Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize 'The stars are words' and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind.
Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveller 128
1The writers of the Beat generation are notorious for staging a quest for transcendence through their works which is quasi-obsessive. In the novels of Jack Kerouac—those of the road in particular—the narrators, fictionalized alter egos of the author himself, are often found roaming the American continent in search of the Holy Grail; embodiments of the modern picaroon giving emphasis to Kerouac's travel narratives. In these novels, the road itself becomes iconic: a road viewed by many as an allegory for the quest, where the worldly cohabitates with the holy; a road which is also emblematic of the search for a writing method that would revolutionize modern literature. The poetry of Allen Ginsberg reflects, also, a quest for transcendence which is set, often, against what he conceived as the alienating environment of modern America. Through early poems such as “Howl,” “America” or “A Supermarket in California” (1956), Ginsberg framed a search for emancipation and self-expression by voicing a fundamental disagreement with the American status quo; a disagreement that sought to resist, and contest, the various atomizing forces at work in the post-war years in order to retrieve the power of the self, of spirit and of the imagination.
2This urge to repossess one’s own existence and recover the beat of one’s heart in the anesthetizing reality of the 1950s typified a romantic aspiration which entailed, also, the reclaiming of the potentiality for transcendence from the sway of the established order. This order, whose ideological grip widely shaped the social, cultural and chronological parameters of post-war America, was conceived as fundamentally normative. It is characterized by historical developments that inaugurated an era of mass-consumption and led to the gradual commodification of all domains of existence, insidiously infringing upon the elemental liberty and tempo of the self. Acting as one of the main narrative thrusts in the writings, the quest per se—as a marker of the counterculture—crystallizes the drive towards the transcendental, envisioned as an alternative ontological and chronological venture to the post-war American predicament; a flourishing preoccupation in Kerouac's writings. As Michael D’Orso argues in “Man Out of Time”:
Kerouac’s novels are more than journals of hedonistic, decadent, sensation-starved people, they are more than escapist, and they are more than portraits of escapists. Kerouac’s central characters are fleeing from the ramifications of Spenglerian civilization—the deadness of life divorced from nature, the omnipresent specter of life’s end, and the weight of time. But they are also moving toward a definite, if indescribable and perhaps unattainable, goal—the experience of ‘It’ and a union with the ‘pure Present.’ They are torn between flight and pursuit, looking behind and ahead, and Kerouac’s novels are chronicles of their struggles (28).
3For Kerouac, this quest amounts to a search for types of transcendence that foreground a specific temporality—what D’Orso identified, somewhat cryptically, as the “pure Present”: a search for transcendental states which, at the right moment and in the right conditions, could propel the self above temporal contingencies—a metaphysical, ontological and aesthetic dynamic at the center of this investigation.
- 1 See Portugés The Visionary Poetics and “The Poetics of Vision” 131–40.
4Simultaneously, this quest for the transcendental operates as an alternative road map to the status quo—something which was intrinsic, also, to Ginsberg's poetical practice, a dimension brought to light by Paul Portugés in his seminal work on Ginsberg and the visionary.1 According to Portugés, the early Ginsberg devised “a theory and practice of poetry that would allow him to communicate his visions and his heightened awareness of reality to an audience bent on denying the mundane as well as the sublime” (“The Poetics of the Vision” 131). For both writers the essence of the quest is deeply romantic and intrinsically political, but also largely mystical. It materializes through a multiplicity of experiences implemented in the here-and-now which, although largely divergent and cacophonous at times, converge in their intent to see, in the right place and at the right time, the kernel of a transcending reality which is thought to lie beyond the confines of the temporal. Resisting chrono-normativity, the quest for transcendence in Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s writing projects singularly reverberates with José Estaban Muñoz’s notion of queer utopia, as coined in Cruising Utopia (2009): both involve the search for a coordinate, indeterminate yet palpable, that eludes the “autonaturalizing temporality that we might call straight time. Straight time tells us that there is no future but the here and now of our everyday life” (22). Framed as a dissident temporal and spatial practice aiming at an ecstatic future, the quest for transcendence in Ginsberg’s and in Kerouac’s works relies on a form of synchrony which participates in a distinctive writing strategy for the transcendental and the utopian, and whose ontological reverberations will be deciphered in the second part of this essay.
5In the Duluoz Legend, the scenario of the quest is used by Kerouac as a narrative ploy that constitutes the backbone of his literary project, offering a pretext for geographical mobility on the mode of discovery as well as an opportunity for self-discovery via the writing process itself. In essence, the quest for transcendence constitutes a yearning for what lies beyond, an attempt to catch a glimpse at the universal and the atemporal from the perspective of day-to-day circumstantial reality. In Kerouac’s novels of the road, the quest for transcendence is also a manifestation of a yearning for a transcendent futurity—a desire which Muñoz interprets as intrinsically queer: “Indeed, to live inside straight time and ask for, desire, and imagine another time and place, is to represent and perform a desire that is both utopian and queer” (26). Aesthetically, this yearning for transcendence is carried out in the writings by means of a constant interrelation of the narrators’ queer desires with their concomitant reality—a reality shaped by the competing ideological forces of the post-war moment, but also, maybe more markedly, by the manifold manifestations of natural phenomena. In Romantic fashion, this outer reality is made to communicate with the inner articulation of this desire; a resounding interiority which constitutes a distinctive marker of Kerouac’s travel writing. Such a type of writing—derived, partly, from the modernistic stream of consciousness—signals a reflexivity that becomes more and more consuming in the Legend, as the road unfolds more and more inwards.
6In Ginsberg’s poetry, the quest for transcendence also takes sociohistorical reality at its point of departure; a reality exemplified by the modern American predicament which it envisions, more often than not, as self-suppressing and alienating at heart, and which it seeks to subvert. “Howl” (1956), written in the tradition of the great American epic poems, chronicles the tribulations of an American youth in revolt—the offspring of the fathers of the “Lost generation.” As Richard Gray observes:
The great American epics ... strategy would be to create a hero rather than celebrate one and to make rather than record the history that surrounds him. They would, in effect, jettison the third-person hero of traditional epic ... and in his place they would put the poet himself as a representative, democratic man who discovers his identity and values in the course of writing, on his own and on our behalf. (13)
7While the (anti-)heroes that Ginsberg depicts are largely disenchanted by the broken promises of national ideals, weary of normative discourses, and embittered by the spread of state control to all spheres of existence, they remain animated by a lust for life and experiences that gives a glimpse of an ecstatic and transcendental future, whatever the means—a queer desire, to use Muñoz’s words, for “new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” (1).
8It is an exaltation of a similar nature that animates Kerouac’s narrator in On the Road, as the novel opens on an emblematic call—the original big bang that sets the text in perpetual motion:
I could hear a new call and see a new horizon, and believe it at my young age; … what did it matter? I was a young writer and I wanted to take off.
Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me. (14)
9This call is a foundational event in Kerouac's oeuvre: not only does it point, loosely, to the narrative arc of the Duluoz Legend, it also hints at their ontological foundations and spiritual trajectory. The “line,” whether drawn on the road or typed onto the page, is the means for the quest; the end is the “vision,” conceived as a genuine gateway to transcendence, accessible only at the expense of a full commitment to the quest. The resolute travelling from East to West reverberates the thrust of the early pioneers pushing westward into the American land; a journey fuelled by the burning desire to discover a more mythical version of America and offer a prophetic vision of its natural resources and opportunities. From the line to the vision, from the materiality of the road to the ethereality of ecstasy, and from the scriptural to the transcendental, the quest is a journey towards utopia where the self is in perpetual motion; an odyssey which simultaneously impacts the here-and-now by rendering “potential blueprints of a world not quite here, a horizon of possibility, not a fixed schema” (Cruising Utopia 97).
10What is more, the narrator’s endeavor can also be conceived as a distant echo from the Gold Rush; an echo through which the quest of transcendence is typified by a search not only for pieces of gold, but also for pieces of God, buried within the natural vistas afforded by the road. As the following passage implies:
We had reached the approaches of the last plateau. Now the sun was golden, the air keen blue, and the desert with its occasional rivers a riot of sandy, hot space and sudden Biblical tree shade .… Under great trees on the shimmering desert the shepherds sat and convened, and the sheep moiled in the sun and raised dust beyond. ‘Man, man,’ I yelled to Dean, ‘wake up and see the shepherds, wake up and see the golden world that Jesus came from, with your own eyes you can tell!’ … The end of our journey impended. Great fields stretched on both sides of us; a noble wind blew across the occasional immense tree groves and over old missions turning salmon pink in the late sun. The clouds were close and huge and rose. ‘Mexico City by dusk!’ We’d made it, a total of nineteen hundred miles from the afternoon yards of Denver to these vast and Biblical areas of the world, and now we were about to reach the end of the road. (Kerouac, On the Road 282)
11Here, the quest for transcendence has ripened into a quest for the transcendent. The passage expresses an acute sense of trepidation and euphoria: the approach towards Mexico City could be that towards Jerusalem. It foregrounds a sense of elation that relays the rushing flow of a highly perceptive consciousness: one that bears witness to a privileged relationship with its surrounding environment and what is conceived as the mystical essence of the real, on the spot and on the dot. Saturated with Christian references and foregrounding a fondness for the primitive, this passage functions as a vision (“see the golden world that Jesus came from, with your own eyes you can tell!”) in which traces of the divine are embedded in the very surroundings that Sal and Dean penetrate by means of the racing car; a vision that denotes a disruptive instant of heightened awareness in expansive motion conducive to a form of transcendence that constitutes the vanishing point towards which Kerouac's road novels dash, flash, and collapse. Crucially, such key moments in On the Road—often referred to as the “IT” moments in other parts of the novel—scramble the narrative by suspending the horizontal trajectory of the quest: emerging from sensory experience expressed in chronological time sequences, the vision matures into a revelation which foregrounds a diffuse sense of holiness which is also timeless. Largely characteristic of the Legend, the “IT” moments are solidly anchored in the utopian regime of the queer, interpreted by Muñoz as “a flux, a temporal disorganization, as a moment when the here and now is transcended by a then and there that could be and indeed should be” (97). This singular superimposition of temporalities, as a queer event that contaminates the present moment with a utopian futurity, defies chrono-normativity by revoking not only clock time, but also cultural uses of space-time commonly admitted in the post-war status quo. As Erik Mortenson observes in Capturing the Beat Moment (2011), “Kerouac’s work must be seen not as unconstrained flow or limited boundary but as a continual negotiation that sheds light on the possibilities and limits for spatial rebellion in America” (46). It is this queer temporality in Kerouac’s writing, a temporality endowed with a synchronic dimension, that redefines the temporal and ontological experience of visions in the novels of the road.
12The socio-temporal conventions of the post-war era are challenged, also, by Ginsberg—a poet of the queer par excellence—and his characters in “Howl” in ways that are equally creative. Throughout Part I of the poem, Ginsberg reports a series of actions and experiences performed by the protagonists—referred to as the “angelheaded hipsters”—taking place on the temporal plane of post-war social reality (“Howl” 1). The vast majority of these experiences display a striking ambivalence: fraught with a sense of danger as death looms large, they are also eerily exhilarating, epitomizing a quasi-delirious passion for existing in the present moment—for being in the here-and-now. At the same time, these characters are also envisioned in their spiritual dimension: they are seen as “burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo” (“Howl” 1)—evidencing a queer desire for the transcendent. The combination of an adverse present with the spiritual élan in the poem introduces a vision of a transcendental futurity that supersedes the deleterious normativity of the here-and-now, paving the way for a mystical articulation of utopia. As Muñoz argues, “we must strive in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there” (1).
13This intermingling of temporalities in the poem—a heterodox temporal dimension that articulates a present that protests the very conditions of its existence with the visions of an ecstatic future—is carried into the writing through a blend of voices of a fundamentally different nature, and which yet overlap and enhance one another. As Charles Molesworth observes: “From the beginning of his career, Ginsberg has constructed a poetry made up of a special blend of two voices: one, a putatively universal voice that would claim implicitly of its lonesomeness that ‘it’s Ours;’ the other, a frankly personal voice that insistently chronicled the growth and movement of a discrete, historically singular people” (52). The latter, the historical voice, is the one that catalogues events from day-to-day life by recording a series of clear-cut representations of the conditions of the poet’s concomitant reality. This voice integrates, also, a social component: while it enlivens the poem by bringing an energetic tone, it often turns into a protest, striving towards individual and social liberation—a vindicative tone shared by other poets of the same period, such as those of the San Francisco Renaissance.
14The other voice that Molesworth identifies in “Howl” partakes in myth: a voice, universal and utopian in nature, through which the protagonists crave a more spiritual form of liberation—one occurring through transcendental connection with the divine. This is what, according to Gray, “implicates [Ginsberg] in what he has called the ‘messianic thing’: the sense, inherited from Whitman, that he is a ‘chosen, blessed, sacred poet’ whose vocation is to prophecy to America” (300–01). While Whitman and Ginsberg did not operate in the same sociohistorical and aesthetic environment, the recourse to a voice inspired by myth lends both poets a sense of timelessness to the writing. Beyond their ravenous nature, they generate a momentum in their respective poems that exalts the self through an emphasis on the vitality and on the creative potentialities of the protagonists. This sense of an energized self is key: it constitutes a propellant for the protagonists to try and overpower the social conventions of their time, the cultural standards and the chrono-normativity of the modern American paradigm, with the aim to realize their innermost potentialities for being in the here-and-now with the least possible restrictions. “Utopia is an ideal,” Muñoz argues, “something that should mobilize us, push us forward” (97). The recourse to such a voice in “Howl” enables Ginsberg to make utopia not a reality, but a generative force in the present, both in and via the poem.
15This type of voice is brought into full effect in the “Footnote to ‘Howl’,” which opens with the following lines:
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel! (Ginsberg 12)
16Featuring a chanting verse inspired by Buddhist psalms, the frenzied scansion produces an epileptic effect that signals a climactic sequence at the close of “Howl.” In this “Footnote,” the divine is conceived as radically inclusive of queerness; it foregrounds a ubiquitous sense of holiness that incorporates multiple sexual references—something which helped create the nefarious reputation of the poem. In substance, the “Footnote to ‘Howl’” delivers a queer vision of immediate salvation, where experiences in the here-and-now are apprehended in synchrony with the transcendent and conceived as instantaneously redemptive; a simultaneity through which the profane is collapsed and equated with the divine. In doing so, it inaugurates a temporality where utopian possibilities in the here-and-now fold over the there-and-then: as Muñoz argues, “these glimpses and moments of contact have a decidedly utopian function that permits us to imagine and potentially make a queer world. Such a criticism would work by allowing us to see ‘the future in the present’” (55).
17Like Whitman, Ginsberg relied on a pantheistic frame of reference to build the transcendental within the common. Through it, the poet may develop a vision of a world where each and every microcosmic element is conceived in direct connection with the divine and penetrated instantly and without discrimination by its spiritual essence; “a leaving of self for something larger in the form of divinity” (Cruising Utopia 186) that partakes in the ecstatic experience of the transcendental. Such a poetical strategy, albeit presented through provocative imagery in “Howl,” reverberates, to a large extent, with that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. As illustrated in “History” (1841): “To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance. Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance” (155). Emerson posits the existence of a creative principle, universal and divine in essence, which transcends the sensible world; a form of godhead that expressly penetrates the here-and-now, its objects as well as its subjects: “Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation” (“Nature” 77). Crucially, such a theological conception anticipates a continuum between self and transcendent through the perception of a spiritual essence incarnate in nature, devised as transcendental per se. Most importantly, it establishes a channel through which the perceiving self may progress from clock time—that which governs daily life—to the synchronous space-time of the vision, conceived in this context as a coextensive field of transcendental energies where time, driven exclusively by spirit, is apprehended as an inexhaustible present that superimposes with the universal principle of creation. This channel, where clock time is distorted by ecstatic time, defines the temporal regime of the transcendental experience in Emerson. It typifies a “stillpoint in the present,” to use Mortenson’s words, “that, once attained, dissolves the self into a ‘momentless’ moment that subsumes past, present, and future into a meaningful and immediate whole” (83)—an alternative temporal configuration that subverts linear time for the timelessness and boundlessness of the godhead.
18On a more fundamental level, the manifestation of visions in the writings of Ginsberg and of Kerouac may be conceived in phenomenological terms as queer events that defy chrono-normativity and which occur, first and foremost, within the respective narrators’ consciousness; enabling them to project their singular perception outwards, cracking open the doomed horizon of post-war America. This projection, in turn, redefines the object of direct experience. It is this interplay—from the subject to the object and back again—that generates two conceptions of temporality which are divergent on a surface level, but not incompatible: one in which the event is perceived as an occurrence in the here-and-now, subjected to the chronological causality of external circumstances; and another in which the event functions as a gateway to a more transcendent reality, initiating a mystical experience which is boundless in time and space, yet in simultaneous occurrence with biographical, organic time. “To see queerness as horizon,” Muñoz points out, “is to perceive it as a modality of ecstatic time in which the temporal stranglehold that I describe as straight time is interrupted or stepped out of” (32). Attained by means of the vision in the works of both Kerouac and Ginsberg, this immanent temporality anticipates the conjunction of the material and historical conditions of the real—those giving birth to the queer event—with its immediate accomplishment on the site of the self; a synchrony that typifies the confluence of chronological, linear time with the timelessness and ubiquity of the divine revelation as experienced by the respective narrators.
- 2 See above, pp. 6–7.
- 3 See The Scripture of the Golden Eternity.
19In Kerouac’s work, this distinctive type of synchrony re-occurs at regular intervals throughout the novels of the road. Built into the writing, it may be viewed as a by-product of an aesthetic strategy that consists in interrelating the here-and-now with the ahistorical and conflating the local with the universal. As seen earlier in the above quotation from On the Road, Kerouac seeks to suggest a sanctified presence incarnate in nature by resorting to goldness;2 a trope through which he may signify the whimsical appearance of a long-sought El Dorado. In other works of the Duluoz Legend, Kerouac frequently refers to the phrase “Golden Eternity”:3 a phrase indicative of insights of a spiritual nature, ethereal moments that stretch into time and which remain largely equivocal, allowing the notions of both Christian epiphany and Buddhist satori to cohabit into the writing. Such a representational strategy, which participates in the aesthetic regime of the transcendental, enables Kerouac to cultivate a form of spiritual universalism that re-mystifies traditional religious discourses. These epiphanic moments make for a natural environment which is copiously idealized and endowed with a form of spiritual benevolence, implying that divine truth—communicated by means of the vision—is encapsulated within the natural sceneries of America.
20Crucially, the integration of this trope into prose is operated through the device of the allegory; a recourse prompted by a recognition that the vision resides in the narrativization of the landscape. Endorsed by Kerouac at key moments in his novels, the allegory is a central device which has been widely used by the main representatives of the American Transcendentalist tradition a century earlier, including Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. As a pillar of their writing strategy, the allegory elicits the conversion of the original factuality of nature into symbolic meaning through their constant interrelation, enabling the transformation of the numerous sights of natural beauty into insights of a spiritual nature. Such an operation establishes a sense of continuity between natural phenomena, spirit, and the perceptive self on the ontological and chronological planes—a continuum reminiscent of the Transcendentalist ethos. As David Bowers points out, the Transcendentalists “interpreted material nature mystically as a ‘veil’ or symbol of the divine; [they] maintained that every individual can penetrate the veil to discover divine truth for himself without the aid of traditional authority or even logic” (11). This incursion into nature is pivotal for the occurrence of visions as queer events in Kerouac’s novels: in Romantic fashion, it articulates a process by which the external becomes a conduit for the internal, mirroring the Emersonian precept according to which “[t]he lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other” (Emerson, “Nature” 38).
21Here again, the articulation of such visions, which seek to interconnect outer phenomena with the expression of the revelation in allegorical terms, relies on a theological configuration which is pantheistic in essence. It enables Kerouac to unbound the concepts of both divinity and time by revoking volition and causality at once and fusing them together—an operation that constitutes an auspicious premise for the allegory to reach its full potential in the writing. In the road novels, these allegories are set in a regionalism that is particularly lyrical, with descriptions that intend to link the particulars of nature with the universal and the physical with the spiritual. They allow Kerouac to elude literal modes of discourse through the use of a language which is highly symbolic: a language that functions on the discernment of signs in order to shape the queer event of the vision into being, since, as Muñoz insists, ‘queerness is not quite here; it is, in the language of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, a potentiality” (21). As such, the allegory constitutes an alternative mode of representation; a “mode of thought,” Olaf Hansen argues, that “tries to recapture again and again the astonishment about the mere chance of the right moment for the right insight” (104). It presupposes that the experience is meaningful, but its meaning is concealed; a sequence with no absolute transcendental signifier, leaving room for subjective interpretation and imagination. This is what enables Kerouac to depict a form of ecstasy that emerges in a scriptural brand of the pastoral: reflecting the contours of a mystical experience that can be intuited but never fully grasped nor comprehended.
22Ultimately, Kerouac’s use of the allegory derails chronological time, as the materiality of history fuses with the symbolism of myth through the medium of the text. Here, the allegory acts as a time warp that hauls the self from the physical temporality of the here-and-now towards the space-time of the vision—a queer conduit that activates the reception of mythical insights conceived as spiritual in origin, universal in application and fundamentally timeless. These insights of a transcendent nature transport the beholder of the vision towards a queer space located outside the matrix of corporeality; a space derived from external stimuli and shaped by the power of spirit, and yet concomitant with chronological time. Conceived as the telos of the road novels, this proposition is that of ekstasis—a transcendental state of instantaneous illumination which collapses temporality. “To know ecstasy,” Muñoz pinpoints, “is to have a sense of timeliness’s motion, to understand a temporal unity that is important to what I attempt to describe as the time of queerness” (25). Deep-rooted on the site of the self yet transcending subjective experience, planted in the here-and-now yet perceived as fundamentally universal and ahistorical, this space is quintessentially ontological: it manifests the incorporation of the mystical vision into the self by operating a shift from the vision to the visionary.
- 4 In a number of accounts and interviews, Ginsberg claimed that he heard the voice of William Blake r (...)
23In “Howl,” Ginsberg’s recourse to a regime of bivocality in the poem propagates a synchrony that amalgamates the timelessness of the transcendent with the chronological, clock time of daily experiences performed on the plane of social reality, which radically redefines the nature of daily actions and challenges the prevailing norms. Such a type of synchrony is accommodated in the writing by means of a distinct poetical strategy: one through which the poem seeks to relay not only the vision, but also the singular affects attached to it. Conceiving his role as an agent of visions, Ginsberg viewed himself as a medium between the community of men and women—personified by his readers and audience—and the transcendent4; a role that redefined his writing project as a queer gateway towards mystical forms of utopia. In a Romantic context, this messianic function manifests the desire to become a channel between the mundane and the sacred, between the temporal and the atemporal—a conception of poetry through which the poet may articulate queer visions of a transcendental character and reveal the divine essence and ecstatic nature of the world. For that matter, and as Tony Trigilio identifies in Strange Prophecies Anew (2000), the communication of the mystical experience demands a language that is capable of “transforming observation into vision [by] blurring the boundaries between prophet and God” (15); a conception of poetical writing which is reminiscent, in good part, of Emerson’s ethics.
24For Emerson, the noblest task of the poet is to create a suitable channel to stimulate the formulation of spiritual insights in his or her own mind and enact them synchronically in the here-and-now, rather than to re-present their content as it occurred in the past, in chronological order. Streaming live from the transcendent, the poet would thus be able to eschew the worldly art of mimesis:
This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees; by sharing the path or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.… The condition of true naming, on the poet's part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and accompanying that. (Emerson, “The Poet” 274)
25Such a conception of the poetical function entails that the creative process is not initiated by external stimuli, but remains profoundly anchored in the subject; a process, first and foremost, of a phenomenological nature. Here, the poet must be highly receptive to his own inflections of consciousness, providing the means not only to perceive, but also to relay, the transcendental experience as it is felt there and then. Such a conception of poetry initiates a quest for innovative poetics which is capable of rejuvenating old poetical forms by enabling the instantaneous conveyance of the transcendental impulse; a procedure which can be traced all the way back to the poetical practice of William Blake. This is what positions Ginsberg in the somewhat anachronic lineage of the Prophetic, as a conveyor of the visionary: on a fundamental level, his duty is to be receptive to the vision, conceived as a queer, transcendental event that occurs on the surface of the here-and-now, and pass it on to the audience via the poem, allowing him to perform the visionary by building it into the poem itself—a poetical strategy that pivots on the ontological and which actualizes the Prophetic tradition in the context of modern America.
26Both the Prophetic mode in Ginsberg and the allegorical mode in Kerouac, while they differ in nature, may be envisaged as two literary strategies that assist the transcription of the transcendental by turning visions into visionary states. As Mortenson argues in Capturing the Beat Moment: “For Beat Generation writers, the visionary state reveals the truth of the world—it is a peek behind the curtain of reality that provides an authentic glimpse of the universe. By eradicating mental structures and preconceptions, the vision provides an opportunity to see the past in a new light, thus creating potential for change” (71).
27Notwithstanding, this “potential for change” takes place, strictly, in those instances when the perceiving self succeeds in converting the factuality of the vision into a blissful suspension of being in the here-and-now. Such conversions, from the perception of mystical insights in the present moment to forms of transcendence apprehended as ecstatic and timeless, have been identified as queer conduits; implemented in the works of Kerouac and of Ginsberg through a distinct set of writing strategies, deciphered above, which have the capacity to articulate the transcendental experience. Crucially, this experience of transcendence, rendered all-pervasive and instantaneously accessible, is grounded in a mystical form of immanence, giving rise to a distinct ontological modality and a temporal perception that defuse the reigning chrono-normativity of the modern predicament, as the following paragraphs will examine.
- 5 As per Ginsberg’s repeated pronouncements, “[i]ndividuals should be encouraged to explore the divin (...)
28For both Kerouac and Ginsberg, the articulation of the transcendent in written form is to be funnelled primarily through the experiences of the self; a proposition that tallies with the Emersonian ethos—in particular at the level of its modus operandi. As seen, the Transcendentalist precepts of Emerson are established in a pantheistic framework in which all living forms are penetrated by the divine to varying degrees—a porosity, queer in nature, through which they may exist in synchrony with the transcendent. For Emerson, “[t]here is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same” (“History” 149). This ontological conception implies the existence of a form of spiritual immanence through which the godhead is embodied, also, in the individual. For Emerson, the occurrence of the transcendental experience in the here-and-now is a collateral effect of the coalescence of the self with the spiritual essence of nature: through it, an ultimate form of being may be attained. This coalescence propagates an ontological mode which is symptomatic of an intimate relationship with the divine, and which may be accessed primarily through individual experience. More than a thematic preoccupation in the works, this form of being constitutes an ontological attainment for both Kerouac and Ginsberg, who had a clear awareness of it from an early point in their respective literary careers, and which they sought to relay in their writings.5
29Thus understood as a singular ontological mode of a transcendental character, the visionary state materializes through the ability to channel natural phenomena and transact with its spiritual essence via first-hand experience. This osmosis, which enables the individual to embody the spiritual essence of nature, vouches for the circulation of the flux of the universal mind within the individual. In the words of Emerson: “[T]hat spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws at his need inexhaustible power” (“Nature” 73). This “inexhaustible power”—a spiritual force in nature—may be interpreted as a principle of vitality conceived as divine in origin and universal in its application; a principle of creation that operates in the first place through nature, and whose assimilation by the subject is conducive to visionary states.
30Most importantly, this ontological mode redefines human time as a function of spirit and equates it with that of nature, where time is but an inexhaustible present that stretches ad infinitum: “[Man] cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time” (Emerson, “Self-Reliance” 189). In the Transcendentalism of Emerson, this faculty to elude linear time is the corollary of “an idealism [that] sees the world in God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events, of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture which God paints on the instant eternity for the contemplation of the soul” (Emerson, “Nature” 70). Veering on immanence, this ecstatic temporality makes the embodiment of nature—and more particularly its spiritual essence—the elemental ontological condition for beholding visionary states, since, for Emerson, “(s)elf-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms” (“Self-Reliance” 191). This fundamental relation of self to the transcendent, of inner to outer nature, is framed by the temporal regime of the queer. “Queerness’s time is a stepping out of the linearity of straight time,” Muñoz contends, “queerness’s ecstatic and horizontal temporality is a path and a movement to a greater openness to the world” (25). It constitutes a moral code that is paramount both in Ginsberg’s and in Kerouac’s writing. It allows for a definition of a transcendental ontology that circumvents chrono-normativity by making the embodiment of the spiritual essence of nature the ultimate ontological and temporal horizon of the visionary in the Romantic context of the works.
31Crucially, the interaction of the self with the spiritual essence of nature—that which avails the incorporation of the transcendental impulse—is an operation which is performative at heart. As Emerson claimed in “History”: “Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion which belongs to [the universal mind], in appropriate events” (149). Taking place within the individual and finding expression on the sociohistorical plane of the real, this operation is conceived as an ontological process which is transcendental in origin and temporal in destination. It implies that the transcendent is carried out in historical reality through the actions of the individual; a performativity of a transcendental nature which involves, simultaneously, the instantaneous realization of the divine in the here-and-now: “Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent” (Emerson, “History” 149). By enacting the transcendental impulse of the universal mind, the individual accomplishes the highest form of his or her being as well as the godhead in historical reality; a reciprocity symptomatic of the synchrony that characterizes the ontological mode of the visionary.
32This synchronic property, essential for the implementation of the visionary state, allows the act of transcendental engagement to come to the fore. Understood in the environment of Emersonian Transcendentalism and conceived, primarily, as a dynamic incarnation of the universal principle of creation, it redefines the relation of the self to history in the primary sources. In Ginsberg’s “Howl,” the synchrony detected in the poem pivots on the existence of a form of spiritual immanence through which divinity itself is embodied within the individual, as illustrated in the “Footnote to ‘Howl.’” As seen, Ginsberg celebrates the presence of a ubiquitous form of divinity, which is incarnate not only in his Beat fellows but also in all the members of the human race, regardless of their social status. In democratic fashion, the “bum” and the “beggars” are yoked together with the “seraphim” and the “angels” and viewed as equally sacred, just like “the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!” (Ginsberg, “Howl” 12). Yet, what is at stake, beyond the instantaneous capture of the divine essence on the site of the self, is the conveyance of its transcendental impulse onto the plane of post-war reality. Ingrained in the very project of the Prophetic, this transference vouches not only for the embodiment of the spiritual essence of nature, but also for its circulation in the present moment via the engagement of Ginsberg’s characters with their concomitant physical and social environment. Here, the protagonists exemplify a momentum unfolding in the here-and-now whose transcendental value resides in its capacity to bridge the gap with the divine through action. In so doing, they establish the terms of a performativity which enables them to channel the transcendent in the post-war moment; a performativity of a transcendental type through which spirit may be carried out in historical reality by way of their own engagement with the immediate conditions of the real. As an aesthetic strategy for the transcendental, it departs from the allegory, whose mode is typically inferential and which, by definition, seeks to represent symbolically rather than perform literally. As Robert Hipkiss observed about Kerouac’s writing project, “[t]he bright emergence of mystic oneness that the solitary mystic seeks is, when encountered in a corresponding natural state ... too much for mortal flesh and mortal mind to bear” (57). This distinction allows Ginsberg to go one step further than Kerouac in the communication of visionary states—aiming not only at depicting visions of a transcendental nature, but also at passing on the visionary impulse for immediate realization in the present moment.
33To close the loop, it may be observed that visions, as they occur in the writings of Kerouac and of Ginsberg, partake in the regime of the utopian; they signal what Muñoz, in Cruising Utopia, identifies as “an idealist mode of critique that reminds us that there is something missing, that the present and presence (and its opposite number, absence) is never enough” (100). Conversely, the visionary state channels a form of synchrony that delivers a utopian future in the here-and-now; a futurity, imminent and immanent, that bypasses chrono-normativity by establishing a horizon of transcendence as immediate ontological potentiality. In Ginsberg’s early poetry and in Kerouac’s novels of the road, this potentiality is summoned through transcendental performativity and carried into the writings through the mode of the Prophetic and of the allegory respectively. Underpinned by the scenario of the quest, the search for transcendence constitutes the underlying dynamics of the ontological strategy of the works, allowing the narrators and protagonists to engage with a temporality of a queer nature, one where the chronological time of the here-and-now meets with the timelessness of the transcendent through motion. In Kerouac, this motion is mechanical in its literal sense; typified by the racing car driven at full speed from one coast to the other and back again—a speed capable of uprooting the self from cultural, social and chronological forms of normativity to launch it into a dissident space-time of a transcendental nature, unbounded and infinite, and graspable only symbolically through its allegorization. In Ginsberg, motion is powered by the prophetic value of myth; exemplified by way of a transcendental performativity that aims at channeling the universal mind in sociohistorical reality via a commitment to the immediate conditions of the here-and-now.
34Above all, for both writers, motion is synchronic, giving shape to a queer impulse from the temporal self towards the transcendent and back into the text, whose momentum overpowers the alienating effects of clock time, “a structuring and educating mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present” (Cruising Utopia 1). In Kerouac as well as in Ginsberg, motion is paradigmatic, projected as a queer gesture through which the protagonists rise up to their fate by virtue of the sheer accomplishment of nature on the site of the self. This distinctive mode in the writings, which is that of the visionary, occurs at the interface of the ontological with the historical and the spiritual: a confluence that lays the foundations for a transcendental ontology which resonates with the Romantic environment of Kerouac’s and of Ginsberg’s works. Shaped by the Transcendentalist legacy of the texts, this ontology of a transcendental nature relies on a pantheistic framework that hinges on immanence, and whose synchronic regime—as the faculty to embody divinity instantaneously and without reserve in the here-and-now—is established as the keystone of its accomplishment.