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The Beats were the anti-zeitgeist of the 1950s. The zeiteist of the 1950s was Eisenhower and bland conformity; it was anti-communist hysteria and McCarthyism; it was Nixon's witchhunts; it was dressing in a narrow range of fashions as though Americans wore Chairman Mao outfits. Just as Stalin as been, in later days, "rehabilitated" or revised in the history books, so has McCarthyism and blacklisting been revised here in the U.S. as not such a good thing after all, but at the time America was living in fear of the Communist threat, both foreign (all those missiles and bombs) and domestic (all those communists who had infiltrated the State Department, the government, our own university!). And that's my point: one qualification for the Great American Novel is that it is American, and, if anything, On the Road is anti-American because it is anti-zeitgeist.
There was a lot of subversive and innovative stuff happening in the 50s. The Eisenhower bland thing is overly-simplistic. In visual art and music,especially jazz, the 50s had an edge that is too often overlooked. I think that's true of literature too. Kerouac is only one example. What about Snyder, Ginsberg, Boroughs, Bellow and the guys in hollywood who wrote the wonderful noir movies of the early 50s?
I covered Ginsberg, Burroghs, &al., with my mention of the Beats. Emulating the Beats were the Beatniks ("Après moi le déluge," Kerouac & co. might have said), but they were still very much a small minority, nowhere near as large a group as the hippies were to be ten years later. Mostly the Beatniks were a fringe groups within college communities--so we're talking about a minority within a minority. We look back and see BEAT writ large, but the vast majority of America was engaged in bland, mindless ccnformity. Even your own observation that there was a lot of subversive stuff happening in the 1950s depends upon it being isolated, bohemian, alienated--it oculd hardly be considered subversive if everyone was doing it.
Maybe zeitgeist does imply something more mainstream. Retroactively, looking at the beats, they seem to reflect a spirit of the age, even if it was a counter cultural one. On the Road reflects the 1950s in a similar way that another "great American novel" The Great Gatsby reflects the 20s. Neither was terribly successful during its respective time, but both are now worthy of great American novel status for the same reason.
To paraphrase Corso: Three writers does not a zeitgeist make.
Yes, there was a counterculture in the 50s, but it was not as influential at the time as people think it was. 'On the Road' wasn't published until 1957 -- far too late in the decade to make an impact. And Ginsberg was known as a smut poet at the time. They and Burroughs had very little impact on the cultural tone of the decade compared to others. A better way to explain it is that, yes, the culture of the US in the 50s was not completely I-Like-Ike-buttoned-down-white-bread, but there was a lot more mainstream control of the zeitgeist compared to now.
Yet Corso himself was a publish beat writer of the 1950s as were Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and (sort of) Neal Cassady.
I'd agree that it was a counterculture, but mainstream success is hardly an indicator of 'great American novel' status. The Great Gatsby, widely considered a 'great American novel', was widely ignored at the time, its author was an American expat in France and it in reality only dealt with the experience of a subset of Americans: wealthy, overprivileged Long Islanders. Yet it accurately reflected the state of America at its time. I would suggest that On the Road does the same. It may deal primarily with counterculture types who drop out of mainstream society, but that dropping out was an act against mainstream white bread 1950s culture.
Or to put it another way, Michael Azarrad's book Our Band Could Be Your Life deals with an underground movement on independent musicians in the 1980s. It's nonfiction so not a novel itself, but it shows a group of artists who toiled in obscurity creating a movement that would later transform popular music. Yet, looking back, these obscure bands reflect the spirit of the 1980s every bit as well as Michael Jackson or Duran Duran.
And apologies for the typing mistakes. It's early morning here in Southeast Asia where I live and work and I'm undercaffeinated.
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Mason
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Jan 20, 2014 11:30PM
The Beats were the anti-zeitgeist of the 1950s. The zeiteist of the 1950s was Eisenhower and bland conformity; it was anti-communist hysteria and McCarthyism; it was Nixon's witchhunts; it was dressing in a narrow range of fashions as though Americans wore Chairman Mao outfits. Just as Stalin as been, in later days, "rehabilitated" or revised in the history books, so has McCarthyism and blacklisting been revised here in the U.S. as not such a good thing after all, but at the time America was living in fear of the Communist threat, both foreign (all those missiles and bombs) and domestic (all those communists who had infiltrated the State Department, the government, our own university!). And that's my point: one qualification for the Great American Novel is that it is American, and, if anything, On the Road is anti-American because it is anti-zeitgeist.
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There was a lot of subversive and innovative stuff happening in the 50s. The Eisenhower bland thing is overly-simplistic. In visual art and music,especially jazz, the 50s had an edge that is too often overlooked. I think that's true of literature too. Kerouac is only one example. What about Snyder, Ginsberg, Boroughs, Bellow and the guys in hollywood who wrote the wonderful noir movies of the early 50s?
I covered Ginsberg, Burroghs, &al., with my mention of the Beats. Emulating the Beats were the Beatniks ("Après moi le déluge," Kerouac & co. might have said), but they were still very much a small minority, nowhere near as large a group as the hippies were to be ten years later. Mostly the Beatniks were a fringe groups within college communities--so we're talking about a minority within a minority. We look back and see BEAT writ large, but the vast majority of America was engaged in bland, mindless ccnformity. Even your own observation that there was a lot of subversive stuff happening in the 1950s depends upon it being isolated, bohemian, alienated--it oculd hardly be considered subversive if everyone was doing it.
Maybe zeitgeist does imply something more mainstream. Retroactively, looking at the beats, they seem to reflect a spirit of the age, even if it was a counter cultural one. On the Road reflects the 1950s in a similar way that another "great American novel" The Great Gatsby reflects the 20s. Neither was terribly successful during its respective time, but both are now worthy of great American novel status for the same reason.
To paraphrase Corso: Three writers does not a zeitgeist make.Yes, there was a counterculture in the 50s, but it was not as influential at the time as people think it was. 'On the Road' wasn't published until 1957 -- far too late in the decade to make an impact. And Ginsberg was known as a smut poet at the time. They and Burroughs had very little impact on the cultural tone of the decade compared to others. A better way to explain it is that, yes, the culture of the US in the 50s was not completely I-Like-Ike-buttoned-down-white-bread, but there was a lot more mainstream control of the zeitgeist compared to now.
Yet Corso himself was a publish beat writer of the 1950s as were Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and (sort of) Neal Cassady.I'd agree that it was a counterculture, but mainstream success is hardly an indicator of 'great American novel' status. The Great Gatsby, widely considered a 'great American novel', was widely ignored at the time, its author was an American expat in France and it in reality only dealt with the experience of a subset of Americans: wealthy, overprivileged Long Islanders. Yet it accurately reflected the state of America at its time. I would suggest that On the Road does the same. It may deal primarily with counterculture types who drop out of mainstream society, but that dropping out was an act against mainstream white bread 1950s culture.
Or to put it another way, Michael Azarrad's book Our Band Could Be Your Life deals with an underground movement on independent musicians in the 1980s. It's nonfiction so not a novel itself, but it shows a group of artists who toiled in obscurity creating a movement that would later transform popular music. Yet, looking back, these obscure bands reflect the spirit of the 1980s every bit as well as Michael Jackson or Duran Duran.
And apologies for the typing mistakes. It's early morning here in Southeast Asia where I live and work and I'm undercaffeinated.
