The Beat Generation did not spring forth fully formed into the conservative America of the 1950s; it was formed around the creative expressions and ideas of certain members of the post-war avant-garde. This emergence and characterization of a Generation was an evolutionary process, one which saw a raw creative force and unorganized individual voices shaped and molded into more manageable forms. The shaping and molding was the work of the popular media: the weekly newsmagazines, the daily newspapers, always eager to bring the latest trend to the attention of their readers. There on the printed page they summarized and simplified the Beats, processing and preparing them for digestion by middle America.
The attachment of this vivid label [the Beat Generation] is largely due to the double-handed efforts of Life and Time who, early in the game, picked up the "beats" as the great American rebellion of our youth and our times. This they lampooned in their stylish language of rhetorical deceits. Instead of the anticipated burst balloon, lying limp in the streets to be kicked aside into the gutter until the next rebellion came along, "beat" found an echo in our ferocious times and has continued to sound through the nation. The term lost any significance of meaning, assuming it ever had a specific one, and broke down to a physical type - a kid with beard, rumpled clothes, sandals, bongo drum, jazz records and copy of Howl. [...] With more and more name calling came less and less clarity until the word assumed mythic proportions and the Beat Generation had arrived. [...] You can't lump all writers together - not even the Bohemians. And if you mean just the "beats," do you mean Life magazine "beat," Ginsberg "beat," Kerouac "beat," or Norman Mailer "beat"?The label was applied to a wildly varying group of writers, many of whom vehemently denied being part of any such agglomeration. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for example, felt quite alienated from the other Beats, partly due to his being a few years older than Kerouac and Ginsberg; partly due to his shyness. Nevertheless the label stuck: a convenient handle.
(Wilentz 1960)
Spokesmen are chosen in much the same way that names are bestowed, and from amongst the Beats, Jack Kerouac was nominated to represent the movement as a whole. For this reason I thought that it would be fitting to use one of his phrases as the title for this essay.
"Unspeakable visions" is an apt image for an essay in the history of publishing, for it links the oral and the visual realms which publishing incorporates. In the case of the Beats it also illustrates the importance which was placed upon both orality and individual vision: writing as the ongoing attempt to communicate, in print, the visions and the "voice" of the writer.
The underlying assumption was that words could express such visions, an assumption which was later stated more explicitly by Kerouac in Essentials of Spontaneous Prose, his statement on poetics (Allen 1965). In it he explained his method of capturing and communicating his visions, mapping a path from the writer's envisioned image to the reader's imagination, in what is almost an "end-run" around language itself:
Set-up: The object is to set before the mind, either in reality, as in sketching (before a landscape or teacup or old face) or is set in the memory wherein it becomes the sketching from memory of a definite image-object.Ong also described this model of language in his book Orality and Literacy, where he summarized the textualist's (or deconstructionist's) attempts to combat our culture's dominant chirographic and typographic bias. In his words this bias assumed "a one-to-one correspondence between items in an extramental world and spoken words, and a similar one-to-one correspondence between spoken words and written words. [...] On this assumption of one-to-one correspondence, the naive reader presumes the prior existence of an extramental referent which the word presumably captures and passes on through a kind of pipeline to the psyche" (Ong 1982). Thus the written word's "pipeline to the psyche" allowed the reconstruction of the original referent (or vision) in the mind of the reader.
[ . . . ]
Scoping: Not "selectivity" of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement, like a fist coming down on a table with each complete utterance, bang! (the space dash) - Blow as deep as you want - write as deeply, fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning-excitement by same laws operating in his own human mind.Lag in procedure: No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatalogical buildup words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing.
Derrida and the deconstructionists pointed out that this "pipeline" model of the communication process was seriously flawed. As Ong put it: "language is structure, and its structure is not that of the extramental world" (Ong 1982).
Hence this paper's title, and Kerouac's phrase, are illustrations of the process frustrated: visions seen, but unable to be communicated. All writers experience blockage at some point: things seen or experienced, either with one's own eyes, or inside the mind's eye, which elude description: the unspeakable visions. One might quite legitimately ask whether the visions of the Beat writers were any more difficult to voice that those of any other group of writers. The answer to that question would be both "no" and "yes." "No" in that the process is inherently difficult - language and the "extramental" world being structurally different. But "yes" also, for at least two reasons.
One of the characteristics of the avant-garde is that they make a deliberate break with the status quo. The Beat writers had rejected the traditional poetics of their era. They were in the process of developing entirely new poetics, albeit ones inspired by certain of their literary forebears (1). In a very real sense they were building a new language with which to express their own individual visions: Kerouac spoke and wrote of a "Spontaneous Prose;" Ginsberg described "poetry adapted from prose seeds, journals, scratchings, arranged by phrasing or breath groups into little short-line patterns according to ideas of measure of American speech" (Allen 1973); Michael McClure experimented with poems written in an imagined "beast" language he called "grahhr;" Burroughs borrowed from the techniques of collage to explore texts with his "cut up" method (in which "pages of text are cut and rearranged to form new combinations of text and image") and his "fold-in" method (where "a page of text - my own or some one else's - is folded down the middle and placed on another page - The composite text is then read across half one text and half the other"). The very newness of these poetics: this "language," meant that poetic expression using it was that much more difficult for the writer.
The style and the forms were not the only aspects of the new writing that were different and unfamiliar to the reader. The content, too, was new. The beats mined their individual interior visions to create their work; they drew upon the everyday: the concrete image and the specific event. Beat poet Lew Welch described the writing of his poems in almost religious terms, likening it to the "snagging" of an ecstatic vision: "The poem is not the vision. The vision is the source of the poem. The poem is the chops, but the real chops are being able to go across that river and come back with something that is readable" (Meltzer 1971). The precedent for this poetic tone was William Blake, and Ginsberg also felt strong kinship with Blake's mystical visions.
But mysticism and ecstatic phrasing were not the order of the day for poetry in the 1950s, and many of the Beat writers found it extremely difficult to interest publishers in what they had written. Kerouac's first novel, The Town and the City, was quite traditional in style, being likened by some to Thomas Wolfe; it found a publisher relatively easily. His second novel, however, On the Road, was a radical stylistic departure. It languished for over six years before finally being published, while John Clellon Holmes's Go, describing the same Bohemian scene in a much more traditional writing style, received an amazing (at the time) ten thousand dollar advance.
Finding one's voice as a writer, finding the words to express these "unspeakable visions of the individual" in no way ensures that one will have a platform in print from which to speak. Again, this is a problem common to all writers. But for writers of the avant-garde, indeed for all writing from the underground, there is an additional difficulty. Even when the "unspeakable visions" can be voiced (hopefully with an increasing facility as these new poetics were refined and absorbed), for a writer to reach the widest possible audience, that voice must be "spoken" in print through the mouth of a conservative, establishment press.
It is an unavoidable aspect of any industry that power is concentrated in the hands of those who have been longest in that industry, and thus those holding power will have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Publishing is no different in that respect: change, experiment, and radical departures from convention are not lightly entertained.
As newcomers to the literary world, the Beat writers had yet to develop the contacts and the reputations which were, and still are, so essential to publishing success. As Coser, Kadushin and Powell have described in their examination of the American publishing industry (Coser 1982), only a very small percentage of manuscripts published are obtained through unsolicited submission (2). By far the majority are brought to the attention of the editor or publisher through personal or professional contacts within the industry. Yet influential contacts were almost nonexistent for the Beat writers.
As part of an underground the beats had great difficulty getting into print. But throughout history there have been other such dissidents, other countercultures, and always there have been publishers for them, avenues to print for their works. This was also true for the Beat writers.