to his [Burroughs's] intent" than he "had ever recognized before; that the work was more of a deep work, a calculated work, a planned work. In other words, the artistry in it was more deliberate and more profound than I thought before" (xiv). Perhaps the "intent" he refers to here is unconscious intent, and the calculation, planning and artistry was to be found in Burroughs's willingness—his deliberate decision—to write in such a way that unconscious intent could be made manifest (Mailer says he did not know exactly how the book was written, but that he had heard several different accounts).
21. Ibid., xvii (all quotations).
22. Ginsberg, Indian Journals, 38–39; original emphasis.
23. In a last-ditch effort to avoid confrontation over the march, the VDC and the Hell's Angels agreed to meet for a combination negotiation session-party at the home of Sonny Barger, leader of the
24. Though the publication dates of Planet News (1968) and The Fall of America (1972) place these collections at the end of the decade and into the seventies, the poems within them were composed between Ginsberg's return from India and the end of the sixties, and were well-known to the public throughout those years because of his frequent readings and interviews. Ginsberg did not hoard poems, but usually made them public in one way or another soon after they were composed.
25. For an excellent brief summary of the varieties and characteristics of yoga and of chant, see Mircea Eliade, "Yoga," and Sanjukta Gupta, "Mantra" in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade, 15 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 15:519–23 and 9:176–77, respectively.
26. Spontaneous Mind, 127.
27. Ibid., 154; original emphasis.
28. Ibid., 141–42; original ellipses.
29. It is worth noting that in this passage Ginsberg is characteristically rereading his early work to coincide with his latest theories of language, perhaps in the interest of making his poetic project appear seamless over time, or of enlisting the popularity of his older poems to serve his newest enthusiasms. For example, when Ginsberg writes a foreword to the 1976 publication of his 1956 letter about "Howl" to Richard Eberhart, he disavows his earlier "insistence on a divine self rather than a relatively heavenly emptiness" but goes on to suggest that "it was implicit that mindfulness insight and perfection of Self would lead to no-Self."(See Ginsberg, "More Explanations Twenty Years Later," in To Eberhart From Ginsberg [Lincoln, Massachusetts: Penmaen Press, 1976], 12). Following Ginsberg's lead in this causes one to miss the distinctive difference between the prophetic poetry of "Howl" and "Kaddish" and the poetry of emptiness and materiality that I argue defines his post-India work. See also note 31, below.
30. Spontaneous Mind, 142.
31. Tony Trigilio, for example, argues that the "Lord" and "Caw" at the conclusion of "Kaddish" signal the "Ah" of the later poetry: the non-referential material-transcendent prophetic language. I take the point that the Caw—as well as the "incomprehensible manuscripts," "scribblings, "yacketyyak," and babble of "Howl"—might be read as pointing towards a Buddhistic emptiness, and Ginsberg certainly did study Buddhism (on Kerouac's advice) in the fifties before and during the writing of "Howl" and "Kaddish." But in the sources Trigilio cites to support his reading Ginsberg is looking back at "Howl" and "Kaddish" from a markedly more Buddhist perspective, reading those poems in light of his later practice. Ginsberg seems invested in making his early poems contiguous with his later poems by the mid-sixties, even, but especially by the 1980s (the date of the annotations to "Howl" that Trigilio frequently cites). Trigilio is attentive to the difference between "Howl" and "Kaddish," and the ways the later poem alters, revises, and develops the version of prophetic language Trigilio finds in "Howl," but he does not apply that same sensitivity to reading Ginsberg's later comments on both poems. In the context of his discussion, Triglio provides a useful overview of various critics' responses to Ginsberg's Buddhism. See Trigilio, Strange Prophecies Anew: Rereading Apolcalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), esp. 131–49, where Trigilio relies heavily on Ginsberg's 1986 annotations to "Howl" and interviews from the sixties through the eighties; 139, for critical citations on Buddhism; and 172, where he aligns the "caw" and "Lord" from "Kaddish" with the Buddhist "Ah" from the later work.
Paul Portugés, for his part, marks a strong distinction between Ginsberg's post-India poetry and the early work that made him famous by emphasizing the difference between Ginsberg's discipleship to Blake (and the vision of Blake that served as his poetic inspiration during the first decade of his writing) and his post-India discipleship to Buddhist teachers. Nevertheless, many of the readings in the first part of the book, which examines the poetry from 1948 to 1961, during Ginsberg's discipleship to Blake, focus on Buddhistic aspects of the early poetry, deploying, as do Trigilio's readings, Ginsberg's own later rereadings of his early poems (see, for example, the reading of "Kaddish" as a "physical poetry" [End Page 295] centered around the breath, which Portugés supports by referencing Ginsberg's 1972 version of "How Kaddish Happened"; in Portugés, 80–81 and 172, n. 62).
In the context of the 1976 interviews with Ginsberg that constitute the second half of the book, on the subjects of Buddhism, mantras, and drugs, he and Ginsberg on a number of occasions look back on the pre-India poetics as having been committed to the same kinds of awareness and understandings of language inherent in the post-India work. Besides these reflections, Portugés's interviews with Ginsberg on Buddhism and mantra chanting are taken up largely with the details of how Buddhistic practice has translated into the poetry. He argues elsewhere, as I do here, that Buddhism is a way for Ginsberg to circumvent the rational mind. See Portugés, The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg (Santa Barbara: Ross-Erikson, 1978), esp. Part I, ch. V, and all of Part II; and also "Allen Ginsberg's Paul Cézanne and the Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus," Contemporary Literature 21 (1980).
John Lardas's study of the Beats' Spenglerian notion of religion and history is another example of an analysis that defines Ginsberg's spiritual poetics by the early work: his study breaks off by the late fifties, and insofar as it addresses Ginsberg's work in the sixties and beyond it focuses on his psychedelic experimentation (assigning Buddhism to Kerouac) and assimilates that to what Lardas has argued is Ginsberg's early Spenglerian religious outlook. Ginsberg's Om chanting in
A notable exception to these critics' tendency to read Ginsberg's work as expressing one essential outlook can be found in John Tytell's Naked Angels (1976), an early attempt to account for the Beat movement and the importance of its major writers. Tytell, providing detailed readings of Ginsberg's poetry from the first collection through Fall of America, is less concerned with making these collections cohere around one poetic project than with revealing the evolution of a poet he sees as part of a major tradition that includes the Romantics, Emerson, Whitman, Pound, Williams, and even Eliot. For Tytell, Ginsberg's Buddhism is part of a larger thread in the poetry that seeks to embrace all of life without judgment. As such, Buddhism is a force in the poetry that moderates the anger Ginsberg also mobilized (especially in "Howl," "Television was a Baby Crawling Toward that Death Chamber," and in the poems of Fall of America). See Tytell, Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).
32. Spontaneous Mind, 152.
33. Ibid., 174.
34. Ibid., 177.
35. Ibid., 178.
36. Ibid., 184.
37. Ibid., 183 (all quotations).
38. When Ginsberg describes what the return to the body in yoga and meditation means to him, he invariably speaks of calming the emotions, accepting one's humanity, ceasing the anger and the critical judgments that impede the disinterested love of all things. Nevertheless, as I will argue, a residue of supernaturalism remains, one which is especially revealing of more general understandings of language as supernatural in the sixties.
39. Portugés, 95–96.
40. "The metaphysics of presence" denotes the assumption that language implies a human speaker; Derrida argues against this assumption.
41. See my The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (
42. Alan Watts, Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion (New York: Random House, 1971), xii.
43. It should be noted that the Charismatic movement was not just an American phenomenon, though it originates in this country and, as I will show, it has a particular history with specific implications for American literature and culture. The movement had an impact on churches all over the world during the sixties and seventies, especially in
44. For an excellent account of these churches and of the roots of American Pentecostalism in the first half of the twentieth century, see Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
45. Richard Quebedeaux, The New Charismatics (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976), 58–59.
46. This is not to say that the phenomenon was exclusively the province of white, middle-class
47. "Attitude of heart" quoted from Robert Frost, respected Neo-Pentecostal teacher, in Quebedeaux, 134.
48. Ibid., 107; original emphasis.
49. Ibid., 124.
50. Ibid., 133.
51. Quebedeaux's examples of explicit statements to this effect are numerous and fascinating. Howard Ervin, whom Quebedeaux describes as "a chief theological spokesman for Neo-Pentecostalism" argues that doctrinal conformity is not so much an impossible ideal of unity as an actual barrier to Christian faith. "An anti-supernaturalism 'theology' has no solution, only theories, for the human predicament, which is basically man's alienation from God . . . On the other hand, a doctrinaire theological orthodoxy is not a serious option. It is essentially a refurbished scholasticism whose concept of metaphysical reality has congealed in abstract definitions and propositions. It is too prone to confound definition with essence," (Ervin, These are not Drunken, As Ye Suppose [Plainfield, N.J.: Logos International, 1968], 225–26, quoted in Quebedeaux, 127). Quebedeaux also points out that many who attended charismatic "Christian Centers" like Melodyland (established in 1960; in 1969 it moved into a defunct theater across the street from Disneyland) in fact have two religious affiliations—one to the center and another to what he calls an "historical" denomination (Quebedeaux, 122).
52. Quebedeaux, 230 (n. 6).
53. See Andrew M. Greeley, The Catholic Myth: The Behavior and Beliefs of American Catholics (New York: Scribner, 1990).
54. See 1 Corinthians 14:1–39.
55. As C. F. D. Moule writes, "The gift of tongues, as it is known today, seems usually to be a spontaneous welling up of a special language. It is not recognized as any known language . . . [For the private individual] it is, it would seem, a significant outlet of pent up praise or emotion too deep, too intense, for words: it is a perfect mode of private devotion. . . . what is offered as interpretation. . . . is often very general; and although it may have independent value, it can hardly be more successful as an interpretation of the tongues themselves than the notoriously hopeless attempt to describe the 'meaning' of music of ballet, of a poem, or of abstract art" (Moule, The Holy Spirit, 87, quoted in Gervais Angel, Delusion or Dynamite?: [End Page 297] Reflections on a Quarter-century of Charismatic Renewal [Eastbourne: MARC, 1989], 118).
56. Walter Hollenweger, quoted in Quebedeaux, 129.
57. C. F. D. Moule, The Holy Spirit (London: Mowbrays, 1978), 87, cited in Angel, 102
58. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, 2nd ed., ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 10
59. John Tytell, for example, sees it as less accomplished than the previous sixties volume, Planet News, and certainly more despairing, Ginsberg having become "Disoriented"from the yogic joy of his previous verse. See Tytell, 255–56
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