“Popular Literature is a mass analgesic.” To what extent do you agree? Discuss with reference to poems by Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg
Provisionally, I would say that popular literature, or popular (mass) culture in general, can be a mass analgesic but isn’t necessarily so. For the title statement to have definitive value then there would have to be a necessary connection between a thing being popular literature and it being a mass analgesic. We lack a conclusive definition of what constitutes the popular, whether we take Arnold’s conservative and reactionary position, or Adorno and Horkheimer’s more pessimistic definition, or any other, none can realistically claim to account for all popular literature. In part, this is because all definitions are essentially deferring the meaning of words onto others words (Culler, 1979, p158-9) and consequently, as soon as someone refers to something as “popular” that exceeds or otherwise goes beyond the authority of any given definition of the popular, that definition becomes limited, and hence not the universal or conclusive definition it might have purported to be. Whether we talk of literature or culture in general, we lack a conclusive definition of the popular, and so there can be no necessary connection between being popular and being a mass analgesic, and therefore the title statement is not definitive. However, as Arnold advocates, particularly with regard to Greek culture (Arnold, 1969, p147), culture can be used to distract and diffuse social tensions and restore or maintain the desired norms (ibid, p163-4). Likewise, the grand propagandists of the 20th century (communist, capitalist, fascist) made use of all sorts of popular culture as a means to both maintaining domestic security and to justify foreign policies. However, whether or not the poetry of O’Hara and Ginsberg is a mass analgesic is a somewhat more complex question.
Both poets belonged to the American avant-garde of the 1950s, a time and place where divisions between high culture and mass culture were breaking down, or at least becoming more fluid, e.g. [i]Cahiers du Cinema[/i], was founded in 1951. It was a French magazine designed to reform conservative notions of what constituted [i]great cinema[/i], and to campaign for the inclusion of Hollywood movies alongside European "art cinema" in the pantheon. Against this backdrop the particular movement that involved O'Hara and Ginsberg was distinctly anti-academic, or anti-what it perceived to be academic. In response to [i]The New Poets of Britain and America[/i], the "counterestablishment" published [i]The New American Poetry[/i], which included the poetry of the two mentioned and constituted "a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse." (Lehmann, 2005, p170-71) We see this rejection in the long lines employed by both poets, particularly in [i]Howl[/i], and [i]To the Film Industry in Crisis[/i], and the blatant jazz influences like the use of syncopated rhythm, (from [i]Howl[/i])
"who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz."
Nonetheless, they still published in an anthology with other poets, indicating an association, a tradition, shared preoccupations and so on, which indicates in quite a basic way that they were not as counter- as they might have liked to believe they were. More literarily speaking, both writers employ a montage or collage effect that is absolutely typical of high modernism, indicating just how little distance they’ve travelled in their rebellion against academic poetry. In fact, one could see the infusion of pop culture references and jazz rhythms as a strategic popularising of the high modernism of TS Eliot, and the romanticism of William Blake. Indeed, the exclamations that run throughout Ginsberg’s poetry, particularly the latter two sections of Howl and the Footnote, are clearly reminiscent of Blake in my opinion. If one does adopt this reading of O’Hara’s and Ginsberg’s poetry then one might be tempted to say that rather than being a mass analgesic their poetry is a cult analgesic, designed to placate the rebellion against modernism by reforming it slightly, a piecemeal rebellion, if you like. While this is certainly not what either poet thought of himself as doing, it may well be what they are doing.
The claim to spontaneity, a word used frequently in the critical material on the Beats in general, is central to the debate as to the rebellious (and therefore other-than-analgesic) quality of the work of both poets. In this, I find O'Hara far more convincing than Ginsberg, though ultimately what they seem to be attempting is impossible as far as I can see. O'Hara allegedly produced his poems in a flurry, hacking away at a typewriter in his lunch hour. Certainly, the poems about short journeys that he's made and the things he observed along the way, such as [i]Music[/i] and [i]Personal Poem[/i], bear this out. Indeed, he references his lunchtimes frequently (also in [i]A step away from them[/i] and implicitly, [i]The Day Lady Died[/i]), which would add credence to this description of his writing methods. While his "critical" writing, [i]Personism: A Manifesto[/i], is primarily a satirical, or at least ironic, piece, in one of the few lucid moments he says, "You just go on your nerve." (O'Hara, 2005, p172) This idea of (Beat) poetry as spontaneous improvisation is attractive and romantic, but it's indefensible. The inclusion of such clear jazz influences (Lady Day/Billie Holiday being the inspiration for [i]The Day Lady Died[/i]), as well as the ties to prior poets (e.g. Whitman being mentioned in Ginsberg's [i]A Supermarket in California[/i]) indicate that these poems aren't a mere description/celebration of a moment, a now, a presence; but instead, of things in absence.
I'd even go so far as Derrida, and say there is no present moment, no spontaneous thing, that can be recorded via poetry, or any other kind of writing, "in language there are only differences [i]without positive terms[/i]. Whether we take the signifier or signified, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system." (Derrida, 1991, p63) The apparent rebellious spontaneity of O'Hara and Ginsberg is undermined, even flat out contradicted, by the presence of so many references and allusions to things belonging to other cultural moments, of things that are not spontaneous and momentary but established in traditions. In rebelling against what they conceived of as stifled and backward-looking academic poetry they produced something that is formally similar (the intertextual allusions in both sets of work are, again, typical of high modernism) and affirmed the present to the point of absurdity. Again, I'd agree with Derrida (ibid, p10-13) that a group of words attempting to be utterly spontaneous would not be a group of words at all; that all words (all signs, ultimately) necessarily carry with them connotations and implications from past usage and without this they wouldn't be meaningful. Put simply, improvisation and spontaneity are literally impossible in a language that depends on the past in order to be meaningful [1].
More literarily, Frank O'Hara couldn't have [i]Lana Turner has collapsed[/i] be meaningful without the story having already existed and been written down.
"And suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!"
We wouldn’t have any idea what he was talking about if we didn’t know who Lana Turner was, which is something contingent on things other than the present and the supposed spontaneous improvisation of O’Hara’s poetry. Rather than being a momentary expression, this poem actually depends on certain pre-existing things, just like the academic poets. This same argument is just as true when applied to Ginsberg’s references to Whitman, or any similar thing. He is depending on things other than the present in order to make any sense, rendering any claim to be “writing solely in/for the present moment” contradictory or just plain false. This would add weight to the claim that such poetry is a mass analgesic, playing around with established traditions, images, symbols, references, with no particular end or aim in mind, as the purported end or aim “a spontaneous expression of the present moment” is nonsense.
One thing that could rescue O'Hara's and Ginsberg's poetry from the charge of being a mass analgesic is if either endorses a specific politics. If either, or both, do endorse such a thing then, provided it wasn't merely the political zeitgeist of the time of their writing, it would give us a reason to say that they were more than the Derridan criticism would suggest. Ginsberg very much thought of himself as being part of a counterculture and a politics opposed to the emerging consumerism of 50s capitalism, even going do far as to claim,
"This is for the poor shepherds. I am a communist."
This line appears amidst a rather depressing poem about working in a baggage room, but appears to be directly contrasted with this, from America,
"America stop pushing, I know what I'm doing."
Indeed, the individualism of Ginsberg’s poetry is far more prominent that any communist agenda that I can see. By my quick count there are 121 uses of “I” in Howl and Other Poems, and only 12 uses of “we”. Compare that to Lenin’s assertion, “All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all. I am just like everybody else.”[2] Ginsberg wouldn’t know a communist if one invaded New York and shot him, in my opinion. Even if that reading takes the issue too far, Ginsberg is certainly most unclear, making a handful of references to Communism but primarily talking about himself and certainly letting “I” dominate his text.
O'Hara is similarly ambiguous. The most explicitly political poem of his that I've read is [i]To the Film Industry in Crisis[/i].
"- but you, Motion Picture Industry,
it's you I love!"
The 1950s saw increased political involvement in Hollywood, causing great disruption. The 1948 Paramount Case set the precedent for Divorcement, whereby the studios had to sell off their exhibition chains, i.e. the actual theatres, and thus production and distribution was divorced from exhibition. This was, in part, because the monopolies that were growing were a little too close to communism for some people’s liking. “Most industry leaders expected the postwar industry to go from strength to strength, but instead, it went into quite sudden and precipitous decline - By 1962, admissions had fallen to barely a quarter of their 1946 level.” (Maltby, 2004, p161) Championing the cause of cinema at a time of crisis can be read as a political move, even more so if one uses a high-art medium such as poetry to champion a pop-art medium like cinema. While one might be tempted to see O’Hara as associated with the Cahiers du Cinema and other parts of the same movement, it’s important to note that he does declare that what he loves is,
"Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals."
This is where he has a similar ambiguity to Ginsberg, in that he’s using a high-art medium, poetry (albeit in a prosaic manner with full width paragraphs of text), to renounce the value of high culture (criticism) in favour of popular culture (cinema). While Ginsberg can’t seem to make up his mint whether he’s a libertarian or a communist, O’Hara can’t seem to make up his mind whether he’s producing high literature or popular literature. Now, this uncertainty itself can be considered political, in both cases, but it does beg the question as to what is actually being endorsed. As Orwell points out (2004, p102), clarity in thought and language go hand in hand, and fuel one another, as do a lack of clarity in the two. O’Hara and Ginsberg make it very difficult to ascribe a clear political position to their works. The lack of a discernible political position that isn’t contradicted by other aspects of their work strengthens the reading that their work constitutes a mass analgesic.
In conclusion I think that both Ginsberg’s and O’Hara’s poetry constitutes a mass analgesic, and they are good examples of popular literature acting as such. Both borrow from numerous traditions, including high modernism, part of the academic poetry they claimed to be rebelling against. This pretence of rebellion, which may sound harsh but I believe it’s accurate, while actually maintaining much of what one purports to be rebelling against, is the classic sign of popular analgesic, a means of deflating or dissipating dissenting voices and feelings. As I said before, neither poet would have thought of his work as doing this, but I think that this is exactly what they do. Nonetheless, it isn’t all that they do. Both poets’ infusion of popular references, from jazz, and particularly from cinema in the case of O’Hara, into voices reminiscent of Eliot and Blake creates a complex and often confused/confusing melange of rhetoric. This lack of clarity makes it impossible, for me at least, to find any particular politics that might “redeem” their work from the charge of being a mass analgesic. The purported philosophy of sponteneity, which might enable a philosophical redemption, is utterly fruitless when talking about written language, which is built on echoes, traces, connotations built up over time.
[1] It is important to note, however, that Derrida does concede later on, as discussed in terrific detail by Judith Butler, that not only is the echo, the trace, the hint of the past that which makes language meaningful, but contrarily that it is only the possibility of a break with tradition that makes any utterance possible at all. While this does not rescue O’Hara’s and Ginsberg’s poetry from such criticism, it does offer a resistance to the somewhat simplistic Derridan reading that I’ve offered here.
[2] brainyquote.com/quotes/quote … 53237.html
Bibliography
Arnold, Matthew, 1969, Culture And Anarchy, Cambridge University Press, London
Culler, Jonathan, 1979, Derrida, in John Sturrock (ed), Structuralism and Since, Oxford University Press, Oxford
Derrida, Jacques, 1991, Differance, in Pegy Kamuf (ed), Between the Blinds, A Derrida Reader, Columbia University Press, Chichester
Derrida, Jacques, 1991, Speech and Phenomena, in Peggy Kamuf (ed), Between the Blinds, A Derrida Reader, Columbia University Press, Chichester
Ginsberg, Allen, 1959, Howl and Other Poems, City Lights Books, San Francisco
Lehmann, David, The Last Avant-Garde, in Gupta, S. and Johnson, D. (eds), 2005, A Twentieth-Century Literature Reader, Oxon, Routledge
Orwell, George, 2004, Politics and the English Language, Penguin Books, London
O’Hara, Frank, Personism: A Manifesto, in Gupta, S. and Johnson, D. (eds), 2005, A Twentieth-Century Literature Reader, Oxon, Routledge