Jack Kerouac, an American writer and poet, is best known as the founding member of the Beat literary movement, which he named the Beat Generation. The Beats were a group of American writers, poets and other intellectuals who came to prominence in the late 1950s. The original Beat group was small, consisting of Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, William Burroughs, and J.C. Holmes. It started to form in the late 1940s in New York and rebelled against American conformism, consumerism, capitalism, the military-industrial complex, racism, ecological destruction, and conventional family life.
From the very beginning, the goal of Kerouac's artistic creativity was to leave behind a true record of his times. Having crossed the United States many times, he had an awareness of the limitless possibilities America had to offer to all its inhabitants. However, post- WW II America was growing into a strong industrial and bureaucratic police state, the power of which was mostly in the hands of white managerial and professional classes. The possibilities of lower classes and racial minorities to lead a decent life were extremely limited, and many of these groups lived a marginalized life on the brink of American society.
The Meaning of the Word Beat
The word beat was primarily in use after WW II by jazz musicians and hustlers as a slang term meaning ''down and out, poor or exhausted, or rejected by society.'' The original Beats first heard it in the late 1940s from Herbert Huncke, a Times Square hustler and thief. Kerouac, fascinated by this word, felt that it could serve his own purpose and express the ideas he wanted to communicate in his early literary works. For him, the word beat expressed the state of postwar American society, which was riddled with racism and lived in the fear of nuclear war and communism.
Kerouac took the basic meaning of the word and added to it the religious dimension, thus changing beat to beatific. For him, the Beat Generation was a religious movement in search of new American values, the American Dream and spirituality, and this search was supposed to be done through literature. For Jack Kerouac, a true beatnik was a person who rejected mainstream values like materialism, conformism, and the suburbanized family life.
The Ideology of the Beats
Jack Kerouac and the Beats wanted to distance themselves from mainstream America; one of their goals was not to conform to traditional middle-class materialistic aspirations. The Beats revolted against conventional family roles. They indulged in sexual experimentation, and regarded regular employment as another expectation tying them to society.
Spontaneity, freedom, drug use and jazz also shape the complicated ideology of the Beats. To understand the Beat vision, it is vital to understand that at its core lay Beat masculinity. In short, the movement represented the 20th century white male rebellion, in which there was no place for women. The term beat was reserved only for men, and dissociation from anything mainstream, including women, was key in the establishment of the Beat Generation.
In the 1950s, housekeeping and child-rearing were considered ideal female roles, which tied them to the domestic sphere. Men were also expected to assume the role of the husband, father, and breadwinner. Consequently, the Beat movement placed women directly in connection with notions of marriage and family. Since marriage and family life were viewed as traditional institutions in the eyes of the Beats, they often rejected them and rebelled against them.
The place of women in the Beat movement was artistically and socially extremely limited. Women usually assumed a subordinate position in the movement and became playthings and muses to the male writers. Beat men, even the married ones, turned for emotional intensity not to women, but to other men. We could say that the Beats seldom considered their women as their colleagues or equals. They saw women as defenders of decorum, conformity and domesticity. Consequently, women represented something to rebel against.
The original members of the Beat Generation group used a number of different intoxicants. In addition to the alcohol common in American life, they also experimented with marijuana, Benzedrine and morphine. They claimed that these drugs were used to stimulate their artistic creativity; however, quite often these substances were used merely as a means of hedonistic intoxication. Kerouac claimed that his drug experiments were directed toward his art. He was convinced they gave him further access to his memories and private images. In other words, the drugs he was using gave him access to explore his subconscious mind and enabled him to reach states of expanded awareness.
Literary Experimentation of the Beats
Kerouac and his literary circle also shared an interest in literary experimentation. Their work stressed spontaneous and uncensored writing that was usually based on their experiences on the periphery of American society. The most important spokesman and advocate of spontaneous and uncensored writing in the group was Jack Kerouac, whose philosophy was based on the insistence that the writer should refuse inhibition and self-censorship. In fact, Kerouac was evolving his philosophy of spontaneous composition that had to do with ''the undisturbed flow from the mind'' (Nicosia 1994: 453).
The Meaning of the Term ''Beat Generation''
Kerouac first sat down to discuss the term Beat Generation with his fellow writer and friend Holmes in 1948. The basic ideas of Kerouac's vision were first put on paper in Holmes' novel Go from 1952. Shortly afterwards, in November 1952, The New York Times commissioned an article from Holmes, entitled This is the Beat Generation. The article officially launched the term. In it, Holmes characterized the Beat Generation ''as a cultural revolution in progress, started by the post-WW II generation of dissatisfied young people coming of age into the Cold War world without any spiritual values they could honour'' (Charters 1992: xx).. However, Holmes saw the Beat Generation as life-affirming rather than life-evading: ''They drink to 'come down' or to 'get high', not to illustrate anything. Their excursions into drugs or promiscuity come out of curiosity, not disillusionment'' (Nicosia 1994: 423).
But it was not until the publication of On the Road in 1957, that the Beat literary group became widely known to the public. Kerouac was besieged by requests to explain it. The following is a vague definition he gave to J.C. Holmes in 1948: ''It's a sort of furtiveness. Like we were a generation of furtives. You know, with an inner knowledge there's no use flaunting on that level, the level of the 'public', a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world...It's something like that. So I guess you might say we're a beat generation'' (Nicosia: 1994: 252).
In the article entitled The Philosophy of the Beat Generation, which he wrote for Esquire magazine in 1958, Kerouac emphasized that the ideas of the Beat Generation were the ideas of the primary circle of the Beats and no one else. In the late 1950s, the original word beat lost its specific reference, and became a synonym for anyone living a bohemian lifestyle and acting rebelliously, or appearing to advocate a revolution in manners. In the 1960s, the Beat movement was replaced by the hippies as representatives of another alternative American culture.
Sources:
Brinkley, Douglas, ed. Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954. New York: Viking Penguin, 2004.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. London: Penguin Books, 2000.
Nicosia, Gerald. 1983. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. Berkley, Los Angeles: California UP, Ltd., 1994.
Weinreich, Regina. Kerouac's Spontaneous Poetics. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1987.
McNally, Dennis. 1979. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, and America. New York: Da Capo Press, 2003.
Charters Ann, ed. The Portable Beat Reader. USA: Viking Penguin, 1992.
Tanja Batista - Tanja Batista has a BA in English Language and Literature from the Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
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