- 1 For terminological clarity, “queer temporalities” can be defined as “[p]ossible forms of deviance a (...)
1Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was a poet of the Beat Generation, social activist, homosexual and creator of queer temporalities.1 He was born into a time when homosexuality was considered a psychopathology, a sign of troubled times “emanat[ing] from the disorders of the mid-twentieth century—depression and war, the generalized anxiety of the nuclear age, [and] intense competitive demands placed on males” (D’Emilio 272ff.). While Ginsberg’s early poetry contains few and relatively tame references to his homosexuality, “Howl” (1955) clearly set a mark for an explicit celebration thereof, and the state’s attempts to censor the poem ironically cemented its literary status and bolstered its success (D’Emilio 319). The Beat Generation—the literary movement of which Ginsberg was a core member—was subsequently associated with homosexuality and “sexual perversion,” and Ginsberg came to serve as a bridge between San Francisco’s literary avant-garde and an emerging culture of (homo)sexual protest associated with the homophile movement(s) (D’Emilio 321ff.). Over the following decades, he wrote many poems explicitly documenting his own homosexuality—such as “Love Poem on Theme by Whitman” (1954), “Please Master” (1968), and the late “Jacking Off” (1997)—and advocated for queer rights.
2Surprisingly few academic publications have thus far engaged with Ginsberg’s work and public role from a queer theory perspective. For instance, Anil Pradhan’s “‘Screaming with Joy’: Allen Ginsberg and the Politics of Queer Masochistic Performativity” (2020) explores the performative gestures of “Howl”’s protagonists as constructions of homosexual, counter-normative identities of “queer masochism” (1). Pradhan chiefly draws upon Butler’s theories of heteronormativity and gender performativity (e.g. 3). Meanwhile, Dagmar Van Engen’s “Howling Masculinity: Queer Social Change in Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry” (2012) calls attention to the construction of gender in “Howl” and “Please Master” and asks whether these works represent masculinity in an essentializing way or whether their depiction of identity follows a postmodern, de-essentializing approach. Such readings share an almost exclusive interest in “Howl”—a fault that applies to a majority of Ginsberg scholarship—and an elision of the poet’s manifold subversions and deconstructions of linear or otherwise normative forms of time. On the other hand, explicit engagements with the temporalities of Ginsberg’s work—such as John Lardas’ The Bop Apocalypse or Sascha Pöhlmann’s Future-Founding Poetry—have often pointed to their subversiveness but ignored the queerness of such perspectives on time and focused instead on his modification of Judeo-Christian eschatology. My article intersects at the crossroad of the two approaches by examining Ginsberg’s prophetic teleologies (and anti-teleologies) from a queer perspective. While his connection to the broader topic of the present volume may, at first glance, be limited to his homosexuality and the gay (rights) activism that sprang from his poetry and translated into his political activities, I wish to demonstrate that the queerness of his poetic engagements with time and timeliness is more deeply implicated into the structure of his self-depiction and understanding of poetry. More precisely, I will show, with the example of Ginsberg, how various uses and critiques of linear, normative teleologies can be used as a means of queer resistance on the one hand and an expression of queer desires on the other.
- 2 Other scholars’ definitions follow this line of argument: for instance, Halperin has defined the wo (...)
- 3 Sedgwick defends this supposedly narrow use of the term by arguing that “given the historical and c (...)
3My use of the term “queer” follows Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s definition in Tendencies as referring—in accordance with its etymology, “across” (xii)—to “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically” (8).2 Implicated in this definition are Ginsberg’s general tendency to cross boundaries of normative identity formation and, indeed, to define his identity in terms of incoherence, religious-spiritual heterodoxy, and political independence from pre-defined positions. While the term can simply signify “same-sex sexual object choice” (ibid.),3 and will partly be used to this end in my argument, I follow Sedgwick’s argument by broadening its scope according to the implications of Sedgwick’s definition of queer as a “relational,” “anti-assimilationist” and “multiply transitive” category (xii). In doing so, I bridge the gap between the field’s tendency to discuss queer temporalities with reference to non-normative sexualities (Davies and Funke 3) on the one hand and its partial willingness to view any form of temporal disruption as queer (Haffey 22) on the other.
4Ginsberg’s case demonstrates that there is no “one size fits all” queer temporality, but the emphasis lies on their plurality (Wright 288f.) since the temporalities of his poems are not consistent with each other but openly embrace paradox and multiplicity. Rather than focusing on one specific strategy of resisting normative temporalities, the present paper will illustrate the breadth of Ginsberg’s poetic treatments of time, paying special attention to their transgressions of normative boundaries, in accordance with Sedgwick’s definition of queerness as a “multiply transitive” category.
- 4 While it could be argued that a definition of prophecy necessarily entails the presence of a divine (...)
- 5 While I do not argue that sacred time is per se queer in a narrow sense, Ginsberg’s powerful allian (...)
5The queerness of Ginsberg’s temporalities is conditioned by something more fundamental to his poetics than his sexuality, for it arguably encompasses all aspects which mark his identity as “queer.” His traversing of normative identity boundaries correlates with his public self-depiction as a literary prophet—a person whose mission is the dissemination of religious knowledge derived from epiphanic experience.4 In the Old Testament’s prophetic books, time overtly follows a linear, teleological progression towards a singular yet ambiguous temporal outcome—salvation or destruction. Its ambiguity is captured in the Greek word apokalypsis, which denotes either a “hermeneutical revelation” or a “destructive finality” (Pöhlmann 378; John Lardas qtd. ibid.). The prophet, thus Erich Fromm, presents the people with these two alternative futures and leaves them their choice (Fromm). Salvation is broadly associated with righteous, god-fearing conduct whereas annihilation is construed as the result of an abandonment of god-given morality. Biblical lore can be construed equally within heteronormative notions of time and outside of them. On the one hand, Christianity has arguably become a driving force of American morality and narratives of temporal progress toward universal salvation, and the symbolic representation of progress through the figure of the child, which constitutes the core of heteronormative teleologies and politics (Edelman 2f.), finds its culmination in the figure of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, the apocalyptic tendencies in some of the Biblical prophetic books have been identified as inherently non-normative by Sue Zemka. Her distinction between sacred and secular time identifies the latter with straight time: “where modern, linear [secular] time posits causality and seriality, the typological method posits dialogue and verticality. Events separated by thousands of years are connected through their mutual revelation of a pattern in the divine scheme” (74). This becomes evident in Ginsberg’s very definition of prophecy as “something which somebody knows and feels in a hundred years.” (Ginsberg in Plimpton 45) She further argues that sacred time has become somewhat taboo in academic discourse—“we do not talk … of temporal forms in history that warp time, or repeat themselves, or in other ways depart from the linear grid … [i]n part … because these forms descend from prophecy” (76f.). Particularly the apocalyptic prophecies, she claims, have become marginalized: “The intellectual taming of apocalypticism is the backbone of respectable Christianity” (81). This indicates that some non-linear forms of time, sacred time and apocalypticism occupy the margin of broadly accepted social discourse, similar to the realm of queer temporalities.5 Ginsberg’s understanding of the prophets (and of himself as prophet) casts them as outsiders, as political, social and religious protestors (Fromm 00:04:39), leveraging his own boundary-crossing status for prophetic authority. His resistance against normative temporalities and straight time explicitly draws from alternative, esoteric prophetic conceptions of time, and in turn, Ginsberg’s self-depiction as prophet-poet structurally figures into his rendering of queer temporalities.
- 6 This line of argument was brought forth most prominently by Lee Edelman: “Why not accept that queer (...)
6Rather than share the radically teleoskeptical position of antifuturist queer studies scholars,6 the early Ginsberg inscribed queerness into notions of time largely in line with (Judeo-) Christian teleology and derived from Biblical sources. For instance, “Howl” describes the coming of an apocalyptic revolution in America as akin to the Second Coming: at the end of the second part, the poem’s protagonists—all societal outcasts—
rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz … and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio / with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years (Ginsberg Collected Poems 139)
7Their actions represent the martyrdom and sacrifice of Jesus Christ: from the invocation of his last words in Aramaic to the sacrificial offering of the poem as the flesh of Christ, the passage parallels the narrative of the Gospels to the actions of Ginsberg’s friends and acquaintances (Paris-Popa 60). In the second part, the speaker describes their overcoming of America’s anesthetized mass consciousness, which takes the form of the Canaanite idol Moloch:
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! … lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! / Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! / … Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! … Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time! / Real holy laughter in the river! … They bade farewell! … carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street! (Ginsberg Collected Poems 140)
- 7 Adding to this, the poem transfers any eschatological promise into the present by claiming that “[h (...)
- 8 In About Time, Mark Currie defines prolepsis as “the anticipation of, or flashforward to, future ev (...)
8While the poem’s roots reside in Christian eschatology, presenting the apocalypse as a revelation of divine knowledge in “[v]isions,” “miracles,” “ecstasies,” “[e]piphanies,” it does so in what is clearly marked as past tense—specifying the time frame as the last “[t]en years,” i.e. 1945-1955 ( Ginsberg, Howl: Original Draft Facsimile 142).7 By not only specifying the time frame of the apocalypse in this manner, but implying, in a manner akin to prolepsis,8 that some of it has already occurred and the divine revelation is underway, the poem subtly modifies the atemporal narratives of Biblical apocalypse found in the Book of Revelation. The linear structure of past, present and future is broken, and by merging ecstasy (“Highs! Epiphanies!”) with desperation (“animal screams and suicides!”), the poem’s speaker resists the linearity of a progress narrative structurally embedded into straight time (Schäfer 16f.; Zemka 76f.). More importantly, by privileging the momentary over the permanent and personal ecstasy over reproduction, Ginsberg espouses queer modes of life functioning “outside of […] paradigmatic markers of life experience” and resisting the “conventional emphasis on longevity and futurity” (Halberstam 2).
- 9 The crisis Halberstam’s argument responds to, the AIDS epidemic, may be more immediately tangible t (...)
9By casting the generation’s primary attribute as a prophetic madness—as in the above paragraph, where the “[m]ad generation” is simultaneously one of “[v]isions” and “[e]piphanies”—the speaker reinterprets mental illness, or the crossing of societal boundaries, as a core aspect of the American zeitgeist and an indicator of clairvoyant sanity in an America gone insane. Ginsberg’s poetics cast queer time as a response to an acute crisis which signals the failure of heteronormative conceptions of futurity as longevity. Judith Halberstam has argued that “[t]he constantly diminishing future creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now, and while the threat of no future hovers overhead like a storm cloud, the urgency of being also expands the potential of the moment” (2).9 “Howl”’s protagonists, the “best minds of [Ginsberg’s] generation” (Ginsberg Collected Poems 134), are described as “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” (ibid.)—from their first appearance, momentary ecstasy, both physical and spiritual, becomes a primary hallmark of meaning-making and life quality. The poem implicates the protagonists’ unproductive, desire-driven moments of jouissance and “heightened intensity and urgency” (Davies and Funke 7) within an esoteric teleological framework. This often includes sexual fulfilment: for instance, they “let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy” and “blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love” (Ginsberg Collected Poems 136). By associating such behavior with salvation (both individual and collective), the poem (re-) inscribes queerness into a religious discourse which (at least in the 1950s) was inherently hostile to queer people.
- 10 Chrononormativity denotes “the [late capitalist] use of time to organize individual human bodies to (...)
10By contrast, the sleep-and-deathlike condition of Moloch, the metaphorization of what Ginsberg perceived to be a pernicious American zeitgeist, is depicted as a denial of physical desire and sexual fulfillment: “Moloch in whom I sit lonely! … Lacklove and manless in Moloch! / … Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon!” (Ginsberg, Collected Poems 139) The speaker’s loneliness is associated with the rigid stasis induced by Moloch, which leaves him physically and spiritually unfulfilled, “[l]acklove and manless,” a “consciousness without a body” deprived of a “natural [physical or spiritual] ecstasy.” The collective mentality that Moloch represents is defined by hyper-rationalization, industrial capitalism and a denial of one’s physicality in favor of a purely metaphysical religiousness. Meanwhile, sexual fulfillment (as depicted in part I) is recast as an instrument to religious salvation and a tool to resist what Elisabeth Freeman has called the “time of capital” (“Introduction” 171). The poem associates late capitalism with stasis—describing Moloch as a “sphinx of cement and aluminum,” a “vast stone of war” and “stunned governments” (Ginsberg Collected Poems 139)—and thereby exposes and critiques the state’s naturalization and institutionalization of artificial mechanisms of temporal control (Freeman, Time Binds 3). This process, which Freeman defines as “chrononormativity,”10 is reversed in the poem. While “[i]n a [chrononormative] society, the state and other institutions, including representational apparatuses, link properly temporalized bodies to narratives of movement and change” (Freeman, Time Binds 4), Ginsberg’s narrative locates these bodies in a state of sleep-like immobility, thereby casting the state’s “teleological schemes” (ibid.) as falsehoods. Moreover, by framing non-reproductive sexual communion as redemptive religious experience, the poem resists a heteronormative teleology centered around childbearing as a marker of futurity (Wright 290; Edelman 2f.). Instead, the pursuit of individual fulfillment is prioritized over the maintenance of a collective generational obligation to procreate and ensure the survival of humanity. Individual salvation, in turn, is associated with collective salvation. Overall, “Howl” moves within a teleological framework of time yet redefines queerness—both as an “open mesh” of potentials of identity formation and as “same-sex sexual object choice”—as a vital instrument for religious salvation, thereby modifying Christian eschatology against hetero- and chrononormative teleologies centered around reproduction or productivity.
- 11 My argument here follows Sedgwick’s definition of queerness as well as Halberstam’s argument that q (...)
- 12 The excerpt exemplifies Halberstam’s suggestion that queers engage “in activities that probably see (...)
11Similarly, the speaker of “America” recasts queerness as an indicator of his leadership qualities. At the poem’s beginning, he confronts his nation with its depraved morality. Viewed from an outcast’s perspective, America’s trajectory is depicted as moral and material decline, with the much-hailed creation of the atom bomb, the emergence of capitalism and the fight against communism (Ginsberg Collected Poems 154f.). By associating core aspects of America’s progress narrative with decline, the speaker turns the hetero/chrononormative aspects of progressive optimism on their head while simultaneously authorizing his moral integrity via his queerness (as a homosexual, neurodiverse, physically unfit ex-communist).11 He categorically objects to conservative-normative forms of religiousness, replacing “the Lord’s Prayer” with “mystical visions and cosmic vibrations” (Ginsberg Collected Poems 154)—depicted as a more genuine testament to his religiousness. He “sit[s] in [his] house for days on end and stare[s] at the roses in the closet” (ibid.), his idling becoming a performative gesture that critiques the normalization of socioeconomic productivity (Freeman, Time Binds 3ff.; Schäfer 4).12 Yet it is precisely in his resistance against a multifaceted normativity that “[i]t occurs to [the speaker] that [he is] America” (Ginsberg Collected Poems 155). His multiple transgressions of cultural norms and boundaries are recast as signs of his American-ness which qualify him as the nation’s leader: “I’d better get right down to the job. / It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. /America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel” (Ginsberg Collected Poems 156). Queerness is transformed, as it was in “Howl,” from a mere mode of resistance into an instrument of preventing America’s ethical-cultural decline and leading the nation towards its salvation, and thus becomes the core of the poet’s teleology. Metaphorizing his nation as a vessel and offering himself as its captain in a manner recalling Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain!” (his elegy to President Lincoln), the speaker drafts a multifaceted countermodel to normative temporalities.
- 13 Ginsberg’s self-depiction as prophet poet takes as the beginning of this role a series of visions t (...)
12While the poet’s work of the mid-1950s presents a teleological resistance against chrononormativity which provocatively inscribes queerness into Christian teleology, Ginsberg’s work of the late 1950s, particularly a series of “drug poems,” makes a more decisive break with linear time. The consumption of drugs and the narrative mechanisms used to convey their intensification of the moment offer the potential to disrupt the normalization of “long periods of stability”: “the lucid temporality created by drugs (captured by Salvador Dali as a melting clock and William Burroughs as ‘junk time’) reveals the artificiality of our privileged constructions of time and activity” (Halberstam 4f.). Ginsberg’s experiments with various psychoactive substances (including LSD, laughing gas, mescaline and ayahuasca) were meant to produce, as he later argued, “different reverberations of the same vision” (Ginsberg in Plimpton 64), i.e. the original Blake visions of 1948.13 By chasing after an archetypal experience and its “reverberations,” the poet negated a linear notion of time, emphasizing mythical temporalities that “warp time, or repeat themselves, or in other ways depart from the linear grid” (Zemka 76). More importantly, however, the poems’ speakers depict (ego-) death—imagined as an epiphanic union with a transcendent divine—as the ultimate (anti-) telos. Ginsberg’s veneration of death presents a profound break with normative teleologies as it removes any necessity for progress, productivity, or reproduction.
13Insofar as death imagined as divine union necessarily entails the crossing of boundaries of selfhood, resulting in “an identity without an essence,” it is inherently queer, and aligned with Sedgwick’s definition of queerness. Indeed, it is not death but boundedness which fulfills Ginsberg with anxiety, as in “Lysergic Acid”: “I am … / lost, separated, a worm, a thought, a self / … I allen [sic] Ginsberg a separate consciousness / I who want to be God / … I who wait trembling my destruction” (Ginsberg, Collected Poems 239). The speaker’s telos can be characterized as a kind of “utopia-under-erasure,” a form of regression which at once critiques progressive optimism and functions as a site for dissenting “modes of anticipation,” thus conforming to Halberstam’s view of (queer) subcultures (Freeman, “Introduction” 165f.). While this model of religious experience rejects hetero- and chrononormative teleologies, it proved to be profoundly unproductive for Ginsberg. For unlike in the previously discussed poems, where a queered Christian teleology offers a viable alternative to narratives of decline, the telos suggested in the “drug poems” was a literal dead end, with nothing to offer beyond the fearful dissolution of the personal self. In a sense, this puts Ginsberg’s religious endeavor somewhere between Lee Edelman’s radical opposition to notions of futurity, which suggests that any regard to the future is inherently heteronormative (2f.), and Halberstam’s counter-argument, which remains critical but ultimately accepting of notions of futurity (Davies and Funke 6f.).
- 14 Collins Dictionary defines “chiliasm” as “the doctrine of Christ’s return to reign for 1000 years,” (...)
14Meanwhile, “Laughing Gas” casts time as circular, thereby almost removing the teleological element from prophecy altogether. Under the influence of the eponymous drug, the speaker realizes he has “been here before” through the “odd vibration of / the same old universe” (Ginsberg Collected Poems 197): “the chiliasm was an impersonal dream— / … the sadness of birth / and death, the / sadness of / changing from dream to dream, / the constant farewell / of forms … / saying / ungoodbye to what / didn’t exist” (Ginsberg, Collected Poems 197f.). By negating the “chiliasm”—a Christian teleological notion14 that suggests a linear or “straight” time—the poem disrupts the core narrative of what Edelman has termed “reproductive futurism” (2), namely the association between futurity and reproduction. According to Freeman, the narrative form of the cycle is not per se subversive—on the contrary: “[Chrononormativity] harnesses not only sequence but also cycle, the dialectical companion to sequence, for the idea of time as cyclical stabilizes its forward movement, promising renewal rather than rupture” (Time Binds 5). Meanwhile, the cyclicality in “Laughing Gas” does not complement or “stabilize forward movement,” but constitutes a paradoxical stasis-in-motion. The cycle of death and (re-) birth is depicted as a “constant farewell of forms,” a form of temporal entrapment in which the individual undergoes a series of permutations and dreamlike states, and death is merely a short temporal disruption to this cycle. This queer temporality is inspired by the Buddhist samsara—the cycle of death and rebirth into a world that is per se illusory—“it being the dream / of someone in a dentist’s / chair […] / in the closed universe of / illusion” (Ginsberg, Collected Poems 201f.). Like its Buddhist source, the poem shows birth and death to be transitory states which do not lead beyond the cycle: “The whole universe a shaggy dog story! / with a weird ending that begins again / till you get the point” (Ginsberg, Collected Poems 199). The poem’s speaker gradually overwrites Christian with Buddhist teleology, stating “there is no changelessness / but in Nirvana” (Ginsberg, Collected Poems 204)—thus inventing a previously unthinkable queer form of teleology. By negating the value of reproduction via the structure of time itself, the poem deconstructs the artificial, heteronormative limitation of ideological discourse critiqued in Edelman’s No Future (2ff.). Although the poem is the first of the “drug poems,” it presents their last, most radical logical step of subverting linear teleologies through queer temporalities and temporal disruptions. However, the poet perceived the transcendent ontologies of the “drug poems” as a dead end and soon moved on to a decidedly embodied poetics.
15In the 1960s, Ginsberg’s queer temporalities developed further towards an openly political and performative disruption of straight time. In an interview for The Paris Review in 1965, he offered a definition of prophecy which altogether negated the notion of prediction and thereby abandoned a teleological understanding of history in favor of an even further intensification of present experience:
[Sometimes when writing] I realize I’m hitting some area which is absolutely true. And … applicable … or understandable universally. In that sense able to survive through time … to be read by somebody and wept to … centuries later. In that sense prophecy, because it touches a common key … What prophecy actually is is … that you know and feel something which somebody knows and feels in a hundred years. (Ginsberg in Plimpton 45)
16Ginsberg defines prophetic truth not through a specific external event, but via its ability to collapse present and future into one another, thus creating a rupture in linear time and a “queer moment” of emotions shared by the prophet-speaker and the reader. Sedgwick has defined the “queer moment” (or “moment of queer”), following her definition of “queer,” as “a continuing moment” which is “inextinguishable” and crosses temporal boundaries, merging past, present and future (xii; Haffey 23ff.). Ginsberg’s understanding of prophetic truth as experiential and independent of time presents a radical break with hetero-and chrononormative teleologies because salvation no longer depends upon linear progress, productivity and reproduction, but on moments of heightened intensity and meaning. These queer moments resist their own obsolescence (Sedgwick xii), and are characterized by “transient, extrafamilial, and oppositional modes of affiliation” (Halbertstam, “Introduction” 154). The ontological ground for this crossing of temporal boundaries lies in the poet’s
approximation of divine consciousness, which “is not parceled into a separation between past or future events, but rather apprehends all as a present unity” (Zemka 74).
- 15 Conceptually, Ginsberg’s move from an “external” to an “internal,” i.e. empirical versus psychologi (...)
- 16 Ginsberg was not a reader of the French theorists, and the comparability of his deconstructive meth (...)
- 17 It should be noted here that Traub rejects this critique by arguing that “we can read chronological (...)
17The above definition can be read as the result of an epiphanic experience on a train from Tokyo to Kyoto in 1963, after which he turned from a poetics of transcendence (as evidenced in the “drug poems”) to a poetics of presence. Following this event, he increasingly relied on an embodied poetics that emphasized the physicality of poetry as spoken testimony of religious experience bearing a tangible effect on its readers/listeners. His performative poetics immediately affected his relation to historical and political discourses: for instance, “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (1966) performatively resists the then-dominant narrative of the Vietnam War. The poem’s central speech act establishes a framework of simultaneity in which the Vietnam War can be read less as an external reality (although the poem does not deny its empirical existence altogether (Houen 359)) and more as a state of consciousness evoked by the “black magicians” of government and media.15 “The war is language, / language abused / for Advertisement, / language used / like magic for power on the planet” (Ginsberg, Collected Poems 409), claims the speaker, and subsequently demonstrates the manipulation of historical narratives by major media outlets. Headlines such as “Rusk Says Toughness / Essential for Peace” and “Vietnam War brings Prosperity” (Ginsberg, Collected Poems 407) and, more potently, secretary of defense Robert McNamara’s decision that “8000 American troops [could] handle the / Situation” (406) are abstracted onto the level of “language, language” (407). The speaker then proceeds to deconstruct these in a method suggestive of Derrida’s poststructuralist theory of language and knowledge formation in On Grammatology,16 but in fact derived from the logic of Zen scriptures such as the Heart and Diamond Sutra. He rejects the media’s hegemonic attempts at writing history—thereby engaging in a broader application of what Valerie Traub calls “unhistoricism” or the “‘undoing’ of … history” (26; Freccero qtd. in Traub 26). Traub uses the term “unhistoricism” to describe a particular brand of recent queer scholarship (whose chief representatives are Freccero, Goldberg and Menon) that critiques and seeks to unwrite teleological historicizing narratives which suggest a linear development of non-normative (i.e. mostly homo-) sexualities (22ff.).17 Meanwhile, Ginsberg’s version of this move entails an immediate undoing of the state’s mechanisms of controlling contemporary historical discourse. After this deconstruction has occurred, the narrator fills the vacuum with a counter-history whose narrative force emerges from a blending of past, present and future into an intensified single point:
I call all Powers of imagination / to my side in this auto to make Prophecy, / all Lords / of human kingdoms to come / … all … / ancient Seraphim of heavenly Desire, … / Come to my lone presence / … I lift my voice aloud, / make Mantra of American language now, / I here declare the end of the War! / Ancient days’ Illusion!— / and pronounce words beginning my own millennium. (Ginsberg, Collected Poems 414f.)
- 18 Later in the poem this synchronicity of war and peace is made explicit: “Language Lanugage M 60 Mac (...)
18By invoking the powers of past and present gurus, deities and supernatural beings, the speaker hopes to fill his word with supernatural power (Hungerford 285). When the word comes to embody this power, thus Ginsberg’s logic, its public performative pronunciation affects reality. But the way in which this is done constitutes a profound break with the established narrative of history. By not only declaring “the end of the [Vietnam] War” but declaring war to be an “[a]ncient days’ Illusion,” the speaker conceptualizes it as an illusory and therefore transitive mental state. The synchronicity of this state with one of religious enlightenment dismantles the monopolizing claim of historicizing narratives by doubting the impression that any moment in time has an essential, objective identity, and that a succession of distinct moments is truly taking place (Traub 29).18 Some of the figures invoked may no longer be alive, but their power prevails in the clarity of their truth and the sound of their name, undermining notions of linear temporal progression and a dead past, and allowing for “continuing moment[s]” of temporal disruption. Moreover, the communion of these “Seraphim of heavenly Desire” marks the end of the speaker’s pervasive lonesomeness, the fulfillment of his prophetic longing, and it is from this fulfillment that the moment draws its supernatural power. The excerpt thus engages in several strategies of making queer temporalities at once: “To be temporally backwards or forwards, to delay or defer the future, to expand or dilate the moment—all of these practices can be understood as resistances against a time that marches forward and connects past, present and future in a straight line” (Davies and Funke 10). This does not mean that the speaker has abandoned teleology altogether—after all, he “pronounce[s] words beginning [his] own millennium”—but that prophetic utterances like the un-declaration of the war may disrupt temporal linearity and suspend time.
19Later in the poem, Ginsberg defines prophecy in similar terms as the 1965 Paris Review interview, once more marking time as non-linear and his teleology as queer:
I’m an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas / but not afraid / to speak my lonesomeness in a car, / because not only my lonesomeness / it’s Ours, all over America, / O tender fellows— / & spoken Lonesomeness is Prophecy / in the moon 100 years ago or in / the middle of Kansas now. / … All we do is for this frightened thing / we call Love, want and lack— / fear that we aren’t the one whose body could be / beloved of all the brides of Kansas City, / kissed all over by every boy of Wichita / O but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me O but how many in their solitude weep aloud like me / … almost in tears to know / how to speak the right language / … I search for the language / that is also yours— / almost all our language has been taxed by war. (Ginsberg, Collected Poems 414)
20The speaker’s loneliness in the excerpt is reframed from a marker of queerness—he is a middle-aged single gay man in search of love, and thus diverges strongly from any notions of straight time (Freeman, “Introduction” 165; Freeman, Time Binds 4; Schäfer 10f.)—into an existential human condition and thereby a prophetic truth. In his definition of the latter, the emphasis lies on the performativity of prophetic language—i.e. its physical effect on speaker and audience—and its suspension of time. With the fulfilment of love—not reproduction—as central telos of Ginsberg’s understanding of futurity, the poem strongly confirms Thomas Allen’s argument that the human relationship to time is “founded on desire” (1), on “want and lack.” It also disregards the ideal of reproductive futurism (Edelman 2f.; Schäfer 10f.) in favor of more genuine, emotionally driven human connections embodied in various sexual practices which, similar to “Howl,” are framed as (quasi-) religious experience. The excerpt tackles both heteronormativity and late capitalist fetishizations of productive and efficient time use (Freeman, Time Binds 4f.) while promoting the fulfillment of individual/collective desires. In prioritizing the timeless value of prophecy as a discovery of common ground (“the language that is also yours,” “in the moon 100 years ago or in / the middle of Kansas now”), the poem produces an anti-teleological teleology in which time is entirely suspended, and which is “multiply transitive” (Sedgwick xii)—across time, space and sexualities.
- 19 Pöhlmann defines Ginsberg’s “defiant beginnings” as “founding the future despite the knowledge that (...)
- 20 However, it lacks the referential specificity of queer temporalities since it does not focus on for (...)
21From the 1960s onward, Ginsberg engaged in what Sascha Pöhlmann has termed “defiant beginnings” of “future-founding” (257f.).19 This concept resonates with queer temporalities in the sense that both are employed in resistance against hegemonical forces and their monopolization of historical narratives.20 More precisely, Ginsberg’s acts of “future-founding,” from “Wichita Vortex Sutra” onward, merge present, past and future in a form of sacred time, but with an increasing disbelief in a positive outcome that inevitably lead Ginsberg to reconsider the feasibility of Christian eschatology. Pöhlmann’s argument that “future founding is not synonymous with hope, optimism, or improvement, even though it is related to such notions” (22) immediately links Ginsberg’s poetic practice to teleoskepticism, i.e. the notion that teleological development may not always be positive or lead to gradual improvement (Wright 293). At the same time, Pöhlmann’s argument falsely ascribes his defiance to the vague notion of finality, which undercuts the critical impact of his argument. With the help of queer theory, we can locate the precise object(s) of Ginsberg’s resistance in a variety of hetero- and chrononormative narratives of progressive optimism (as well as other forms of temporal normativity) and examine the root causes that made an exploration of futurelessness necessary for him.
22The poet’s gradual relinquishing of hope first becomes evident in “Iron Horse.” Written six months after “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” it continues the former work’s dual methodology of deconstructive language and performative gesture, but with less faith in the outcome. Furthermore, it critiques hetero-and chrononormative temporalities through a homosexual modification of Jewish tradition:
is Heaven any different from where we are/ How could it be better or worse? / Tho delicate chemical brain changes / Aethereal sensations / … Sahasrarapadma promise / another Universe— / Whitman, Carpenter, Gavin Arthur, saying / … we shall stand in Flesh in Paradise[.] (Ginsberg, Collected Poems 443)
23Suggesting that the difference between the eschatological promise of heaven and the current condition of humans on earth is subtle at best can be read as an act of queer insurrection against (Judeo-) Christian narratives of salvation in itself—and all the more so since Ginsberg weaves both layman’s neuropsychology and Hindu mythology into his explanation. But what appears as a simple invocation of literary-prophetic authorities turns out to be Ginsberg’s understanding of a sexually transmitted prophetic lineage: “Edward Carpenter slept with Walt Whitman. Gavin Arthur [the grandson of Chester Alan Arthur, the twenty-first US President] slept with Edward Carpenter. Neal Cassady slept with Gavin Arthur. And I slept with Neal Cassady” (Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind 272). Craig Svonkin has compared this “self-fashioned gay genealogy” to “the tradition of Jewish intellectual lineage; in the Talmud … it is the norm for a rabbinic scholar to trace the lineage for an idea or story” (183f.). This subverts both the idea of an intellectual-ideational lineage and the heteronormative notion of (generational) reproduction. By establishing the idea of a homosexual lineage, Ginsberg is inscribing queer potential into the very concept of lineage, satisfying what Carolyn Dinshaw has called a “queer desire for history”: “gays and lesbians have been figured as having no past: no childhood … no family traditions or legends, and, crucially, no history as a distinct people” (Freeman, “Introduction” 162; Dinshaw qtd. in Freeman, “Introduction” 162). Contrary to the optimism of “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” “Iron Horse” is permeated by a form of apocalyptic pessimism that was to dominate Ginsberg’s poetry from the mid-sixties to the early seventies:
The Karma / accumulated bombing Vietnam / The Karma bodies napalm-burned / … Must come home to America, / There must be a war / America has builded [sic] herself a new body. / Peaceful young men in America get out of the Cities & go to / the countryside & the trees / … Get thee to the land, / leave the cities to be destroyed. / Only a miracle in Man’s eyes / … can show the warless way—/ or miracle / Radium destruction over Earth / seed Planet with New Babe. (Collected Poems 460)
24Where Ginsberg’s previous assessments of America’s fate were guided by optimism (albeit always balanced by a tone of jeremiadic exhortation), “Iron Horse” strikes a more apocalyptic tone. Once again, the teleology Ginsberg paints adheres overtly to a normative conception of time as linear and progressive by viewing the nation’s future as inevitable outcome of its past and present actions, but does so in polar opposition to progressive optimism. His demands for members of the counterculture in particular (the “[p]eaceful young men”) resemble Edelman’s idea that any thought of futurity, particularly an optimistic one, is per se implicated in heteronormative narratives (Edelman et al. 195). At the same time, it could be argued here that by limiting his demands to men—potentially also implying whiteness—Ginsberg’s temporalities themselves privilege certain less marginalized figures on the queer spectrum and work to exclude others (Wright 289). More importantly, the passage’s last line appears complacent with reproductive futurism through its idealization of the child (Edelman 2f.), even despite the implicit queerness (in the sense of non-normativity or boundary-crossing) of the imagined child’s lineage. Ultimately, this points to the heterogeneity of queer temporalities as a field of research, and towards Ginsberg’s complacency with some forms of normativity and his resistance against others.
25The ecocentric notion that the destruction of (large parts of) the human species could ensure the survival of the planet continued to be of central importance to Ginsberg’s queer teleology. In the 1970 poem “Have You Seen This Movie?,” the poet imagines a “posthuman” future in which nature has been restored after the extinction of the human species (Pöhlmann 298): “America Suicide Cure World Cancer! Myself included” (Ginsberg, Collected Poems 563). This can be read as a continuation of the teleology of the “drug poems,” wherein death is identified with religious salvation. In the later poem, however, salvation is imagined on a societal rather than an individual scale. Ginsberg’s position, while not categorically opposed to teleology (since the excerpt follows a logic of “[c]ancer” and “[c]ure”), can be identified with Edelman’s position in No Future: “queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism” (3).
26Ginsberg’s late work employs various mechanisms of resistance against naïve forms of progressive optimism: in “Ode To Failure” (1980), the poet once again engages in what Pöhlmann has termed “defiant beginnings,” or a practice of future-founding that is aware of the possibility of its failure:
Many prophets have failed, their voices silent / … Walt Whitman viva’d local losers … / Mayakovsky cried, Then die! my verse … / Alexander the Great failed to find more worlds to conquer! / O Failure I chant your terrifying name, accept me your 54 year old Prophet / epicking Eternal Flop! I join your Pantheon of mortal bards (Ginsberg, Collected Poems 745)
27It is worth noting that the figures Ginsberg lists are not primarily known today as failures—in some cases, much to the contrary, and Ginsberg inscribes himself into their “Pantheon” with pride. By glorifying failure, he is positioning himself against oppressive hetero-futurist narrative positing that “progress is a natural force that pushes civilized peoples and their nations into an always improving future” (Wright 293). While the poem overtly associates the speaker’s advancing age with failure, thereby appearing to support normative associations of ageing and decline (Schäfer 7), it also openly embraces the paradox between failure and success by turning a present failure into a potential beginning. This paradox is inscribed into his very definition of failure for prophets in particular: “The prophet is not judged according to the accuracy of his prophecies in hindsight, and in fact such truth claims do not enter the picture at all here. Instead, the first line indicates that the prophet has failed when he is silent, when his voice no longer has an effect on the present and future” (Pöhlmann 301). Failure, Pöhlmann argues, is only iterative and thus can be turned into success in the long run—this way, the poet undermines the perceived duality of the two, and transforms pessimism into a ground for optimism, thereby also resisting the fetishization of progressive optimism. At the same time, Pöhlmann’s argument ignores the queerness of Ginsberg’s “Pantheon of mortal bards,” or more precisely his queering of these figures, who are described as crossing the boundaries of a monolithic, normative identity. The poet’s catalogue includes “local losers,” “Fat Ladies in the Freak Show,” Mayakovsky, a subversive and communist activist Russian poet, “blind Monet,” “deaf Beethoven,” and himself, depicted here as an aged and physically weakened homosexual man (Ginsberg, Collected Poems 745). The “Pantheon” ultimately serves as a counterpoint to the poem’s implicit antagonist—the hetero-and chrononormative idealization of youth, economic or political productivity and stability (Freeman, Time Binds 4f.; Halberstam 4f.). Rather than an attempt at recasting failure as success, the poem can be read as a critique of narrative linearity and its frequent systematic exclusion of marginalized, queer identities—by allowing his “Pantheon” to be read at once as failures and successes, Ginsberg questions the human obsession with unambiguity and undermines the various mechanisms of temporal normativity operative within such narratives. Moreover, by highlighting the queerness of said pantheon—if not in a narrower sense of sexual or gender identity, then surely in the broader sense of crossing identity boundaries—the poet fulfills the “queer desire for history” (Dinshaw qtd. in Freeman, “Introduction” 162).
28The poem’s final lines appear to corroborate Pöhlmann’s argument regarding the iterative potential of failure-as-success: “I have not yet stopped the Armies of entire Mankind in their march toward World War III / I never got to Heaven, Nirvana, X, Whatchamacallit, I never learned to die” (Ginsberg, Collected Poems 745). The hyperbolic absurdity of the poet’s salvatory desire is met with a mixture of stoic acceptance and hesitant optimism, embodied in the subtle yet decisive “not yet”—but rather than a succession of distinct events (i.e. failure and success), the framework of the poem suggests that a certain event can function as both failure and success depending on the eye of the beholder, thereby replacing a time concept of sequence with one of synchronicity. In addition to sequential notions of time, Ginsberg’s late work also critiqued naïve optimism, as evident in “No! It’s Not the End!”:
Dropt one bomb / killed one / hundred thousand / Hiroshima nineteen forty five / No no not the end of / Civilization … / It’s Nobodaddy’s / old temptation / No no it’s not the end of Civilization / Everybody’s waltzing / to “the Hesitation” / … We’re come to “the fabled / damned of Nations” / … No no it’s not the end of civilization / no final solution / just gas & cremation. (Ginsberg Collected Poems 1112ff.)
29Where Ginsberg’s mantric poetics have elsewhere served a positivistic-performative purpose of calling an event into being simply by pronouncing it (“Wichita Vortex Sutra”), the poet’s use of mantric repetition in this poem serves to render the titular sentence meaningless and expose its optimistic naivete by juxtaposing it with a catalogue of human-fabricated catastrophe (Pöhlmann 295). The titular claim thus becomes a condemnation of humanity’s self-denial and of the very logic of straight time, which posits that “time and the individual living in time always move on, move towards the optimistically (and naively) fetishized notion of a promising and prosperous future” (Schäfer 17). By closely associating humanity’s future with its gruesome past, and by marking the latter as inescapable, the poet undermines the imagination of a positive, linear progress in which the past is static, and frames the dominant narrative of an “open future” (Zemka 75) as a delusion. The poem suggests that this narrative “actually prevents a better future by denying that any problems exist in the present (and that therefore do not need to be addressed, prevented, or solved)” (Pöhlmann 296). At the same time, Pöhlmann argues, Ginsberg embraces “the possibility of an alternative future, small as it may be” (296). Once again, however, Pöhlmann’s examination ignores the fact that Ginsberg’s alternative future is decidedly built in opposition to chrononormativity (and, more generally, temporal normativity), which, for Ginsberg, constitute the core of the problem. This is indicated by the reference to “Nobodaddy,” a Ginsbergian take on Blake’s hyper-rational deity Urizen which, in Ginsberg’s oeuvre, often embodies capitalism and the “time of capital” from “Howl” onwards, where it is called “Moloch.” Here, the references to the Holocaust and the atomic bombs dropped on Japan illustrate America’s active subsumption of war crimes in narratives of non-finality—thus illustrating Sedgwick’s argument that narratives of futurity often inherently exclude queer people as well as minorities implicated within the wider spectrum of queerness, which, in turn, correlates with policies harming said groups (xii; 8f.; 16). Thus, the poems of his late career enact a double resistance against two mutually codependent factors—the naïve optimism that dominates narratives of straight time (Schäfer 17; Wright 293) and the destructive tendencies enabled by such narratives and the hegemonic policies that accompany them.
30By connecting the existing scholarship on Ginsberg’s poeticization of time with the critical approaches yielded by queer theory and queer temporalities scholarship in particular, this paper has offered a more comprehensive framework of analysis for the poet’s skilled manipulation of temporal narrative structures, tropes and themes. The broadly accepted scholarly narrative of Ginsberg as a subversive poet has been substantiated with the help of Sedgwick’s definition of queerness as a “multiply transitive” category that exposes, undermines and critiques the deep-rooted ideological (and) narrative foundations upon which Western cultures are built. The dual foundations of temporal normativity which Ginsberg’s poetry tackles are the triple values of “family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (Halberstam 1), on the one hand, and the capitalist manipulation, normalization and streamlining of temporal narratives, on the other. Ginsberg’s queer subversions of hegemonic temporal orders presented a progressive dismantling of teleological forms—while his “Howl” era works still strongly relied upon a succession of crisis and resolution, his growing pessimism with and after the dissolution of the counterculture caused him to increasingly doubt the viability of optimism. Moreover, the gradual de-essentialization of his notion of prophecy—i.e. his gradual abandonment of defining components such as an eternal (albeit ineffable) deity, an objective (albeit equally ineffable) truth, and the reliability of language as a medium to communicate or actualize said truth, coincided with an increasing skepticism towards forms of linear narrative, temporal organization and the progressive optimism that almost necessarily accompanies them. In the end, the hope that did remain in the poet’s view of the future was tied to the condition of radical questioning and the willingness to traverse boundaries—be it temporal, sexual, racial, gendered, normative or other. This is what makes his temporalities truly queer, and perhaps more so over time. If Ginsberg’s dismantling of human conceptions of time can teach only one thing, it is a radical unlearning and questioning the knowledge once thought to be stable as a site of privilege, strategic silencing and uneven power relations.