When we listened to Ginsberg's live reading of Howl today in class, his emphatic, Gene Wilder-esque monotone seemed to convey the same meaning that the famous comedic actor bestowed on his best-yelled parts; that he was raising his voice to his audience because that's how he shows sincerity. It would be a different story if Ginsberg had scoffed or jeeringly said the words, but instead he blew right through them as easily as if he were stating prepositions.
The only other possible reason I can think of is this: I definitely get that one of the main tenants of beatitude (which was carried over to the hippies) is the idea of "sticking it to the man;" boldly stating you smoke pot whenever the chance arises seems, especially considering the time context, to be a pretty strong "fuck you" to the powers that be. This is all by the way of saying that Ginsberg could easily just be trying to mock political correctness. Of course I'm not sure that the whole PC concept was around "back in the day," but in my (probably relentlessly stuck-up) mind is the only justification for bandying about words that large contingents of people would almost certainly find offensive.
2 comments:
I think you bring up very interesting ideas about Ginsberg. Although he may come across as a horrible racist, I think he is only trying to represent these lower-class people with a "beat" attitude, that somehow these groups of people contain certain elements of beatitude. They are people you can learn something from, even if written about in a negative connotation. He can be offensive, but i think in Ginsberg's situation this serves to represent his point and to provide a jarring image for the public masses.
Andy... right about AG's shocking language! It's no wonder there was such an uproar back when it first came out...the piece was put on trial, etc. On one hand, I also cringe a bit at the invocations of "chinamen" and "indians" - and I can't say I don't detect a hint of p/incorrectness (by today's standards, anyway). We can definitely read the limits of their vision of indians, etc.
But on the other hand, I'm a bit more generous with AG and some of the other Beats because they weren't setting out to be exclusive or vicious. They wanted to talk about other types of people, and knew a lot about different traditions, etc. - all pretty revolutionary at the time. So, although they talk about them with shades of short-sightedness (which were very very common at the time), they did so with a certain good intention...which makes them seem a little less "racist" to me.
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