What Did the Beat Generation Want?

Where there is culture, there is counterculture. And so, to understand what the members of the Beat Generation wanted, it is first important to know what they were opposing. The movement that directly preceded the Beats was Modernism, and even though the Beat Generation emerged from particular motives other than mere opposition, the two couldn’t have been more different from one another.

Modernists like Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce sought to break away from past norms by creating new ones. They sought ways to push the boundaries of the literary medium they inhabited while conforming to its bare requirements. In simple terms, the novel remained a novel, and the play remained a play; but new methods of narration were introduced. The stream-of-consciousness method is a prime example, as in the case of As I Lay Dying, a novel in the traditional sense but with an experimental approach. The Beats, drawing inspiration from other sources such as jazz music and psychedelics, went a step further and moved farther from literary norms.

When the Beats appeared, they wanted to rebel against existing literary foundations, societal norms, and most importantly, concepts of morality. The Beat Generation’s origins can be traced back to the 1940s, specifically to Columbia University in New York where Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs met for the first time.

Despite their shared disregard for academia, the Beats initially engaged in the exchange of ideas in opposition to their literature and philosophy professors. These three writers, alongside many others, shared a vision that included everything from literature and philosophy to experiments with spirituality. Even though their aesthetics and themes had been set, their work continuously refused to be defined by them. Their work found inspiration in the lives they inhabited and encompassed lives often larger than theirs.

Literature Deconstructed and Reconstructed Anew 

Each literary movement has a handful of landmark works, and in the case of the Beat Generation, we have three. A simple analysis of these works can showcase just what it is that made the Beats so different from others.

Howl by Allen Ginsberg begins with a declaration: “I’ve seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” It has since become one of the most famous lines in the history of the art form that is poetry. Ginsberg’s opening line is followed by a torrent of obscenity, graphic references to sex, and other words guaranteed to upset the masses. Howl disregards any poetry foundations or rules, instead prioritizing raw and unfiltered expression.

William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is somewhat similar. While one is a piece of poetry and the latter a piece of prose, they share more similarities than differences. Both works were the subject of obscenity trials, both gained a notorious reputation because of their graphic displays of homosexuality and drug experimentation, but most importantly, both became staples of the Beat Generation.

Naked Lunch has often been described as the literary manifestation of a drug-infused trip. This stream-of-consciousness sees Burroughs delving deep into the byproducts of his experimentations with hallucinogens, and the result is a challenging work that captures the unique life of this controversial author. The story revolves around a narcotics addict as he travels from New York to Tangiers, living in between reality and the hellish creations of his drug experimentations. Naked Lunch is notoriously difficult to read and follow, as it embodies the Beats’ general disregard for literary norms and exaggeratingly so.

The most accessible work—and coincidently, the most iconic one belonging to the Beats—is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The Beats advocated for free sexuality and drug experimentation. They also wanted to explore one’s soul and purpose. Some Beats did it through spiritual practices, while others traveled. On the Road is Kerouac’s journal following his travels through America and Mexico in a state of vagabond. It was written in a very short period of three weeks, but as Kerouac himself said, “It took three weeks to write, but I was on the road for years.”

The Beats revolutionized literature and tore apart societal norms, but most importantly, they were the predecessors of the great counterculture movements of the 20th century. Kerouac and his friends emerged at a pivotal moment in America’s history. Fresh out of a World War fought abroad and recovering from the Great Depression, mid-1940s America was witnessing an unprecedented economic boom. Below the picturesque American dream was an underlying dark reality, one of obsessive consumerism and devout materialism.

The Beats rejected these values, claiming them as mortal to man’s soul and values, seeing them as a threat to individuality. The Beats lived humbly and found wealth in other ventures of life. Kerouac summarized this by writing: “Everything belongs to me because I am poor.”

The Beatniks—the Beats’ followers and fans—adopted these values and sought solace in literature and arts. During the 1960s, the hippies appeared and continued the quest of rejecting materialistic America.

This very spirit of counterculture, based on the conscious rejection of the values of materialistic America, and the cause of change and the Civil Rights movement can be traced back to the Beats. The members’ involvement in political life differed, but it was ultimately their influence that caused upheaval, not their efforts themselves. For example, while Ginsberg was very actively engaged with political life, Burroughs led a more private life and let his writing carry his political messages.

The Beats’ Fight Against Censorship

It is amusing to think that less than a century ago, a literary work could be faced with censorship and provoke so much anger in the USA. Starting from their university years, the Beat authors made it clear that they were against censorship in any form. For them, art was something that was supposed to function without boundaries.

In the second half of the 1950s, when the three most important works of the Beats were published, their first-hand clashes with the issue of censorship commenced. Immediately after the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1956, publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti was arrested and put on trial for obscenity. The fight to keep Howl on the shelves was eventually successful with the aid of the American Civil Liberties Union. William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch suffered a similar fate because of its displays of alcoholism, sexuality, drug use, and violence—and again, the Beats won. It is because of their relentless fights against the censorship machine that we can enjoy freedom of expression in literature.

The Beats first emerged in 1950s America, and although it has been less than a century, one should not underestimate how conservative its society was. Of course, it was progressive by the era’s standards and compared to most other nations, but by modern standards, it was anything but. Now imagine a group of young authors openly discussing homosexuality, claiming it as identity, and preaching sexual liberation.

The confrontation between the two can be nothing other than a violent clash. Media coverage of the Beat Generation often succumbed to shock tactics: stories of deprived sexual acts, orgies, and exploitation were sadly assigned to these authors for the embracement of their sexualities. The Beats preached women’s liberation, even though this aspect of their narrative is often shrouded. This is probably due to the fact that only three names are most often associated with the movement, and the rest, regardless of their gender, get lost in the shadows.

Still, the Beat Generation had many great female authors, and their impact on modern culture should not be underestimated. Diane DiPrima, Ruth Weiss, and Joanne Kyger are just a few of the names who published great works that remain parts of the Beat canon.

Diane DiPrima’s novel Dinners and Nightmares deserves special recognition for its portrayal of 1950s America. It effectively criticizes conservatism and directly challenges the notion that women should have limited freedom of speech. The impact of female Beat authors can be noticed starting from the 1960s. Female rock musicians like Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, and Joni Mitchell who were stuck between music and poetry, were direct products of their Beat ancestors.

Transcendentalism was one of the major influences on the Beat Generation, and it was the American Henry David Thoreau who set them on this path in the first place. In his iconic work Walden, Thoreau explored the idea of living in complete solitude, relying on the fruits of one’s manual labor and earthly resources. This philosophy of spiritual enlightenment through material neglect has since been discussed thoroughly.

German philosopher Oswald Spengler gave it a new character: the fellaheen. Borrowed from Arab culture, where the term means a field worker or someone working in agriculture, and is generally thought of as equivalent to humble and hard worker. The Arabic word for field worker presents to Sprengler that those who are downbeat are the closest to spiritual discovery. When the Beats adopted this philosophy, the fellaheen were given different names: desolation angels for Ginsberg and Subterraneans for Kerouac. The quest for spirituality eventually led the Beats to Eastern schools of thought, namely Buddhism.