BEAT, BEATNIK, OR DIET BEAT: THE CHOICE OF A NEW GENERATION
by Mitchell J. Smith
The popular definition of the terms "beat," "beatnik," and "Beat Generation" have in the past 41 years undergone numerous changes wrought by the market and the media. In the 1990s a neoconservative, nonactivist image has been fashioned for the Beats that serves both the function of selling products and defusing rebellious impulses. This new image takes the complex philosophical challenges that Kerouac and others posed for the dominant culture and reduces them to a fashion which can then be marketed. The oppositional power of the public image of the Beats is then assimilated through this process of commodification. It is useful, then, to examine how the definitions of the Beat Generation as conceived by its founders differ from those media images; the process of change that the images have undergone in order to be marketable then becomes clear. The culture which is receptive to these newly defined Beat images can also be examined, and the political and social ends that the images serve can be identified. And finally we can separate the original Beat Generation from its market-generated version, and thus counter criticism based upon the marketed representations.
The original definition of the term "Beat Generation" was developed by John Clellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac to describe people their age living in New York City during the 1940s. The term "beat" itself comes from the image of being "beaten down" to one's bare essentials, of being too worn down by the Depression, World War II, and the new atomic threat to have the energy to construct any kind of false morality or mask for oneself and instead to be nakedly honest before the world. This was, however, a period of direct and purposeful attacks on the notion of individualism, manifested in anti-communism, the growth of bureaucracies, of mass media, of corporations, and the practice of electroshock and lobotomy for those suffering from "social diseases" such as homosexuality or nonconformity. In this period, the "individual" became by definition synonymous with anti-social thinking or even mental illness.
According to Holmes and Kerouac, their generation responded to this with a celebration--sometimes defiant, sometimes secretive--of the individual and unique self and its liberation. This further implied a rejection, not simply of the particular moral and behavioral orthodoxies that had become oppressive, but also of any doctrine which served to codify or justify intolerance. While the previous generation of poets had lamented the collapse of moral absolutes which resulted in an existential void, the Beats embraced this void as "accommodating space," to use Kerouac's terms. The Beats, who were also highly critical of politics, saw any type of political ideology as being ultimately oppressive, whatever its specifics. Naturally the Beats were also critical of conformity to mass and traditional values, because these would inhibit one's natural self. Instead the Beats valued spontaneity as a lifestyle and as a process by which to negate the "conventions of the world" and discover a more immediate response free from socialized preconceptions. The Beats were critical of capitalism for the dehumanizing conditions of labor in this country, as well as the dehumanizing effects of the desire for its materialistic products. Instead they valued the often ascetic, even impoverished life of the artist for pursuing a personal and liberating vision for oneself and others.
All of this is a long way off from bongo drums, hip chicks, and espresso bars full of cool cats in goatees snapping their fingers and saying, "Go crazy, Daddyo," but ironically it was the Beat writers' books which helped launch the mass marketing of such superficial images. So, in its second incarnation, the term "Beat Generation" referred not so much to an actual generation but to a group of increasingly famous, or infamous, writers. One effect of this was that it led to the perception of this generation as being something created, as a literary character, rather than as something observed. As a literary creation, and one not under copyright, the Beat Generation was open to refiguring in numerous media forms. The sales of the original novels and books of poetry were indicative of the market potential here. The initial moral disputes over the works translated into a need for some modification to make the Beat Generation properly marketable. But the titillation and controversy created by the disputes could also be seen as free advertising to help sales.
This then led quickly into the third incarnation of the Beat Generation: its marketable version, the "beatnik." The strategy was to market the Beats as a style or form, with the content either missing or altered. Soon the fad had little to do with the beliefs of the famous writers; rather it was about what they were wearing at the time they made their famous utterances, or more accurately it was about what their more slick imitators were wearing. The images of these newly created beatniks proliferated in the world of media and the mass market. They appeared in clothing fashions. They were characters on TV shows like Make Room for Daddy or had their own shows like Route 66. There were beatnik exploitation films such as The Beat Generation, about a beatnik rapist and murderer, The Wild Ones, about beatnik bikers, and The Subteranneans, which was based on Kerouac's novel about a love affair between a white man and a black woman but which Hollywood, to make things a little less shocking, changed to an affair between a white man and a French woman. There was even a beatnik issue of Mad magazine which highlighted such beatnik attributes as their refusal to take a bath, get a job, or take part in square society. Beatnik images also popped up in ads and logotypes used to sell other products. The purest market product would have to be the Rent-A-Beatnik service. Started by Village Voice photographer Fred McDarrah, the beatniks were advertised as "Badly groomed but brilliant." The idea was that if you were having a party in a swanky uptown Manhattan setting and things had gotten a little too tame for you and your guests, you could pay a beatnik to come to your party, where he would ideally use foul language, expound a bit on existentialism, insult your guests, play his bongos, read his poetry, and generally give everyone a thrilling taste of the bohemian slum. This turns the Beat into pure image, a kind of shabby Ken doll to be marketed as pure capital product. The beatniks may be read as an outrage to contemporary mores, but they are an outrage only against the prevailing tastes and fashions, which is nothing more than any new fashion does. While the Beat attitude rejects poses and superficial masks as conformity to preconceptions, the Rent-A-Beatnik service had the effect of fetishizing appearance and further capitalizing on it in a way that would have been antithetical to the ascetic early Beats.
The image of the Beats was split into what John Maynard, in his book Venice West, has labeled the popular images of the "good" and "bad" beatnik. The "good" beatnik is pictured as having all the typical Beat tastes for jazz, shabby clothes, sunglasses, and berets, but he is a basically good-hearted, loyal, funny person who is rather naive and terrified of social conventions like work, baths, and marriage. The figure of the "good" beatnik is probably best characterized by Maynard G. Krebs from the television show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. As John Maynard shows, Krebs' fear of women is a way of emasculating the Beats, making them seem both pitiful and tame. The emphasis on Krebs as a tame, ineffectual creature seems to be an extension of the Beat idea of non-confrontation, but here it is taken to an extreme that negates the very real social criticisms that the Beats embodied. Legitimate attacks on the personal, social, and environmental dangers of the growing industrial state of the 1950s, which the Beats were by no means alone in expressing, are here trivialized through humor and reduced to a gag. Attention is shifted away from the criticisms of corporate structure and political power to an ad hominem attack on those voicing the criticism. The "bad" beatnik, however, is violent, uses drugs, and may be a biker or some other sort of social degenerate. He will generally not be physically strong (and therefore not a "real" man), but he will make up for this by preying on the weak. A classic portrayal of this can be found in the main character of the film The Beat Generation, who sits in espresso houses listening to poetry and then rapes and kills on his way home. Early in the film he justifies his behavior by saying that since nuclear bombs may start falling at any time, there is no reason to live as if there will be a tomorrow. This portrayal conflates dissent, such as protest against nuclear weapons, with criminality and thus stigmatizes those who choose to engage in any form of action against the government.
The beatnik thus provided a useful marketing image to reach the growing population of young consumers, albeit one altered to fit their demands. The 1950s was a period of social stability on the verge of instability, and the image of the "good" beatnik provided a safe outlet for young people's growing dissatisfaction. Rebelliousness could be trivialized by focusing on the superficial aspects of beatnik fashion that could perhaps satisfy those impulses but which presented no real threat to the established order. Rebellious impulses could also be channeled into the beatnik path of the apolitical dropout, the anti-activist who seeks to change nothing. The image of the "bad" beatnik could then be used to stigmatize anyone who defied the social order. It was J. Edgar Hoover who, with his typically tenuous grip on reality, stated that the three greatest threats to America were Communists, eggheads, and beatniks. Significantly, after Kennedy's election and the continued swell of youth culture throughout the sixties, the beatnik and the original Beats faded out of the mass media as both a marketing image and a literary movement, both replaced by more overt and engaged forms of rebellion.
Then in the eighties, during the Reagan years, which in many ways mirrored the Eisenhower period, the literature of the Beats saw a rise in popularity, with the beatnik once again becoming a familiar image in popular culture. This media redefinition of the Beat might be thought of as its fourth incarnation. The image can be spied once again on television in episodes of Doogie Howser and Quantum Leap. In the latter, Kerouac appears as a character, warning the young that they should not become violent bikers but instead should stay safely at home. The program reduces the choices available to dissatisfied young people to either a safe, "neoconservative" life of conformity or a life of violence and destructive ends. There are also beatnik movies like Heartbeat, Naked Lunch, and Roadside Prophets, and movies whose directors riff off Beat motifs as in Wild At Heart (which might be retitled On The Road Goes To Hell) and Salvador (On The Road and the Adventure of the Central American Death Squads). Beatniks have appeared in popular music by 10,000 Maniacs, The Dharma Bums, Tom Waits, and King Crimson. There are also beatnik products and ads, such as the one for Cappio, an iced espresso drink. And there is the curious publishing phenomenon of Ann Charters, whose Beat memorabilia and anthology volumes are assembled not with critical analysis but with a rolodex: a testament to her power as an editor to get release rights on so many published works and to the continuing marketability of the Beat Generation.
Some examples of these market products may be examined more closely, both to show the degree to which their representations are unlike the first incarnation of the Beat Generation and to see how the Beat aesthetic has changed in its travel through three decades. A fashion piece from the June 2, 1989 LA Weekly provides an excellent example. Entitled the "Re-Beat Generation," the piece describes the fashions and intellectual obsessions of the post-punk twenty-something generation. The text claims to describe the "great tradition of the Beat Generation," which here is interestingly pictured as: "neoconservative ... noncommittal ... cool ... sophisticat[ed] ... [but] no strict revival of Kerouac and Cassady, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti." And though the fashion is described as "so subtle as to elude description," their clothing ("black turtlenecks, baggy trousers, secondhand wing tips"), their affectations ("goatees, berets"), and their tastes ("Dizzy and Chet, underground poetry, John Fante, Fellini") are described rather precisely and with striking accuracy, as if these were instructions for designing a museum display of the classic media beatnik. This piece shows that the Beats are still being represented through their 1950s marketing images, and that the original writers are also read in that context. This blurring of the difference between Beats and beatniks also occurs in a recently released product, the Beat Boxed set of CDs released by Rhino Records, which combines readings by Beat Generation writers such as Kerouac with exploitation bits by Lord Buckley and Rod McKuen. All seems to be equal in the world of camp nostalgia.
How is the definition of Beat affected when beat writers themselves are associated with the ads? For example, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, all major Beat Generation figures, have recently been featured in national advertisements for large companies. The first question to explore in examining these ads concerns personal hypocrisy. This question does risk intentional fallacy, however, since the norm in literary criticism is to consider the poet, such as Ginsberg, as distinct from his persona, and the novelist, such as Burroughs, as even farther removed from his literary characters. But both Burroughs and Ginsberg are public figures whose interviews, speeches, and articles have reinforced their personal fidelity to the principles expressed in their literary works. So their actions may be scrutinized and compared to their public statements, literary and otherwise. In endorsing products, they risk hypocrisy in two areas. First, the motivation for endorsement is money, rather than social, spiritual, or aesthetic motivation. Second, it implies an approval of the capitalist process since instead of opposing and critiquing the materialism, dehumanization, and environmental destruction of capitalism, they are taking part in it. In addition, capitalism now involves multinationalism, which has further dangers including the subversion of democracy and oppression of civil liberties in developing countries. A less clear, but for these authors vital, element of capitalism is its tendency to assimilate and attenuate the power of oppositional ideas by reducing them to fashions which can be bought and sold. This process of commodification then acts as a social pressure release valve, because instead of actively opposing the dominant culture, people buy the fashion of opposition and thus are not merely made neutral, but made supporters of the dominant culture and capitalism.
In the cases of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, the authors are complicit in some hypocrisies but not others. Kerouac's endorsement of The Gap's khaki pants is of course posthumous with the executors of his estate providing the rights to an old photo of a young Kerouac, like those The Gap has used of other deceased figures like Miles Davis and Salvador Dali. Ginsberg's ad for the same product features a current photo of him, which he posed for and which could be seen as being done for personal profit. But in fact, Ginsberg donated all earnings to the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics, a non-profit school dedicated to poetry and spiritual studies, and so he can argue that his motives were not materialistic. Further, he demanded that The Gap include that information on each ad so that the public would not misread the ad. Nonetheless, Ginsberg has still violated his principles by taking part in the capitalist process which he has frequently criticized. The Gap, moreover, is especially culpable since its products are made in southeast Asian countries in factories where unions are outlawed, prison labor is used, and workers are exploited and oppressed.
Burroughs has also violated some of his own principles in his ad for Nike. Without any mitigating circumstances like Ginsberg's, his ad for Nike can be read as being motivated by personal gain. Further, in his writings and speeches, he has called money and material goods addictions which are used to control people and deny them their freedom. But while Nike uses production tactics similar to those of The Gap, Burroughs has never been a supporter of unions or workers' rights. Instead he as been a vocal libertarian, devoted to individualism and private enterprise. So his endorsement of capitalism would seem less troublesome. Yet he has sharply attacked totalitarian regimes, and Nike has been a strong economic supporter of the oppressive and militant regime in Indonesia. Burroughs also opposes systems of control and addiction, and he has pointed out that advertising is a form of mind control and materialism a destructive disease. And more than any other Beat, he has shown an astute insight into the manner by which commodification assimilates oppositional ideas.
The appearance of Beats in these ads also has the effect of conflating Beats in the reader's mind with capitalism. Each ad has specific messages associated with it, identifying the product and its message with the author and the meaning of Beat. The Ginsberg and Kerouac ads are fairly simple, with a black and white photo of the author and the same type of caption that the Gap uses with each famous figure ("Kerouac wore khakis," "Ginsberg wears khakis"). This reduces these authors' careers and contributions to a fashion statement. Further it shows that the authors are not critiquing fads, fashions, or the mindsets that create them, but rather they are giving them implicit approval. The definition of Beat then focuses on style, an attitude of cool, not on ideas.
The Burroughs television commercial for Nike is far more complex. In the first scene of the ad, a child wearing Nikes and playing basketball with friends runs over to a tiny hand-held television sitting on the ground and turns it on. Burroughs appears on the screen saying, "hey, I'm talking to you," while the boy runs off. This scene emphasizes most of the major themes of the commercial. Burroughs appears on a TV on the TV and is thus contained by technology. The commercial's repeated refrain--"the purpose of technology is not to confuse the brain but to serve the body"--highlights a conflict between mastering and serving technology, and Burroughs is clearly the subject rather than master of technology. The boy, however, who turns on the diminutive TV, small enough to be easily be handled by child, is in control of technology and thereby of Burroughs as well. Furthermore, the child runs off, back to his sports despite Burroughs' command, showing contempt for the older generation and particularly for its failure to master technology in relation to sports.
Burroughs then continues to appear on TV screens throughout the commercial's series of quick-cut images of young athletes and of high-tech computer graphics of Nike designs. The athletes themselves are portrayed primarily as body parts, intensifying the focus on humans as athletic machines, or on TVs which shake when they appear on the screen, again emphasizing that technology can't contain or control the young and powerful. The TV screens containing Burroughs are either shown in a stack (stable and unshaking, unlike those containing the youthful athletes) or placed on the playing fields, in which case they are doused with dirt as a baseball player slides into second base, swept off the street by a hockey stick, tossed aside with sand as a longjumper lands, splashed and shorted out by water as a jogger runs through a puddle. This re-emphasizes contempt for the older generation and shows that it's the strength, athletic limit-breaking, and mastery of new technology (i.e., the computer-designed Nike shoes) that sets the young above the old. This then identifies the next major theme of the commercial: both Burroughs and the athletes are rebels. Burroughs' narration admiringly speaks of the ability "to make anything possible" and to do "more that what was done [or] thought possible...put the beyond within reach." So the mastery of technology (again, Nike shoes) has made the young into limit breakers that previous generations of rebels may admire but cannot themselves equal.
Burroughs' admiration throughout the abuse and contempt he receives comes off sounding obsequious. In the final scene of the commercial, after the static caused by the runner disappears, Burroughs takes off his hat and bows his head in an image both of obeisance and emphasized baldness, age, and fragility. So if Burroughs symbolizes an older generation of would-be rebels approving of the rebelliousness of the younger generation, he is also approving of the buying of Nikes as something stronger and more revolutionary than what his peers had accomplished. This serves to attenuate the oppositional power of Burroughs and his generation. They are first de-fanged and then presented to the young as the best revolution the past had to offer. By contrast this makes the buying of Nikes seem radical, thus successfully selling the product and weakening the potential revolutionary influence of the Beats. Again they are made "neoconservative [and] noncommittal," blandly approving of society rather than critiquing it.
One note must be added to avoid confusion on this point. While the public definition of the Beats can be deprived of its oppositional power through the process of commodification, there is nothing here to suggest that their books and the principles contained in them are tainted. A currently popular neo-Marxist reading suggests that in a "late" capitalist era, all opposition is co-opted by market forces. Actions by the authors, such as Burroughs' Nike ad or Ginsberg's publication of a large, expensive volume of collected poems, are used as arguments to show that the author's ideas contained in the books are also assimilated. The suggestion is made that book selling itself causes ideas to be assimilated, or at least proves that they are not truly oppositional because if they were, they wouldn't be accepted for publication. This concept, however, depends on a monolithic definition of culture and a smooth conflation of capitalism and the dominant culture, both false premises. In fact, while capitalism does have the amoral, eternally ravenous quality described by neo-Marxists, the prevailing tastes and morality of what may be called the dominant culture (which is by no means the sole culture in our intensely pluralistic society) are frequently in conflict with activities defined as free enterprise. In fact, while Burroughs and Ginsberg (in this instance) and market forces act to mitigate the revolutionary image of the Beats as perceived by the dominant culture, actual Beat texts are being censored and attacked by that very same culture. Further, the opposition in the texts has very clear goals, such as making the institutions of poetry, publishing, and academia more open. When critics (who are ironically themselves well paid professors and writers within the institutions) demand that the authors remain eternally opposed to these institutions, long past the successful achievement of those goals, they are fetishizing rebellion for rebellion's sake.
A final example of current beatnik marketing which completes this picture of the newly neoconservative beatnik can be found in a Gilby's Gin advertisement in Time magazine. The ad is a full-page black and white photo of a jazz drummer twirling his drumstick, and the caption reads "The drink of the original beat generation." "Beat generation" can be read here in a number of ways. It may refer to the early Beats who were indeed jazz fans; it may refer to the jazz musicians themselves as an earlier and thus truer beat generation; it may focus on jazz as a music most popular in the pre-Sixties, pre-rock, and pre-drug era when the drug of choice for the listeners of jazz, if not the musicians, was stereotypically alcohol, such as the gin the ad is pushing. But the issue of Time in which the Gilbey's ad is included is the July 20, 1992 Democratic Convention issue with Bill Clinton and his newly selected running mate Al Gore on the cover. This contains Time's first cover story on the Clinton/Gore team, with stories on the confidence, youth, and vitality of this pair and their echoes of the Kennedy age of promise. And the cover headline reads, "The Democrats' New Generation." Clearly "generation" talk is in the air, as well as a nostalgia for previous generations. Read in this context, the Gilbey's ad has further resonances with Bill Clinton's preferences for jazz, and Al Gore's well-publicized (through the activities of the PMRC) distaste for explicit rock 'n' roll lyrics. As defined by articles within the issue, the "New Generation" consists of Democrats, usually thought of as liberals, who have moved toward centrist or conservative positions. So Gilbey's "beat generation" has been redefined into a group which is cosmetically radical, but in practice is neoconservative, reactionary in its nostalgia, conformist, and suspicious of the radicalism of the Sixties.
The current resurgence of the image of the beatnik might serve a function similar to the one it served in the late 1950s: as a safe release for rebellious impulses. But just as the first incarnation of the Beat Generation was a specific reaction to a specific time, the 1980s and 1990s version of the beatnik has its own special function. The beatnik was first created in a period on the verge of mass social dissent. That period now lies behind us (whatever may lie ahead) and is under constant pressure and rereading by conservatives as an era of failure. In the radical community as well, the Sixties are often viewed as a period of naive and often unsuccessful activism. The neoconservative, noncommittal, non-activist version of the beatnik may function less as a release than as a reinforcement for the avoidance of such "failed" activism. The beatnik as currently constructed is someone who can drop out, remain disengaged, and still be quite cool and stylish. The economic focus of the figure is on indolence and leisure, appropriate to a period that is seeking to delay young people from entering an overloaded workforce. The moral and political focus is on caution, which completely overturns the earlier Beat emphasis on non-conformity, again in favor of a simplified reading of nonconfrontation. On the Road, the primary text of the Beat Generation, is a novel of spiritual suffering and painful renewal. In today's cynical beatnik version, the message is: go out on the road, but buckle up, eat at the McDonalds, and whatever you do, don't change yourself or your world.
References
Barnet, Richard J. and John Cavanagh. "Viewpoints; Just Undo It: Nike's Exploited Workers." New York Times, Feb 13, 1994.
Dickey, Alison. "The Re-Beat Generation." LA Weekly, June 2, 1989.
Maynard, John. Venice West. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991.
Morgenstern, Joseph. "Beatniks for Rent." Kerouac and Friends. Fred McDarrah, ed. New York: Morrow, 1985.
