Link to the Entire Article
http://www.msmc.la.edu/PDFFiles/humanitas/chana-smith-paper.pdf
http://www.msmc.la.edu/PDFFiles/humanitas/chana-smith-paper.pdf
JACK KEROUAC’S BEATITUDE AS ROMANTIC PRIMITIVISM
A Summary of Chana Smith's "JACK KEROUAC’S BEAT..... "
Kerouac also took exception with Mailer’s negative portrayal of hipsters, insisting that
“beat” or “beatitude” referred to a new state of spiritual consciousness.13 The mass media and what van Elteren appropriately terms “cultural industries,” played an important role in reinforcing the perceived connection between jazz and Beat culture by appropriating jazz in the manufacture of the beatnik image. In fact, the jazz clubs of Greenwich Village figured importantly in the Beat “scene” and Kerouac was among the young enthusiastic audiences who came to worship the likes of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell. He compared the state of “beatitude” to what he perceived as the spiritual transcendence a jazz soloist reached by “blowing his top” In this paper I examine two central elements of Kerouac’s beatitude, jazz and the identification with suffering, in order to support my argument that, although he may have bristled at Mailer’s depiction of white “hipsters,” Kerouac’s own representations of African-Americans and women are rooted in similar constructs. |
The mass media and what van Elteren appropriately terms “cultural industries,” played an
important role in reinforcing the perceived connection between jazz and Beat culture by appropriating jazz in the manufacture of the beatnik image. In fact, the jazz clubs of Greenwich Village figured importantly in the Beat “scene” and Kerouac was among the young enthusiastic audiences who came to worship the likes of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell. He compared the state of “beatitude” to what he perceived as the spiritual transcendence a jazz soloist reached by “blowing his top” |
Strong identification with the suffering masses, referred to often as the fellaheen, is also
another important element of Kerouac’s “beatitude” and is apparent both in his life and works. The tragic loss of his brother during his childhood--and his mother’s suffering--a devout Catholic upbringing, and feelings of social alienation are all likely reasons for Kerouac’s exploration of marginalization. |
According to Prothero, the Beats were strongly influenced by Oswald
Spengler’s Decline of the West which depicts a cyclical narrative of world civilizations in which the fellaheen, marginalized, deeply pious people, follow more evolved learned men of “reasons and causes” toward spiritual revolution.24 The fellaheen is a subset of the primitive, a category to which Western McCampbell Grace reads Spengler’s notion of the fellaheen in terms of race and gender, commenting that, culture has historically relegated blacks, women, and the feminine… the body of the primitive, particularly the female, is often constructed as over-sexed, devious, diseased, irrational, voiceless, fit only to breed or labor.25 The Subterraneansis Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical work based on his relationship with a African American woman, a “fellaheen” with a troubled past, whom he names Mardou Fox. |