Beat Generation the Beats

¶ … beat generation are several strong principles, the most notable is associated with the founder, Jack Kerouac and his definition of the generation as a whole.

The road" has been a powerful metaphor for freedom from the constraints of ordinary life, ever since Jack Kerouac's On the Road became the Beatnik Bible in the 1950's. Kerouac saw beauty in gas stations and freedom on the road. The metaphor caught the imagination of a generation. Many of the key phenomena of "the Sixties" developed in coherence with this metaphor... getting high on psychedelic drugs was called "taking a trip."

Jack Kerouac and others developed through his mostly autobiographical works the "positive" concept or purpose of the retaliatory generation of the beats.

Within the works of the small elite group of writers associated with the beat generation there are many messages about, life, the world and rejection of conformity. There is little doubt that one of the most foundational aspects of the literature of the beat generation is its reliance on the role of illicit drugs as a theme and even a lifestyle to be both glamorized and acknowledged as a powerful avenue to freedom and knowledge. It is through the years of the production of many of the works associated with the beat generation that the use of drugs became an almost mainstream lifestyle choice. T

The writers/philosophers of the beat generation used the personal exploration of drugs and the thoughts and feelings they elicit to help develop character, storyline and even what most would term a cult following for their thoughts ideas and works. Three of the most profound works expressing these ideas are, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, William Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Hunter S. Thompson's Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. It is within these three works and others associated with the so-called "beat generation" that the ideals associated with free will and self-induced experimental psychoses are best demonstrated. In fact is could be argued that there is more written about the use, role and significance of drugs in these three works than there is simply written about the works themselves.

Prior to a greater understanding of the real consequences of drug use, and in response to the conservative 1950's overdramatic warnings these young men demonstrated the creativity and "wisdom" of the free flow of thought through illicit drug use. Regardless of the argument that the drugs were simply a part of the image, their use had real effects and visible consequences upon the people who lived the lifestyle, be they writers or simply admiring stragglers. In one work associated with an attempt to reconcile the main character in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with the writer there is a legitimate and poignant connection between the why and the why of drug use during the age.

But at a more prosaic level, Thompson's meisterwerk has had hardly any direct or serious heirs on this side of the Atlantic. And that's because an absolutely essential component of the Thompson satiric armoury was the ingestion of large quantities of mind-distorting drugs. However warped, twisted and cynical Thompson's perception of drugs and their effect, the fact remains that at the time he was writing, the consumption of illegal, mind-altering substances still had a social revolutionary cachet... Drugs are yuppie now, mainstream. The political realities of their illegality remain the same, but they no longer possess much potential for torque, for a clarifying lens to be held up against the culture that refuses to tolerate them.

And are the illegal drugs essential to the gonzo methodology?

Will Self then goes on to describe why drugs were the chosen avenue of creativity in the time of the Beats and so much of what he has to say makes sense in the long and short-term of the subject at hand.

Well, you could remove them from Fear and Loathing altogether and still somehow conjure up an evocation of those same states of mind. But on the whole, given the available options, drugs do really seem to be the best one.

Large quantities of stimulants and hallucinogens produce quite delightfully awful states of paranoia. Chuck some high-proof spirit into this boiler of toxicity and you have a conflagration on your hands. Add some heart-pumping amyl nitrate into this mix and then you'll really be taking your medicine.

Of course what this allows you to achieve is the condition of a harassed, strung-out war reporter crouching in a shell crater, working for a wire agency that might not pay him, or even support his accreditation, while in fact you haven't even quit the bathroom of your soundproof suite. The drugs both enhance and synergise with the feeling that many reporters get when they're exposed: the story they're covering before them, the news service they're representing behind them.

The full gambit of the consequences of these choices can be found within the writing of the time, from the giddy realization of great brilliance to the more than dark demonstration of near suicidal loss of hope. It is all there.

Beat," declared Jack Kerouac, whose On the Road made the Beat Generation an American byword, "means beatific, it means you get the beat, it means...Zen, apple pie, Eisenhower -- we dig it all. We're in the vanguard of the new religion." The husky Canuck and former footballer enthused over the "subterranean hip generation" with its "tendencies to silence, bohemian mystery, drugs, beard, semiholiness..." For the involved minority of the youth, at least, the "beat mystique" was a whole new epiphany, a revelation of how things were, and of how they ought to be.

Jack Kerouac may have coined the generation's name but it was not completely developed as an idea until these admiring writers expressed it through the delusions associated with the lifestyle of drug and alcohol use. The free flow of ideas of the exploration of the dark side and the light side of drug use is present even today and difficult to disentangle from the messages of the works, as the drug use is so much the core of the messages of the works.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is such a product of its times that readers since have had trouble coming to terms with it. To a later generation scared straight by drug-awareness campaigns and trained to "just say no," the quantity and variety of drugs ingested by Hunter S. Thompson (alias Raoul Duke; a.k.a. Dr. Gonzo) and his Samoan attorney alone are no laughing matter. Where others see irrepressible free spirits, this audience sees irresponsible jerks. On the other hand, those who are attracted to the book only for its outrageous humor often fail to appreciate the bleakness of its moral landscape. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is both a jet-black comedy and a doomsday parable.

The demonstration of need, today may be seen in its full temper, with the inclusion of the dangerous path taken by the characters and their writers, yet the creation of an entire genre of work almost entirely associated with illicit drug use is an anomaly within literature. Falling somewhat short of the achievement of the utter spirituality they espoused the writers traveled a dangerous path to destruction and welcomed the good the bad and the ugly of it as part of the whole experience.

Junk yields a basic formula of "evil" virus: The Algebra of Need. The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control.... I never had enough junk-- no one ever does.

William Burroughs, Naked Lunch

The genre is such an anomaly that even the political aspects of the drug use and abuse found within the works, or at the very least the political messages it might send has become a part of the demonstration of scholarship on the subject. The writers meant to challenge the authority of their time and in so doing may be seen as challenging even their own sanity.

The antidrug slogan "Just say no!" is an odd response indeed. Say no to what or to whom? Say no to a threat, to something that will draw you too far outside yourself. Say no because you want to say yes. Say no because, somewhere outside yourself, you know that this "you" owes a debt to the yes, the openness to alterity that is foreclosed in the proper construction of subjectivity. Of course, "just say no" never says no solely to a person-- to a dealer or a user; rather, you "just say no" to the yes itself, a yes that is not human but is perhaps the ground of human response. This constant reminder to "just say no," then, is always haunted by a trace of the yes. As William Burroughs asks in Naked Lunch, "In the words of total need, "Wouldn't you'd?" Yes you would" (xi).

As in the above work written by Jeffrey Nealon the ides associated with the pull of drugs are highlighted through William Burroughs' words from Naked Lunch. Expertly written works tracing the history of cocaine use quotes from Burroughs' as a basis for greater understanding of the drug and its pull.

Ever pop coke in the mainline? It hits you right in the brain, activating connections of pure pleasure. The pleasure of morphine is in the viscera. You listen down into yourself after a shot. But C. is electricity through the brain, and the C. yen is of the brain alone, a need without body and without feeling. The Coca charged brain is a berserk pinball machine, flashing blue and pink lights in electric orgasm. C pleasure could be felt by a thinking machine, the first hideous stirrings of insect life.

And in an article on drugs for the British Journal of Addiction written in I956 and later appended to the Grove Press edition of the novel, Burroughs wrote: Cocaine is the most exhilarating drug I have ever used. The euphoria centers in the head. Perhaps the drug activates pleasure connections directly in the brain. I suspect that an electric current in the right place would produce the same effect. The full exhilaration of cocaine can only be realized by an intravenous injection. The pleasurable effects do not last more than five or ten minutes. If the drug is injected into the skin, rapid elimination vitiates the effects. The same goes double for sniffing.

Within The Electric Kool- Aid Acid Test there is probably found the most pure sense of the use of drugs as an avenue for enlightenment, even though the work itself was composed at a time when the reality of the drug scene was becoming more and more evident.

People were finding that through continued use, people were dying at best and going insane at worst. The subject of the autobiographical journey Acid Test, Ken Kesey, another father of the beats demonstrated that life imitates art when he as a student was exposed to hallucinogenic drugs during paid experiments for the psychology department at Stanford University and then became permanently altered by them. He gave us such acclaimed works as One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, in which he demonstrated the sometimes-permanent hallucinations that can result from hallucinogenic drug use.

The conception of the work was largely associated with Kesey's own mental trepidation and the internal workings of the fiction were associated with a self-imposed madness that somehow became terribly permanent, at another's hands. In Cuckoos Nest, Kesey moved through the conception of mental illness and demonstrated in an effective and very moving way just how close to mad we all could be, given the right stimulus and situation.

In his later years his real life-adventures in association with the spread of hallucinogenic drug use became the subject of the chronicle of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Tom Wolfe set about journaling the whole adventure, associated with Kesey's role as a ring leader for the Merry Pranksters

In 1964, Kesey and his friends, who had become known as the Merry Pranksters, bought a 1939 International Harvest school bus and drove to New York to see the World's Fair. Kesey recruited Neal Cassady from Kerouac's On the Road to drive the bus, and filmed a significant portion of the journey; Kesey would later show clips from the trip to chemically-induced audiences at his parties. Kesey became the proponent of a local band known as the "Warlocks," which later became the Grateful Dead. Kesey and his Merry Pranksters became notorious for their "Acid Tests" and use of LSD and other drugs. Kesey's exploits with the Merry Pranksters during this period formed the basis for a best-selling book by Tom Wolfe called The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. When the government made LSD illegal, Ken and the Pranksters fled to Mexico.

For many people the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was a bridge between generations, as the beat generation developed into and influenced the Hippie Generation, as the old guard, Kesey and Neal Cassady, handed over the reigns to the new liberated front, who were at least slightly more restrained in their use of illicit drugs, as can be seen by the polite refusal of Wolfe to imbibe while he was chronicling the journey. Yet, there is plenty of evidence that the illegalities of the newer drugs simply made them hide amongst the old standards and were still very common.

It is safe to say that if it were not for the free wheeling lifestyle associated with the use of hallucinogenic drugs Wolfe's book would not have been written. The story itself is almost entirely associated with the kind of life decisions and attitudes that are associated with challenging the authority of the age, and the most dramatic challenge, to self and authority is the use of illicit substances as a demonstration of self rule and also an avenue of outlet for human emotion and action.

The kinds and number of drugs that are used by the people and characters within these three text run the entire spectrum of the illicit and licit drug family. Everything from Marijuana to LSD is consumed and experienced in the work. There are drugs that are preferred over others and drugs that have greater detrimental effects over their users, yet the function of the drugs often determined the outcome of the activities associated with the sequence in the works. There are times within all the works where the challenges of living while perpetually high get the best of the characters and yet the most negative observations of individuals are those associated with tertiary rather than primary characters within the works, as we see a disturbing trend toward inhumane sideline characterizations of people who are very obviously being destroyed by the madness of the movement.

They were not the chosen few they were simply the followers who could not break free from the disturbing lifestyle that woulde ventually destroy them. We often know what happened to the brilliant princes of the movement but there are probably thousands of individuals even today are living through the effects of the freewheeling use and abuse of drugs and alcohol.

Within these works and others associated with the beat generation there are many psychological motivations for the consumption of drugs of all kinds. The motivations, be they simple justification or sincere reason, determine the role and significance of the drug's use. Clearly the reasons are detailed without censorship within the works, as the drugs and their use almost take on the personification of a well-worked character. Some of the many reasons why a person or character might use drugs are: experimentation, recreation, to fill the pure need of addiction, to ensure solidarity between characters and/or persons, rejection of authority, to avoid the real and mundane, as an avenue for creativity, as a window into greater knowledge of life or spiritual awareness and there are even incidents where drugs are even used to avoid symptoms of psychosis.

With the demonstration of the attempt by the characters in the non-fiction work The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Wolfe describes the solidarity between characters, the rejection of the mundane and the use of drugs as a tool to seal the group together for the cause, utter rejection of authority,

And the truck heaves and billows, blazing silver red and Day Glo and I seriously doubt, Cool Breeze, that there is a single cop in all of San Francisco today who does not know that this crazed vehicle is a guerrilla patrol for the dread LSD. The cops now Know the whole scene, even the costumes the jesuschrist strung-out hair, Indian beads, Indian headbands, donkey beads...."

Wolfe goes on to explain that the behavior of the Merry Pranksters, described in this and many scenes is normal, at least to them. Driving through town in an abstruse vehicle with an alarmingly real looking cap gun shooting at "beautiful" people, e.g. The normal people on the street, who conform. This is the ultimate example of recreation, they are in rout to meet Kesey at the headquarters and in rout they feel the need to cause havoc among average people, as an expression of their rejection of authority and mundane.

In the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Wolfe describes Kesey, the beloved leader of the LSD movement, "In short this young, handsome, successful, happily-married three-lovely-children was a fear crazed dope fiend in flight to avoid prosecution on three felonies and god knows how many misdemeanors and seeking at the same time to sculpt a new satori from an old surf -- "in even shorter mad as a hatter."

Within the other two works the demonstration of the avoidance of the mundane, and the rejection of authority plays out within the internal dialogue of the characters. The constant drive to both reject the normal and mundane by being in a constant state of intoxication is intermingled with the demonstration of an attempt to maintain the appearance of "normal" through the paranoia of drugged psychosis. "He would be arriving from L.A. In the late afternoon. I drove very quietly on the freeway, gripping my normal instinct for bursts of acceleration and sudden lane changes- trying to remain inconspicuous."

The evolution of the movement has now gone far enough to demonstrate that there is a real fear of authority, to be expressed over the idea of being caught, and the consequences of such a situation, yet not enough a of a fear to simply respond by getting sober, as the urge has either become chemical or the war is still being fought.

The ideal standards of the beat generation, associated with the spiritual journey that Jack Kerouac started but could not finish can be summed up rather eloquently within one interpretation of Jack Kerouac's intentions for the use of drugs coupled with the "on the road" mentality

As a modernistic mystic, Kerouac believed that direct knowledge of God, spiritual truth, or ultimate reality could be attained through subjective experience (conceived as intuition or insight). This was both his wager and means for being intoxicated -- drunk with life -- (helped along, as always, by alcohol and/or drugs). His aim, however, was not to get smashed; rather, it was to get a higher purchase on the ecstasy of being in order to forge a mystical bond with the divine or ultimate. In fact, Kerouac's sobering-up phase of the late 1950s and 1960s was accompanied by far more excessive consumption of alcohol than the various stages of the quest when fully engaged, thus testifying to the misplaced thirst of despair in comparison to ecstasy. Kerouac's modernism -- his interest in authenticity and baring one's soul -- enhanced his mystical yearnings, especially in an age of vulgar materialism, complacency, and standardization. He was passionate about turning away from the conventional notion of the good life and towards that essential role of a writer revealing the spiritual urgency of a transparent self -- someone immersed in the everyday world yet seeking personal meaning in the mysterious relationship between the finite and the infinite.

Yet, regardless of the positive intentions of the father of the beat generation the reality became much more base as time went on, just as it di with many writers and seekers after him.

Over time, the tyranny of self that finally emerged from such dedicated pursuits proved a major hindrance. Kerouac's peccatos --deadly indeed -- were the traditional ones: most of all pride, gluttony, and lust. His self-indulgence, which at times joyously led or abetted the quest, eventually spun out of control, chasing and finally catching its own tail and spiraling down. Once the self-destruction had accelerated after 1958, it bored into a hell of Kerouac's own invention -- one that he could not extricate himself from. Alcohol (and drugs) played a dual role in this process, for it both fueled the soaring trajectory of the quest and burned it out with a vengeance. Kerouac lived and died by the Dionysian double-edged sword (having lost sight of that very fine line between ecstasy and destruction). Holmes, who felt that Kerouac would not live much beyond forty, wrote the epitaph to his quest back in the mid-sixties: "Such voracious appetites, such psychic vulnerability, such singleness of purpose, must... ream a man out at the end, and the Kerouac I knew was as incapable of turning away from his own consuming consciousness, as he was of living for long once he had been burned out by it."

The intoxication, both literal and figurative became all-consuming. The rawness of the soul during the process drove most of the thinkers of the age into premature end. In fact the rapidity of this transformation can be seen in a striking passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the bay than up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Las Altos or La Honda...You could strike Sparks anywhere-that sense of the inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail...We had all the momentum we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...So, now less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark-that place were the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Thompson here is lamenting the loss of the ideals associated with the beat movement. The reality that hit home rather rapidly, was that to much avoidance of the real can destroy not only a movement and a spirit but many individuals in its path. The nostalgia that Thompson feels for the strong and youthful enthusiasm of being able to find out the answers to all through the rejection of the mundane is coupled with the reality that his own life and times had seen so many persons, including himself, spiral down the road to pure, raw and base drug addiction and paranoia.