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“垮掉”不垮 ---- 关于美国50年代“垮掉一代”

2013-10-18 01:09 [Abstract] It’s a generation hard to summary in a word, they were crazy, undisciplined, desperate and self-indulgent, and however, they were also active, ambitious and sincere.
     They certainly did not have the ability to change life which is indeed conservative and old-fashioned. What they could do was to escape from it, they gave up money, status, social responsibility and family obligation, they got pleasure from taking addictive drugs, sexual love and jazz etc. In pursuit of sensational experience, they tried to free themselves from old ideas, and look for a new life style, new faith, new values, and new relations with each other. They weren’t “beat” down, as the term apparently suggested. Their life and art practice both demonstrate their active attitude towards the life.  They took risk, brought forth new ideas, and explored true essence of life bravely.
    This article tries to probe into the essence of the spirit of the Beat Generation and offers a new point of view to approach this cultural trend.
[Key Words] the Beat Generation；extreme behavior；young face；lost faith
 
 【摘 要】 关于“垮掉的一代”是很难用简单几个字就能形容清楚的，他们疯狂，放纵，堕落，沉沦；同时他们又坦率，真诚，积极，有追求。
    他们并没有能力改变生活与其中的那个守旧古板的社会，他们能做到的只是厌倦和逃避，把金钱、地位、社会职责、家庭义务一概抛弃，从吸毒、性爱、爵士乐等感官欲望的满足来把握自我，解放个性，直接获得全新的生命体验。
    他们试图通过直接获得生命体验，从而以人最基本的生命存在为基础，探索新的生活方式、新的信仰、新的价值观念、新的人与人之间的关系。他们并没有“被击败”，更没有“垮掉”，他们的生活及艺术实践都显示出他们对人生进攻的姿态，他们追求冒险与创新，勇敢地探索人生真谛。
    本文试着探究“垮掉”精神的本质，重新看待“垮掉”意义。
【关键词】 “垮掉的一代”；极端行为；年轻面孔；信仰缺失
 
1.      Introduction
    Like the "Lost Generation" of the 1920s, the American "Beat Generation" of the 1950s names both a literary current and a broader cultural phenomenon or mood. Rejecting the conformism and stress on "normality" of the Truman and Eisenhower years, the Beats emphasized an openness to varieties of experience beyond the limits of middle-class society; they explored the cultural "underground" of bebop jazz, drug use, "polymorphous perverse" sexuality, and non-Western religions.
    The term” Beat” was reportedly coined by Jack Kerouac (1922-1969, American) in the late 1940’s. As he said “Ah, this is nothing but a beat generation” from a specific conversation between Holmes (1926-1988, American) and him, this great movement in American history came into being. Then Holmes’s celebrated article in late 1952 in the New York Times Magazine carried the headline title “This is the Beat Generation”, that caught the public eye. But it became more common at about the time that writers like Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997, American) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919, American) were beginning to get noticed. It was quickly becoming a slang term in America after World War 11, meaning “exhausted” or “beat down” and provided this generation with a definitive label for their personal and social positions and perspectives.
    The origins of the word 'beat' are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself. Kerouac, who coined the expression, Beat, insisted that it meant not simply "beat down" or exhausted, but also "beatific." in his The Source of Beat Generation, he explained, the primary meaning of beat was poor, frustrated, penniless, beating down, roaming and sleeping in the subway, but at last it became the revolutionary slogan and label of American society behavior. [1] Holmes said: the so-called” Beat Generation” meant not only tired out., exhausted, upset, but also being ordered, used up, utilized, and the naked intuition and sincerity from deep heart. [2] Ginsberg calls this Beat Generation "Legacy and Celebration, conference an ‘intergenerational symposium’… learned from William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Steir. The ideals transmitted ‘involve candor, spontaneity, suspicion of hierarchical authority, a multicultural sophistication, a world revolution’.

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2. “The Beats” beating the society
2.1, the living social environment of “The Beats” at that time
    It’s a postwar generation, after World War II, life in America was dull and static. Dad went off to work, mom minded the house and it seemed like everyone would have a job, security and happiness. Visionaries at the time, however, saw that this idyllic prosperity was artificial and temporary; they wanted life now, not at age 65. They went on the road, hung out in jazz bars, drank and read poetry and howled at the moon. They created an antithesis called the Beat Generation. The 60s brought such cultural changes as expanded consciousness, rock & roll, civil rights and strengthened democracy. So the whole society fell into a state of depresses, especially the youth who were given up, behaved with naked intuition, went all out, advanced bravely.[3]
 
2.2, the behavior of “The Beats”
2.2.1, In society
    A man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth. 'Why don't people leave us alone?' It was the face of a beat generation, also a spiritual crisis, their misery, protest, exploration and degradation… Its members have an instinctive individuality, needing no bohemianism or imposed eccentricity to express it. Brought up during the collective bad circumstances of a dreary depression, weaned during the collective uprooting of a global war, they distrust collectivity. But they have never been able to keep the world out of their dreams. The fancies of their childhood inhabited the half-light of Munich, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and the eventual blackout.
    Some extremes go as follows: Standing before a judge in a Bronx courthouse, being arraigned for stealing a car, this young face looked up into the camera with curious laughter and no guilt. The same face, with a more serious bent, stared from the pages of magazine, representing a graduating class of ex-GI's, and said that as it believed small business to be dead, it intended to become a comfortable cog in the largest corporation it could find. A little younger, a little more bewildered, it was this same face that the photographers caught in Illinois when the first non-virgin club was uncovered. The young copywriter, leaning down the bar on Third Avenue, quietly drinking himself into relaxation, and the energetic hotrod driver of Los Angeles, who plays Russian Roulette with a jalopy, is separated only by a continent and a few years. They are the extremes. In between them fall the secretaries wondering whether to sleep with their boyfriends now or wait; the mechanic berring up with the guys and driving off to Detroit on a whim; the models studiously name-dropping at a cocktail party. But the face is the same. Bright, level, realistic, challenging. "Any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding, and yet the generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to possess a uniform, general quality. Their adolescence was spent in a topsy-turvy world of war bonds, swing shifts, and troop movements. They grew to independent mind on beachheads, in past-midnight arrivals and pre-dawn departures. Their brothers, husbands, fathers or boy friends turned up dead one day at the other end of a telegram. At the four trembling corners of the world, or in the hometown invaded by factories or lonely servicemen, they had intimate experience with the nadir and the zenith of human conduct, and little time for much that came between. The peace they inherited was only as secure as the next headline. It was a cold peace. Their own lust for freedom, and the ability to live at a pace that kills (to which the war had adjusted them), led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity. [4] 大学排名
2.2.2, In the field of literature
    The central Beat writers--William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac became nationally famous thanks to Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (1956) and the obscenity trial that followed its publication, then Kerouac’s On The Road , Burrough’s (1914-1997, American) Naked Lunch all became the representative work of the Beat Generation. They wrote just as they behaved, living in New York and San Francisco. Besides their enthusiasm for jazz and drugs, the group around Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac shared an interest in literary experimentation. Their work stressed spontaneous and uncensored writing, often based on their own experiences among small-time criminals and drifters. They influenced a whole generation of American youth by their crazy living style, they said: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked”,[5] “I look at this roaring, crazy New York with innocent and strange eyes, millions of people are busy running about life continually, just like a nightmare ---- robbery, loss, heaving and death, only that they can strive for a grave for themselves outside the island.”[6] "There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.'  Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination." "I'm running out of everything now. Out of veins, out of money." "The stone world came to me, and said Flesh gives you an hour's life." "What's your road, man? – holy boy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road.  It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow." "Americans should know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls."…
2.2.3, In the field of art
    In art, the opening of the symposium's Beat film festival features an eerie, disorienting, black-and-white film by Jonas Mekas, Guns of the Trees, which tells a fragmented tale of disaffected youth in a bleak Cold War world. Mekas arrived in the United States from Eastern Europe in the 50s, virtually penniless. He slept on floors and ate when he could as he scraped together the resources to make his movie. Mekas remarks that the Beats never knew they were a movement, they just knew they had a lot of friends who were artists. They shared their work and the excitement of their flourishing creativity.
    The film Naked Lunch which described a writer who was addicted in writing and drugs, couldn’t distinguish the real and unreal world, the whole film with a surreal skill recorded the hallucinatory world after taking addictive drugs, full of a lot of symbol metaphors and odd sexual hints.
Also a song was sung like this:
 
“When you cast your eyes upon the skylines
Of this once proud nation
Can you sense the fear and the hatred
Growing in the hearts of it’s population

And our youth, oh youth, are being seduced
By the greedy hands of politics and half truths

 

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