Norman Spinrad
1 rue Maitre Albert about 3600 words
Paris 75005
France
SCIENCE FICTION AND THE BEATS:
American Literary Transcendentalism
by Norman Spinrad
While it is common knowledge that science fiction is not
generally admitted into the polite drawing rooms of the guardians of
America's version of F.R. Leavis's "Great Tradition," it is now
almost forgotten that another alternate American literary culture
was never quite accepted with open arms as part of the official
canon either, a literary tradition now seems sadly on the verge of
extinction, preserved in moribund form in a handful of critical
studies, and in a few bookstores like San Francisco's City Lights
and Paris' own Shakespeare and Company.
I'm speaking of what was called the "Beat Movement" at the time
of its greatest and most prominent flowering in the 1950s and
1960s. The novels of Jack Kerouac and the poetry of Alan Ginsberg
were the core of the Beat Generation, but certain essays of Norman
Mailer, notably The White Negro, were central to its esthetic too.
Thomas Pynchon's V was certainly part of this alternate literary
culture, as was Richard Farina's BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP
TO ME, Rechy's CITY OF NIGHT, even early Charles Bukowski.
And while neither the Beats nor the American science fiction
writers of the period nor the critics of the day generally
recognized the connection, both are avatars of a characteristically
American literary esthetic rooted in the very nature of America
itself, an alternate American literary tradition that has always
existed outside the literary law.
The Beats might have seemed to have come out of nowhere towards
the end of the 1950s with the publishing of Kerouac's THE
SUBTERREANS and ON THE ROAD and Ginsberg's HOWL and the attendant
broughaha in the major cultural media, but culturally speaking, they
were the spiritual descendants of an old American bohemian tradition
that had existed in the Greenwich Village for over a century and
that had thrived in exile in Saint Germain and Montmarte in another
incarnation in the 1920s and 1930s.
The literary ancestors of the Beats were Henry Miller, Walt
Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, William James, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, arguably even Thomas Paine and James Fenimore Cooper.
Far from avidly seeking entrance into genteel literary society,
the American bohemians formed a kind of outlaw proto counterculture,
and in Greenwich Village, Paris, San Francisco, and the mystical
countryside, created their own liberated zone.
Liberated from the restrictive sexual mores, conventional
politics, and dress codes of "square" society. Liberated from the
grammatical restrictions of conventional prose and the formal
restrictions of conventional literary structure. Liberated to
explore human sexuality as a major literary topic. Liberated from
official reality. Liberated from the notion that "life is real and
life is earnest."
Frankly, Scarlet, they didn't give a damn.
They were Bad Boys, Subterraneans, Dharma Bums, White Negroes,
living in disreputable neighborhoods, eschewing real jobs, dressing
to make a statement, engaging in "free love," doing drugs, boogying
to a different drummer, taking as their heroes dubious characters
like Rimbaud, Billy the Kid, Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde, and their
own outlaw demimonde as their literary country.
In this other America, the Indians, Blacks, Outlaws, and Street
People are the Good Guys, and the Cowboys, Cops and Squares are the
Bad Guys. Religion has nothing to do with uptight Christian
morality and everything to do with Eastern concepts of satoric
transcendence, meaning, among other things, that sex, drugs, and
yes, jazz and rock and roll, can be functional sacraments of the
godhead, and that, as William Blake had it, "the road of excess
leads to the Palace of Wisdom."
Disreputable as it might be, this mystical libidinal anarchism
was as American as Mom and Apple Pie, as old as the myth of the
West, as the American transcendentalists of the 19th century, indeed
arguably as old as America itself, which, after all, was colonized
by European reprobates and remittance men, and led into revolution
against the crown by scandalous Deists and Freethinkers like Paine,
Franklin and Jefferson.
Early literature in this tradition cultivated the notion of the
the Noble Redman and in a later more urban mode, the Negro, as
paragons, and finally the hipster himself as the self-made White
Negro, Third World boddhisattvas liberated from uptight white
society, from official culture and official reality, spontaneously
in tune with the music of the spheres and living the life of the
natural man.
Whitman sang the song of himself, Miller proclaimed himself Mr.
Sexus, Ginsberg howled, and Kerouac took it all on the the road.
The literary ultima thule was to make the reading of the poetry or
the prose the existential equivalent of real world satori, the
reproduction of the peak mystical experience to be found in sexual
ecstasy, zen meditation, psychoactive drugs, the contemplation of
certain magic landscapes, the right music, or ideally all of the
above at once.
It's not hard to see why such literary outlaws were never
exactly welcomed in polite literary company, where they would no
doubt do their best to get loaded, seduce the hostess, barf in the
punch bowl, and maybe punch out the host. The Code of the West
demanded nothing less.
Nevertheless American literature would have been pretty dead
without the Bad Boys. These writers made poetry a mirror of the
psychic landscape, liberated prose into a free-form poetic medium
free to use the real language of the people, and took the novel
where angels most certainly feared to tread.
Small wonder, then, that when Kerouac and Ginsberg emerged as
media icons, and Time transmogrified the Beat Generation into the
"beatniks," they became the Pied Pipers of a generation of American
college students emerging from the gray years of the Eisenhower era.
Small wonder that when Bob Dylan, a beatnik icon himself,
picked up an electric guitar in 1965 and put it all to the driving
beat and adolescent energy of rock and roll the Summer of Love and
the Counterculture were just a shot away, as a whole generation
found itself dancing to the beat of America's primal different
drummer.
Smaller wonder still that when the Counterculture collapsed
towards the middle of the 1970s, when America took a hard right turn
during the Reagan era, the Beat Movement followed it into the
dustbin of history, that Kerouac and Ginsberg and their crew have
had no major literary successors. As far as the Powers That Be are
concerned, even the memory of the whole phenomenon and as much of
what led up to it as possible was something upon which to impose
cultural amnesia lest official reality be threatened again.
One may search in vain through the literary magazines and
"serious fiction" lines of major American publishers for the next
generation of American mystical bohemian writers, and novels dealing
with the outlaw culture on anything remotely like its own terms are
almost nowhere to be found.
It would appear that an American literary tradition as old as
the nation itself has finally reached a dead end.
But appearances are deceiving.
For the place to look for current incarnation of that literary
spirit is neither Shakespeare and Company nor the City Lights
Bookstore nor Greenwich Village and North Beach but in American
science fiction. And therein lies the tale.
#
It may seem strange to have gotten this far without even
mentioning William Burroughs. Burroughs, after all, was the mentor
of both Kerouac and Ginsberg, and the stylistic influence of works
like NAKED LUNCH is evident in everything they wrote, as well as
serving as the conduit for the influence of Henry Miller, whose
banned books, like Burroughs', were for many years only available in
Olympia Press editions published by Maurice Girodias in Paris.
But Burroughs belongs at precisely this point in the discussion
because Burroughs is the key figure, the literary point of tangency
between the stream of libidinal anarchism that culminated in the
Beats and the stream of science fiction which still flows from the
same primal source.
Burroughs' first major novel, NAKED LUNCH, though unpublished
until 1959, was a major influence on Ginsberg and Kerouac, who
acknowledged Burroughs as their literary Master. And NAKED LUNCH,
with its biomorphic transformations, its psychedelic street people,
its Mayan mind-control obsessions, even its random cut-up formal
games, was already bordering on a kind of science fiction.
NOVA EXPRESS, with its galactic Nova Mob and Nova Police
battling in secret for the destiny of the Earth, with its central
concept of Word and Image as mind-control viruses, is science
fiction by any coherent definition. One sees its genre mirror-
image in much of the work of Philip K. Dick, in Michael Moorcock's
Jerry Cornelius cycle, in my own BUG JACK BARRON and LITTLE HEROES,
in the "condensed novels" of J.G. Ballard, in William Gibson's
NEUROMANCER trilogy, and indeed in most of the writers associated
with the current Cyberpunk movement.
And William Burroughs was himself influenced by American
science fiction. He appears to be well-read in the field. He
lifted a whole section of Henry Kuttner's FURY, and rewrote it, with
the appropriate acknowledgment, in his own novel. He even secured
the rights to turn Alan E. Nourse's sf novel BLADE RUNNER into a
"screenplay" in novel form, which is why the producers of the film
based on Dick's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? had to buy
rights to the title from both Nourse and Burroughs when they decided
it was just what they needed to retitle the movie.
When it came to content and thematic material, it was Burroughs
who borrowed from American science fiction, but when it came to
prose and form, he paid back the debt with interest.
Moorcock's allusive prose line in the Cornelius cycle has
theoretical underpinnings in Burroughs. J.G. Ballard's condensed
novels and the terse imagistic style that grew out of them reproduce
the major esthetic effect of Burroughs' cut-up techniques in more
controlled and coherent form. Delany's semiotic space operas BABEL
17 and THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION deal with the word as a control
vector, and DHALGREN owes much to Burroughs in terms of ambiance and
form. Gibson's cyberpunk style has absorbed its lessons from the
Beat Secret Master, and even Philip Jose Farmer did a
straightforward Burroughs pastiche in "The Jungle Rot Kid on the
Nod," as well as a short novel called RIDERS OF THE PURPLE WAGE, a
true Beat work written in a style that pays as much homage to Jack
Kerouac as to James Joyce and which is surely Farmer's finest work
of fiction.
Which is not to say that the average science fiction reader or
even writer even today thinks of anyone but Edgar Rice when the name
Burroughs is uttered. Burroughs' main influence on science fiction
came through the New Wave Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, and
its literary successor as sf's own Bad Boys, the Cyberpunks of the
1980s.
Having been something of a central figure in all this myself, I
find it difficult to discuss the matter coherently without bringing
my own work under consideration, which may be considered bad form.
But on the other hand, I am at least in an ideal position to convey
the constellation of my own literary influences, and, in a way, I am
typical of a school of atypical science fiction writers.
As a boy, I did indeed gobble up an indiscriminate range of
genre science fiction, but I was reading Melville and Twain too, and
by the time I was in college, Henry Miller, Kerouac, Pynchon,
Mailer, and yes, Burroughs, alongside Dick, Sturgeon, and Bester.
The point being that even from my adolescent point of view,
these two alternate American literary traditions had something
common at the core, and when I started to write I knew that where
they interfaced was where I wanted to be when I grew up.
Both American bohemian literature and American science fiction
are anarchical; it's always the outsider against the system, with
the outsider as hero. Both literary traditions are much more
interested in the peak experiences of society's fringe hipsters than
in the quotidian life of the common man. Both literary traditions
are transcendental, that is both traditions deal with heightened
states of consciousness, and see them in a positive light. Both
view the official reality of here and now with dubious skepticism.
Strangely enough, or perhaps not so strangely, both have the
same sort of extraliterary dimension, for both have spawned American
subcultures, science fiction fandom on the one hand, and the "Beat
Generation" and its ad mass transmogrification, the Counterculture,
on the other.
I was entirely unaware of the science fiction subculture of
fans, conventions, and fanzines until after I was a published
novelist, so, unlike more typical sf writers, its existence as an
in-group audience had no effect on my development.
But in the early formative years of my writing career, I was
well aware of the existence of the Beat milieu that was in the
process of being transformed into the Counterculture. I had read
Kerouac, Ginsberg, Pynchon, and Burroughs, and even in my college
years in New York, I had hung out in the East Village coffee-houses.
I did my on the road work in Mexico out of college before renting a
crummy cheap apartment in the East Village, worked in a sandal shop
and wore the product, had my peyote trips, and was considered a
beatnik by my parents. I moved to California before I wrote BUG
JACK BARRON, went to one of Ken Kesey's first acid tests, watched
the rise and fall of Haight Ashbury, and wrote for the Underground
Press.
To me, at least, it seemed only natural. This was clearly
where the future was unfolding, and where better for a science
fiction writer to be than at that unfolding edge.
Nor was I the only one. Robert Sheckley, Avram Davidson, and
Philip K. Dick, to name a few, had previously traveled in such
circles, Samuel R. Delany and Thomas M. Disch followed in their
footsteps, and in England, the New Worlds crowd was very much a part
of "Swinging London."
And it was there that the intersection became more than a
matter of hip life-style. For while science fiction was not invited
into the staid literary drawing rooms of London either, it was very
much a part of the general literary and cultural underground, and
visa versa. People like Moorcock and Ballard moved easily in both
circles. And both were literary theoreticians, who accreted a
movement around them, the so-called "New Wave," which aspired to the
creation of a hybrid "speculative fiction" that would simultaneously
liberate science fiction from its genre conventions and reinvigorate
a generally worked out mainstream with new worlds of content.
This was a science fiction far more self-consciously concerned
with style and form than anything that had come before, a science
fiction at least as interested in inner space as outer space, a
science fiction with street smarts, a science fiction which, like
the Beats, saw evolution as a matter of transformation of
consciousness and the psychic mutant as hero.
The conflict within science fiction between the New Wave and
the Old Guard was much the same as the conflict between the
Counterculture and the Establishment, hip and square, but in
retrospect it can be seen that even traditional science fiction
shared in the transcendental concerns of the Beats, the difference
being that the Beats sought immanent transcendence in the midst of
the mundane here and now, whereas writers like Clarke and Bester and
Dickson set their satoric transformations in the future or on other
planets.
This was why subcultures formed around both literatures, for
both literatures featured protagonists on the Yellow Brick Road to
the Palace of Wisdom, both viewed official reality from the point of
view of outsiders, both were in that sense messianic, both offered
radical political and social visions, and both opposed individual
liberty to social control, Bad Boys to Big Daddy. Both subcultures,
therefore had their inherent appeal to the eternal American
adolescent, and indeed both had their input into what became the
Counterculture, as witness the Jefferson Airplane and Leonard Cohen,
2001, and Easy Rider.
For what the Countercultural phenomenon was at its core was a
generation seeking to free itself from official reality and remake
itself in its own self-created image. Or rather, perhaps, an image
that had been created for it by ON THE ROAD, STRANGER IN A STRANGE
LAND, the songs of Dylan and the Beatles, DUNE, and its own
underground media.
From this perspective, Van Vogt's Slans and Kerouac's Beats,
the followers of Michael Valentine Smith and Bob Dylan, were
brothers under the skin, and the prescient psychedelic hero of Frank
Herbert's DUNE was the literary soul-brother of Timothy Leary.
When the cultural commissars of the Nixon and Reagan eras
finally succeeded in reimposing official reality, depriving the Pied
Pipers of their natural audience, American literary
transcendentalism seemed to fade away.
Indeed, the Powers That Be were determined that their children
not be led away into the Magic Mountain again. The novel of
mystical ecstasy or bohemian high adventure is no longer to be found
in college bookstores except as musty reprints. The torch that was
passed by James and Emerson to Henry Miller, via William Burroughs,
to Kerouac, Ginsberg, Farina, and Pynchon seems to have finally been
blown out.
Or has it?
For while the long tradition that culminated in the Beats was
disappearing from the shelves, science fiction was becoming the
favorite reading of what youth remained literate, was becoming
nearly 20% of all fiction published in the United States. And while
most of it may be dim action-adventure space opera and reactionary
retrograde fantasy, there has remained through the 1980s an
alternate American science fiction that has kept the American
transcendentalist spirit alive.
You can see it in the thread that runs from Van Vogt's SLAN
through Alfred Bester's THE STARS MY DESTINATION, Heinlein's
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, Poul Anderson's THREE HEARTS AND THREE
LIONS, much of Gordon Dickson, DUNE, most of Philip K. Dick, on into
Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius cycle, my own BUG JACK BARRON and RIDING
THE TORCH, right on through the 1980s and the edge of the 1990s,with
Kim Stanley Robinson's THE GOLD COAST, Ken Grimwood's REPLAY,
Michael Swanwick's VACUUM FLOWERS, my novel LITTLE HEROES, Greg
Bear's BLOOD MUSIC, and of course the Cyberpunks, with Gibson's
NEUROMANCER, Bruce Sterling's SCHIZMATRIX, John Shirley's ECLIPSE
trilogy, and Lewis Shiner's new novel SLAM.
The protagonist as Joseph Campbell's Hero With A Thousand
Faces, Hesse's Siddhartha, Bester's Gully Foyle, Herbert's Paul
Atreides--the naif who finds himself outside official reality, on
the road along the vector of a vision quest that will transform not
only his place in the world but his consciousness.
And this to be achieved outside of official reality--on a far
planet, in a secret demimonde, even in a discorporate reality like
Gibson's cyberspace or Bear's Noosphere--seen as the realm of the
transcendent.
Heightened consciousness produced by drugs or their
technological transmogrification into electronic devices or
biological alterations. The hero as self-made psychic mutant, and
the mutant as Subterranean, hipster, Dharma Bum, outlaw transformer
of the world.
And at least to some extent, the free play of prose style and
form inherent in the task of conveying the reality of an evolving
consciousness moving through an outre environment, form and style
driven by function.
Not into Bauhaus minimalism, but into the McLuhanated prose of
BUG JACK BARRON, the lysergic lyricism of Paul's visionary states in
DUNE, the cybernated style of NEUROMANCER, the psychedelic
apotheosis of THE STARS MY DESTINATION, where Alfred Bester's
already supercharged prose literally explodes out of a purely
literary form and into a fantasmagorical symphony of words, concrete
poetry, and imagistic illustration, or Bester's more obscure and
even more radical GOLEM 100, which utilizes this trans-literary mode
from the very first page.
If American cultural history shows us anything, it is that
there has always been a audience for literature that calls these
spirits from the vasty deep of the American Dream. When Whitman
sang the song of himself, he was singing of America, Huck Finn's
journey down the Mississippi with Nigger Jim led straight to
Kerouac's White Negroes on the Road, to Van Vogt's Slans, Herbert's
Fremen, Gibson's cyberpunks, for there is something in the American
outlaw spirit that always glories in being a stranger in a strange
land.
If Einstein teaches us anything, it is that energy can be
neither created nor destroyed, only endlessly transformed. Not all
the piety and wit of the guardians of official reality could really
stuff this genie back in the bottle, for it was born with America
itself, it lives in the very blood and bones of the land. It is
America's dream of itself.
The collapse of the Counterculture left that collective
American dreamtime without a credible here and now for its river-
raft journey on the yellow brick road. But energy cannot be
destroyed by evolutionary pressure, only forced to mutate into a
currently viable form.
And so when American transcendentalism found itself all dressed
up on Saturday night with no place to go, it did what Earth's
bindlestiff metropolises did in James Blish's CITIES IN FLIGHT,
strapping on anti-gravity generators to become legendary Dharma Bums
of the spaceways, to follow the Eternal Road out among the stars,
into the future, into cyberspace, into the literary Noosphere.
Thus did American science fiction become sole surviving heir
through destiny and circumstance to Twain and Miller and Burroughs
and Ginsberg and Kerouac, to Huck Finn and Billy the Kid and the
Dharma Bums, to America's own secret song of itself.
The Great Wheel turns.
And what goes around, comes around.
Those were the days of miracles and wonders.
This is the long distance call.
end
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