Power and Culture
Poli 110J 08
The teeth and excrement of this life
Howl
• 1957 Obscenity trial in San Francisco
– "filthy, vulgar, obscene, and disgusting language.”
– Judge: “Would there be any freedom of press or
speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid
innocuous euphemisms?”
• 2007 Obscenity fear
– Pacifica radio planned to broadcast in order to
commemorate 50th anniversary of Howl’s protection
under First Amendment
– But feared fines from the FCC, put it online
– Differing basis of censorship: public morals vs.
“offensiveness” and affordability of free speech
Reading poetry
• Poetry is the art of arranging words in the
maximally powerful order
• Look up any references that you don’t
understand
– Poetry derives a part of its power from allusion to
other sources
• Don’t ask what it MEANS, ask what it DOES
– Poetry is art, not a secret code
Howl
• Clear American identity
– Influence of Walt
Whitman
– Similar mystical and
political concerns
• Brotherhood, spirituality,
equality, repression,
sexuality
• The title
– What is a howl?
Background
• 1926-1997
• “Beat” poet
• Ginsberg’s mother, Naomi Livergant Ginsberg
– Politically radical and mentally unwell, hugely influential
on Ginsberg’s life & work
– His other most famous poem, “Kaddish”, written at her
death
• Carl Solomon
– Ginsberg met him in a mental institution during a period
when each was briefly institutionalized. Formed lifelong
friendship.
Part I
• “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness”
– Who are the best? What is meant by “best minds”?
What does it mean that they are the ones destroyed?
• Reflected in word choice: the use of coarse language in high
art
– Frames all of part I of the poem
• Who…
– The actions of part I are those of these destroyed
minds, efforts to escape and transcend.
• Ironically, those most despised by society at large are in fact
its best
Transcendence
• A spiritual overcoming of the world in which
we find ourselves
– To reject and vault above the material world, to
access some higher spiritual good (union with
God, truth, salvation, true self, enlightenment)
– Emphasized in the mystical aspects of many world
religions
Transcendence
• Modes of
transcendence
– Spirituality
– Humiliation of the flesh
– Sex
– Drugs
– Art
– Violation of taboo
Transcendence
• Over a world of power, materialism, and time:
• “Who threw their watches off the roof / to
cast their vote for Eternity outside of Time, &
alarm clocks / fell on their heads every day for
the next decade” (16)
– Desperate attempts to transcend end in failure
• “…or were run down by the / drunken taxicabs
of Absolute Reality” (16)
– What could be more crudely real than that?
• “Who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on
Dadaism…” (18)
– Carl Solomon
– Is this not a better appreciation of Dada than a
lecture?
– Beauty and meaning in art that transcend rational
analysis
– Resistance against the dominance of unreason by
the rational
• ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe,
and / now you’re really in the total animal
soup of / time—
• “an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani
saxophone / cry that shivered the cities down
to the last radio” (20)
• “with the absolute heart of the poem of life
butchered / out of their own bodies good to
eat a thousand / years.” (20)
Howl pt. I
• “I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by madness”
• Transcendence
• Failure & destruction
Howl, pt. II
• What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed
open their skulls and ate up their brains and
imagination? (21)
– “the best minds of my generation”
– Inhuman, monstrous
– Crudely material, vs. the spirit
Moloch!
• Rashi, 12th c. French rabbi & commentator:
– “Tophet is Moloch, which was made of brass; and
they heated him from his lower parts; and his
hands being stretched out, and made hot, they
put the child between his hands, and it was burnt;
when it vehemently cried out; but the priests beat
a drum, that the father might not hear the voice
of his son, and his heart might not be moved.”
Moloch!
• Leviticus 18:21: “And thou shalt not let any of thy
seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt
thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD.”
• A divine commandment to disdain
• Worship of Moloch equated to profaning the name of God.
• Cannibal-god of the Canaanites, the enemies of the
children of Israel
– The enemies of the few, the chosen, the faithful
• Idolatry and abomination
• Also a reference to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
(1927), which depicts industrial society itself
as Moloch, a concept that Ginsberg expands in
pt. II
• Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness!
– Brute materialism
– Repression
– Cannibal
– Blasphemy, unholy
– Loveless, sexless
• “They broke their backs lifting Moloch to
Heaven!” (22)
– The best minds of my generation
– Failed attempt, not to themselves transcend, but
to elevate the profane into transcendent holiness
– “Heaven which exists and is everywhere around
us!”
• The transcendent is not fantasy, it is as real as the
material brutality that has displaced it
• Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles!
ecstasies! / gone down the American river!
– “down the river”
• Betrayed, cheated: “sold down the river” refers to the
way in which difficult slaves in the Northern slave states
would be sold into harsher conditions in the South
• Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions!
the whole / boatload of sensitive bullshit!
– Un-rational aspects of human existence, bringing
meaning to life
– A sincere embrace of what the calculating,
materialistic Moloch deems a “boatload of
sensitive bullshit”
• “They bade farewell! / They jumped off the
roof! to solitude! waving! / carrying flowers!
Down to the river! into the street!
Part III
• “Pyramidal” structure: lengthening responses
to “I’m with you in Rockland” structure
• Rockland a mental institution
– Real institution Columbia Presbyterian
Psychological Institute
– What is suggested by the name of Rockland?
• But even there there is love & friendship
I’m with you in Rockland
• where you bang on the catatonic piano the
soul / is innocent and immortal it should
never die / ungodly in an armed madhouse
– The spiritual elevated over the material
• But it can be killed
– Ungodly armed madhouse sounds a lot like
Moloch
• The asylum is the world in microcosm
I’m with you in Rockland
• where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
/ plan the Hebrew socialist revolution against
the / fascist national Golgotha
– Inversion: inmates in charges of the asylum
• Though Solomon is “madder than I am”
– Plans of the ultimate victory of the few, the holy,
and the oppressed
– Moloch = “fascist national Golgotha”
• The place of the skull
• Martyrdom & crucifixion
I’m with you in Rockland
• where you will split the heavens of Long Island /
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the /
superhuman tomb
– Emergence of the transcendence into the mundane
– Superhumanity equated with death, the tomb
• The Chief of Police, the image, and the tomb
– Life and the miracle of resurrection are properties of
the human
• Resurrection the definitive triumph of the spiritual and
divine over the material world
I’m with you in Rockland
• where we wake up electrified out of the coma
/ by our own souls’ airplanes…
– Fantasies of the final triumph of the soul over the
material world, vision of what that world would
look like
– O victory forget your underwear we’re/ free
I’m with you in Rockland
• in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea/journey on the highways across America in tears
/ to the door of my cottage in the Western night
– In Rockland the only consolation is memory and
imagination
– Though the speaker is with Solomon in Rockland, they
are not physically present to each other
– Though some small comfort is possible, the speaker
remains within the godless, armed madhouse
Footnote to Howl
• A footnote
– Separate from, below the text
– Either
• Provides clarification for the text
• Provides additional understanding and context for the
text that are not strictly needed in the text itself
Footnote to Howl
• Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
– Radical tonal shift, from sadness and solitude,
futility and self-destruction, cannibal-gods and
insane asylums to ecstatic recognition of universal
holiness
– Holiness =/= sacredness
• Holiness is the mark of the presence and/or favor of
God
Footnote to Howl
• The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is
holy! / The nose is holy! The tongue and cock
and hand / and asshole holy!
– Continues theme that the despised are in fact the
elevated
– But begins to attack the duality present in the
poem so far, as both the spiritual and the material
are presented as of like holiness
Footnote to Howl
• Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy
the / clocks in space holy the fourth
dimension holy / the fifth International holy
the Angel in Moloch!
– Fifth International
– Unity of opposites
– Sacredness present even in the most profane
Footnote to Howl
• Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy!
Ours! / bodies! suffering! magnanimity!
– Holiness here is achieved, as the “best minds” failed
to do
– Not in transcendence, but in immanence
– Not “lifting Moloch to Heaven,” but recognizing the
“Angel in Moloch”
• Not elevating the earthly into the divine, but recognizing the
presence of divinity in the mundane. The world, good and
bad, spiritual and material, is itself holy.