06年经典译文之亚文化—垮掉的一代（４）(3)

网络资源 Freekaoyan.com/2008-04-17

Criticism

One prominent critic of the Beats was Norman Podhoretz. He was a student at Columbia who knew Ginsberg and Kerouac (some of his student poetry was published by Allen Ginsberg before their falling-out). Later Podhoretz became editor of the neo-conservative publication Commentary.

In 1958, he published an article in the Partisan Review titled "The Know-Nothing Bohemians". As Russell Jacoby (in his book The Last Intellectuals) describes it, in this essay Podhoretz "defended civilization against the barbarians":

"There is a suppressed cry in those books [of Kerouac]: Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time." "The Bohemianism of the 1950s" is "hostile to civilization; it worships primitivism, instinct, energy, 'blood.'" For Podhoretz, "This is the revolt of the spiritually underprivileged."

Podhoretz thought he glimpsed a link between the beats and the delinquents, a common hatred of civilization and intelligence.

"I happen to believe that there is a direct connection between the flabbiness of American middle-class life and the spread of juvenile crime in the 1950s, but I also believe that juvenile crime can be explained partly in terms of the same resentment against normal feeling and the attempt to cope with the world through intelligence that lies behind Kerouac and Ginsberg."

Another quotation from "The Know-Nothing Bohemians":

"Being against what the Beat Generation stands for has to do with denying that incoherence is superior to precision; that ignorance is superior to knowledge; that the exercise of mind and discrimination is a form of death ..."

Ginsberg responded in a 1958 interview with The Village Voice (collected in Spontaneous Mind), specifically addressing the charge that the Beats destroyed "the distinction between life and literature.":

The novel is not an imaginary situation of imaginary truths — it is an expression of what one feels. Podhoretz doesn't write prose, he doesn't know how to write prose, and he isn't interested in the technical problems of prose or poetry. His criticism of Jack's spontaneous bop prosody shows that he can't tell the difference between words as rhythm and words as in diction ... The bit about anti-intellectualism is a piece of vanity, we had the same education, went to the same school, you know there are 'Intellectuals' and there are intellectuals. Podhoretz is just out of touch with twentieth-century literature, he's writing for the eighteenth-century mind. We have a personal literature now-Proust, Wolfe, Faulkner, Joyce.

Gary Snyder in a 1974 interview (collected in The Beat Vision), comments on the subject of "casualties" of the Beat Generation:

Kerouac was a casualty too. And there were many other casualties that most people have never heard of, but were genuine casualties. Just as, in the 60s, when Allen and I for a period there were almost publicly recommending people to take acid. When I look back on that now I realize there were many casualties, responsibilities to bear.

Quotes

"The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked."

- Amiri Baraka

"sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the lost generation's subsequent existentialism, I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation', he lept up and said 'That's it! That's right!'"

- Jack Kerouac

"But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality ... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearning of human souls ... woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! ... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back."

- Jack Kerouac

"Three writers does not a generation make."

- Gregory Corso

"Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose."

- Allen Ginsberg (quoted in Great Poets Howl: A Study of Allen Ginsberg's Poetry, 1943-1955 ISBN 3820477616)

"Once when Kerouac was high on psychedelics with Timothy Leary, he looked out the window and said, 'Walking on water wasn't built in a day.' Our goal was to save the planet and alter human consciousness. That will take a long time, if it happens at all."

- Allen Ginsberg