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From Prophecy to Parody
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20646 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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10 / 1992 |
5,435 Words |
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Raphael Falco
Raphael Falco is visiting assistant professor at the
University of Oregon. |
The best Prophet naturally is the best guesser.
--Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
In his essay on Milton, Thomas Babington Macaulay mused that "perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind." While Macaulay believed there was truth in poetry--that, indeed, truth was essential to poetry--he believed poetic truth to be "the truth of madness." He maintained that the premises of great flights of imagination "require a degree of credulity within almost amounts to a partial and temporary derangement of the intellect."
Macaulay's view, on one hand indebted to the classical notion of the furor poeticus, might also be seen as a prescription for romanticism run amok. And, while the nineteenth century certainly had mavericks who followed the prescription, the twentieth has witnessed a running amok of romanticism beyond the wildest fancies of the young essayist in 1825. We might even say that "a certain unsoundness of mind" became a standard under which twentieth-century literature sailed, just as "the truth of madness" served in lieu of sacred truths as ballast for the drunken boat of modern writing.
The Madness of the Beats
In American literature, the most extreme example of the unsoundness is probably the Beats, whose writing is both the most romantic and the maddest we have. Their cult of madness--glorified by Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, DiPrima, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Holmes, and others in the 1950s--caught the imagination of the generation that followed them with a force never to have been expected by their meager ranks and marginalized existence. We see evidence everywhere, from Bob Dylan's lyrics to Thomas Pynchon's novels to Hunter Thompson's journalism, that their paeans to madness, and their gift for pastiche, made an immense contribution to the writing of the 1960s.
Yet, the influence of the Beats as literary innovators is difficult to measure. They certainly led the charge against censorship, and, in specific cases--John Clellon Holms and Norman Mailer, perhaps--we detect strong echoes. In general, however, the Beats have as yet spawned no clearly identifiable literary descendants of similar stature; indeed, it is difficult to see what contemporary novel grows out of the so-called Beat novel, or, for that matter, what poetry would claim Ginsberg or Ferlinghetti as its original. Poets such as
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