Lardas, John. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 2001. 316 pp. $39.95 US. ISBN 0252025997.
[1] Although John Lardas does not break any new ground by casting
the Beat writers of post-World War II America as spiritual visionaries
within a bland and conformist society, the depth and subtlety he brings
to the task has been unequaled so far. By showing that Jack Kerouac,
Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were, as a group, highly influenced
by Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, he is able to portray
them as cultural critics who were working within a pseudo-scientific
theoretical framework. Ever since Norman Podhoretz damningly dismissed
the Beats as "know-nothing bohemians" in the mid-1950s, their defenders
have sought to invest these writers with intellectual substance and
respectability, and although there are inherent problems with Lardas's
defense, he answers Podhoretz as well as anyone has.
[2] Oswald Spengler declared that all historically viable human societies
begin as vibrant cultures, eventually reify into stagnant civilizations,
and then collapse into chaos in order to be reborn as new, organic
cultures which are unified around a "prime symbol," or central, unifying
ideal. While Spengler's original purpose was to provide a palliative
for a defeated Germany in the wake of World War I, Lardas claims that
the Beats read him in light of "typically American concerns: individualism,
democracy, and a pastoral vision of self and country set apart from
the corrupting influences of the European aristocracy" (41).
In other words, the Beats used Spengler's analysis to give support
to their own cultural purposes, which were to provide an antidote
for the spiritual ills of America while also embodying new ways of
living in an America returned to the purity of its original myths
and ideals.
[3] The Beats' purposes and activities were religious, according
to Lardas, in that they sought to reaffirm the sacredness of the everyday
- a prime Spenglerian feature of a healthy culture. But instead of
idealizing sacredness within a theological perspective, the Beats
saw it as a function of living out and expressing their culture's
most basic ideals, which in America were the ideals of absolute freedom
and liberty. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs also saw the act of
writing as a way of breaking through to, and enacting, this "new vision"
of a sacred universe. Armed with a home-grown "theology of experience,"
they sought to transform their own "liminal" experiences (as test
cases) into literary works that would establish a liberating "dialogic"
with the reader and thus perform prototypical religious functions.
Lardas is, in fact, most interesting and convincing when describing
the Beats' hope that their writings would function as both exorcisms
and prophecies within a moribund America suffering from a bout of
the "late civilization" blues.
[4] Instead of indiscriminately lumping the Beats together into one
groovy and psychedelic stew, however, Lardas goes to great pains to
delineate their differences. He examines the distinct contours of
thought and lifestyle that Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs extrapolated
from a Spenglerian base. He is fascinating and instructive on Kerouac's
fusion of Catholicism and Buddhism, Ginsberg's theory of spontaneous
composition, and especially Burroughs's almost messianic program of
"de-rationalization." Contrary to the claims of skeptical critics,
Lardas shows that these writers were responding to the foremost intellectual
developments of the time, for example the "new physics," in their
own experimental and experiential ways.
[5] In the concluding chapter of this thoughtful study, Lardas states
that the Beats' entry into America's popular culture was both inevitable
and distorted. Their seemingly vague and anti-institutional religiosity
was irresistibly attractive to a generation that came of age during
the 1960s, yet in translation it was also a religiosity that had very
little staying power. It tended towards a myopic inwardness, which
was hardly beneficial for any movement that hoped to change the culture
as a whole. Its emphasis on experience was also conducive to much
older strains of American anti-intellectualism that the Beats, according
to Lardas, had no intention of perpetuating. However, Lardas himself
has difficulty explaining the true and essential nature of the Beats'
religiosity, though it is the lynchpin of his study. It is almost
as though he is trying to do something that the Beats' whole project
resisted. As Octavio Paz once observed, all religions begin as poetry,
not theology. So perhaps any attempt, no matter how well-intentioned,
to transform the Beats' visions into a logical and systematic whole
will strain at artificiality. This, indeed, is the paradox involved
in writing about all varieties of romanticisms - explanation turns
the poetry into theology. And though it is probably a necessary, even
Spenglerian, turn for the critic and historian to take, it nevertheless
takes great skill to not discard the essence in the midst of the analysis.
Lardas, for one, does admirably well in this regard.
Michael Van Dyke
Department of American Thought and Language, Michigan State University
(vandykem@msu.edu)
