The Beat Generation & The Hippie Movement - Research Paper Example

English Literature 09 April The Beat Generation & the Hippie Movement When we talk about youth protest movements inAmerica, the hippies and the 1960s come into our heads at once. But the fact is that the sixties witnessed only the second wave of youth revolts and student revolutions that have irrevocably changed the world. However, the first youth upheavals - clumsy, without any clear program, but rough and wild, began in the 1950s and paved the way for the successors. The Beat Generation as a cultural phenomenon clearly manifested itself in the early and mid 1950s. Kerouac, who coined the term, stated that it derives from the word “beatitude” – beat and attitude – attitude towards life of an anti-conformist generation with a unique world outlook which strives for spiritual communion, infinite love and bliss. There are many interpretations of that Kerouac‘s “beat”. A young beatnik as a media stereotype of the movement is “broken”, “crushed”, “worn out” and “tired” of the western society of that time. Beatniks were ardent fans of jazz also. That’s why the neologism could be originated by jazz rhythm. The word “beatnik” appeared in the American language on April 2, 1958 with a helping hand from a San Francisco Chronicle journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner Herb Caen, who used it in his column. He added to the English word “beat” (taken in any meaning named above) the Russian suffix – “nik”, taken from the popular Russian word “sputnik” (satellite), which became international. This research of American subcultures will be inconsistent without mentioning avant-garde Lettrism, inspired by Dada and Surrealism. It deeply influenced postmodern art and society as called to break with old traditions. It was founded in the early 1950s in France by Isidore Isou, a Romanian-born poet. The ideology was based on the postulate of degeneration of words as spoken symbols in the modern world. Therefore, the followers of Lettrism preferred, for example, to write private letters instead of long telephone conversations; write slogans, not novels. The Lettrists also loved to alter state of consciousness and perform. They roamed around the cities and villages of America in their weird painted clothes strongly ridiculing the postwar consumer society, banality of mass culture and absurdity of political and social system. The Beat Generation kept apace with the Lettrists. Birthplace of the Beat movement is New York. In the 1950s - early 1960s, a group consisting of artists, writers, poets, among which are Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and their fans has drawn a large public interest. But the subculture was logically developed and received cult status in California, in particular, in its southern part, associated with the famous Venice beach art colony. It was vividly described in the famous book by Lawrence Lipton – The Holy Barbarians. In the mid-1950s, the Beatniks staged performances named Jazz and Poetry in beach cafes. Their core motif was the representation of the rebellious, colorful spirit of the slums and the attempt to romanticize life of “white trash” - the one that has a significant influence on modern American culture to this day. The Beat movement was not massive. But their antagonism toward common values ??and fatigue from bourgeois contemporaries (hitchhiking trips and hipster way of life of the Kerouac’s heroes in the novels On the Road, Dharma Bums; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig), talented immersion in literature (Howl by Ginsberg), forced confrontation (like the one at a mental hospital in Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, where the character of the senior nurse Ratched and the hospital itself are the allusion to the state)) and artistic delights, as well as the desire to turn away from social and political problems and experiments with drugs (novel Junkie and Naked Lunch by Burroughs; The Island and The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley) have played a role in the dissemination of their ideas. Lawrence Ferlinghetti also belonged to this galaxy and is also known as a writer (for example, he published several collections of experimental prose - A Coney Island of the Mind, 1958). But Lawrence became famous thanks to the book store City Lights, opened in 1953. In 1955 he published the scandalous poem by Ginsberg - Howl and was arraigned on charges of indecency along with the author, but won the process. The famous story of Salinger - Catcher in the Rye, was released back in 1951 and is still banned in some U.S. schools! In 1956 Leonard Cohen, a cult writer, poet and singer, published his first novel. Tom Waits always emphasized the relationship of his creative work with the ideas of the Beat movement. However, he was not the only one. Many other prominent figures of the world’s cultural establishment experienced their influence. Their own heroes were strange and extraordinary. They were marginal people like Arthur Rimbaud - a genial poet but a drunkard who gave up writing poetry at age 21 and went to Africa. He came back only twenty years later, disgustedly looked at the book of his poems and, according to legend, refused to recognize them as his own. The Beat Generation argued that Rambo “burned out”: this ideology was the forerunner of the famous Cobain’s phrase “It’s better to burn out than to fade away” and other similar rock and roll phrases like “live fast, die young”. They were flamboyant like Burroughs, who openly spoke about the benefits of homosexuality. However, he married a woman, whom he shot in 1951 in an attempt to stage the scene from William Tell. He used a gun instead of a bow and missed…Then he wandered in South America, experimenting with different drugs. He became famous for his untranslatable book Naked Lunch and invention of the collage technique, which was used by all the bohemian people, including David Bowie. At the end of his life, he became friends with Waits, starred in Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy and died in 1997, when Patti Smith recorded her Peace and Noise. The Beat Generation died with Burroughs and Ginsberg in 1997. Ginsberg, one of the most popular American poets, lived a full strange life too: he washed dishes, drove trucks, worked as a night porter and even a seaman on cargo ships. His Sunflower Sutra formed the ideology of the Beat movement: after the release of Howl, American society started the persecution of homosexuals, as the poem was full of obscenities and Ginsberg lived openly with his lover. Another Founding Father, Jack Kerouac, died in 1969. He graduated from Columbia University, as many of the Beat stars and even served in the Navy, but was disenrolled because of suspected schizophrenia. Since then he has led the life of a tramp and wrote his books spontaneously on the road. On the Road was finished in three weeks and was fully consistent with the ideology of the Beat: the ideology of unlimited freedom and disregard for social conventions. The Beatniks brought to life the concept of counterculture - movement in opposition to everything official, “normal” and generally accepted. They originated their fashion even- baggy collared sweaters with long sweaters, jeans called Texas, flannel trousers, Van Dyke beards, thick-rimmed glasses. They gathered in coffee houses, read a lot of books and had the reputation of intellectuals. Their worldview conjoined the heritage of Emerson and Whitman (as a kind of myth of America), Fenimore Cooper and Ernest Hemingway (natural man), Kropotkin’s anarchism, philosophy of Zen Buddhism, etc. The Beat Generation managed to change the role of youth in society of the mid- twentieth century. In static society the major role belonged to the older generation. The counter-culture of the mid-1950s - late 1960s speeds up the pace of life. Poems are replaced by slogans and aphorisms, classical dances by be-bop and rock and roll. Utilitarian jeans replace suits and dresses. The consciousness of the people reacts for first time to the fact of presence of technologies which literally invaded human life (atomic energy, television, satellites, rocket science). So, one of the important concepts of the counterculture, preached by the Beatniks, was the rejection of the rationalistic technological civilization with its latest marketing technologies. The Beatniks popularized the world of cultural and spiritual values, though admired bikes and hitchhiking. Their role model was a cool young guy, necessarily a peer. You can meet such heroes in the American movies of the 50s. Two actors became true idols - Marlon Brando and James Dean. In The Wild One Marlon Brando played a moody leader of a biker gang and James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause played a car thief. In both films we see confusion, homelessness, an accurate representation of the dark corners of reality. The wild ones and rebels began to appear in all cities of the world (serving as a prototype for future biker, rocker and punk subcultures, affecting many politicians and future policies in general). For the first time the parents realize that they are unable to cope with their offspring. The level of juvenile crime has become very high. The adults looked in fear at grim and violent youths riding on Harleys and all kinds of crazy kids finely shown, for example, in Cry-Baby. It is interesting that throughout its history until the 1950s American cinema has never been targeted at people under twenty-five. But in the mid-1950s Hollywood sensed a trick as it was losing the battle with television which attracted the young audiences with different entertainment shows. Film-makers decided to change the rules of the game accentuating on the younger generation. Big business followed the lead changing its policy, investing in youth fashion, music, etc. They created their own slang - in fact, nearly all today slang words were simply borrowed from the Beatniks and somehow modified. In particular, they introduced the omnipresent word “cool” - it was taken from jazz. They also borrowed from jazz such words as “cat”, “dude”, “dig” and many more. The first Beatniks were able to use the power of the media to create their own image and promote it. Representatives of the Beat Generation were not so numerous. But their names, books and stories associated with them, are widely known today even by people who are far from the study of youth subcultures and politics. So, they cultivated a taste for nonconformism and left the stage. It was the time for the Hippies. The hippie subculture was formed in the United States by the mid-sixties. Members of this subculture were mostly middle class young people: humanities students and Bohemians. All of them were engaged in finding a way out – “exodus” from the technocratic, materialistic society. These ways included drug dreams and attempts to revive pastoral innocence. Another forerunner of the hippies that is certainly worth mentioning is Der Wandervogel – the movement of migratory birds that originated from Germany and was brought to the U.S. by the Germans who settled around the country in the twenties - early thirties. This back-to-nature movement got warm reception and was quickly popularized (the most well known representatives are probably the Nature Boys). This movement involved the youth of the first postwar generation. The contemporaries described them as strange people with long hair falling down to shoulders, dressed in short pants and colorful jackets. They sang in the streets, danced in circles, like little children. They looked like people from a fairy tale. The “migratory birds” had, nevertheless, a local character and ceased to exist with Hitler’s advent to power in 1933. The Hippie movement was more massive than all the previous (and subsequent) forms of youth subcultures. The Hippies “occupied” New York and Los Angeles and turned them into prime movers of musical and artistic styles. The Hippie movement reached its apogee during the fabled Summer of Love in 1967, when thousands of young people said goodbye to parents, colleges or just run away to be a hippie. Then, according to American sociologists, the movement numbered about five hundred thousand people. Among them were two hundred thousand “real, ideological hippies”, leading an appropriate lifestyle for many months; two hundred thousand of so-called “plastic hippies”, i.e. young people who were hippies only during the holidays; and, finally, one hundred thousand of “invisible hippies” – people who shared the ideology one way or another. The latter mainly included older people - university professors, public servants, intellectuals. One of the “invisibles” was a nuclear physicist Capra Fritjof who subsequently combined the postulates of quantum mechanics and Hindu mythology in a spirit of postmodern (his Dance of Shiva was popularized by Flowers Children along with the traditions of Eastern mysticism in general). Capra and many other professors led almost a “schizophrenic” way of life at that time. During the day he is a lecturer and researcher, at night or on weekends - an ordinary hippie, hitchhiker, smoking marijuana in a rural hippie community. The happening called Human Be-In, San Francisco, 1967, was an important milestone in formation of the movement. That Gathering of the Tribes was the first of its kind. On January 14, 1967, about 50 000 hippies gathered in the Golden Gate Park to hear Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Alpert, Dick Gregory, Jerry Rubin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder, etc. All the speakers talked about life, love, enlightenment and peace. The Grateful Dead, The Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service rocked the place. People enjoyed music, speeches and food… with LSD. It was a unique event as gathered in one place the acknowledged leaders of the generation who set the tone of the American history and formed new views and ideas. The basic principles of the Hippie subculture can be formulated as follows. First of all it was a passive resistance to the technocratic consumer society. That resistance was manifested through certain rituals that represented a symbolic threat to the symbolic system (they played the rebels as a way of social adaptation). Secondly - the journeys, which were understood by hippies both geographically and in the mystical sense as the inner journeys related to drug and the concept of “expansion of consciousness”. Thirdly – self- expression. The Hippies expression was associated with a total dissatisfaction with the education system, aimed at dehumanization of society. Fourth - subjectivity, introversion of the hippies (which came out as a protest against intellectualism and unreasonably high standards of the objective world). And finally I need to mention their individualism as a reaction to impersonality of the mass society. A hippie believes that freedom is in his head and pays no attention to existence of oppressive social structures around. The Hippie subculture was characterized by a metaphysical protest, expressed through alteration of consciousness (with the help of magic, occultism, yoga and drugs), transformation of sexuality (through the sexual revolution and drugs again), change of interpersonal relationships (“class struggle” against “I”, “ego”). The crucial role in the hippies’ fight against the technocratic society belonged to three key elements of the counterculture: drug culture (an attempt to escape from yourself; the knowledge of God); Eastern mysticism (or rather its synthesis with Christianity and Native American shamanism); and the idea of ??universal love (sexual revolution as a way to achieve maximum personal freedom from the traditional rules and standards). The drug cult was considered to be a powerful weapon, capable, in the opinion of the hippies, to persuade people into creation of an alternative society. Eastern mysticism has become an alternative to Catholicism (and Christianity in general), which stained themselves due to collaboration with the Nazis during the war. Freudian-minded hippies treated sex as a driving force capable to change world history and push the human race not only to a revolution of consciousness, but also to a social revolution. American hippies mostly strayed away from the outside world, lived in communes and sympathized with the USSR and China Communists, hoping to make a revolution in the United States. The leaders of politicized hippies were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Over time, the hippies realized that they must start the revolution from themselves- revolution in mind, not in society. The idea of ??consciousness revolution succeeded in some way from the idea of ?? the Beat Generation - instead of debilitating political debates and clashes they preferred to run away from home and society, to live among people who stick to their beliefs. The Hippies participation in politics often turned into a farce like election of a swine for the President of the United States. The Hippies piled up barricades around the U.S. military offices together with Vietnamese Zen Buddhists and Hare Krishna followers and theatrically besieged the Pentagon. Nevertheless, the Hippies made political history of the U.S. - they led the peace movement and clearly manifested their ideals during numerous anti-war demonstrations held across the country. Representatives of different social classes, age and gender have made efforts to end the war in Vietnam. Many of the demonstrators have never been real hippies, however, the officials and conservative elements labeled them as ones. That primitive labeling contributed to greater division of the country as politicians considered the Hippies to be the second sort people, not true Americans, and tried to ignore their opinion and demands. The Hippies movement reached its peak in 1967-1968 and almost faded till 1971. This is partly due to the loss of the three pillars of the counterculture - Janice Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. All of them were barely 27 years old (mystical 27…many Western rock stars have died at this age or before; Amy Winehouse is the freshest example). Alcohol and drug abuse were indirect causes of death of all three. However, the chapter in the history of the Hippie movement was closed by Mark David Chapman on December 8, 1980, near the Dakota building in New York hotel. Death of John Lennon is connected with the end of the sixties era, the era of universal love and hope for the transformation of the world. The values ??and ideals of the fifties and sixties have not disappeared, not vanished in public awareness of the subsequent generations, but were organically enclosed into the context of modern Western culture. Nostalgia for the Beat can be clearly noticed in America. Johnny Depp bought a worn Kerouac’s raincoat for $ 16 000. Collected works of Burroughs and Kerouac are republished again and again and are in high demand. Francis Ford Coppola shot a movie version of the novel On the Road. Naked Lunch was adapted for cinema by David Cronenberg. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a very popular exhibition Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965. The revival of humanistic ideals, pronounced ecological concerns of the Hippie movement, became now more relevant than ever in the attempt to solve the problems of the survival of the human race. Their slogan - Back to Nature, back to the pastoral innocence, love and peace instead of hatred and total destruction of the environment, are fundamental to many parties and antiwar movements. References Elteren, Men. “The Subculture of the Beats: a Sociological Revisit.” Journal of American Culture 22.3 (1999): 71+ Gottlieb, Annie. Do You Believe in Magic? The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation. New York: Times Books, 1987. Morgan, Edward. The 60s Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.  Raskin, Jonah. American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004. Sterritt, David. Screening the Beats: Media Culture and the Beat Sensibility. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Stern, Fred. “Ginsberg, Kerouac the Beats and the Hippies.” World and I June 2008: 44+ Read More