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)
