[Abstract] It’s a generation hard to summary in a word, they were crazy, undisciplined, desperate and self-indulgent, and however, they were also active, ambitious and sincere.

They certainly did not have the ability to change life which is indeed conservative and old-fashioned. What they could do was to escape from it, they gave up money, status, social responsibility and family obligation, they got pleasure from taking addictive drugs, sexual love and jazz etc. In pursuit of sensational experience, they tried to free themselves from old ideas, and look for a new life style, new faith, new values, and new relations with each other. They weren’t “beat” down, as the term apparently suggested. Their life and art practice both demonstrate their active attitude towards the life.  They took risk, brought forth new ideas, and explored true essence of life bravely.

This article tries to probe into the essence of the spirit of the Beat Generation and offers a new point of view to approach this cultural trend.

[Key Words] the Beat Generation；extreme behavior；young face；lost faith

【摘 要】 关于“垮掉的一代”是很难用简单几个字就能形容清楚的，他们疯狂，放纵，堕落，沉沦；同时他们又坦率，真诚，积极，有追求。

他们并没有能力改变生活与其中的那个守旧古板的社会，他们能做到的只是厌倦和逃避，把金钱、地位、社会职责、家庭义务一概抛弃，从吸毒、性爱、爵士乐等感官欲望的满足来把握自我，解放个性，直接获得全新的生命体验。

他们试图通过直接获得生命体验，从而以人最基本的生命存在为基础，探索新的生活方式、新的信仰、新的价值观念、新的人与人之间的关系。他们并没有“被击败”，更没有“垮掉”，他们的生活及艺术实践都显示出他们对人生进攻的姿态，他们追求冒险与创新，勇敢地探索人生真谛。

本文试着探究“垮掉”精神的本质，重新看待“垮掉”意义。

【关键词】 “垮掉的一代”；极端行为；年轻面孔；信仰缺失

1.      Introduction

Like the Lost Generation of the 1920s, the American Beat Generation of the 1950s names both a literary current and a broader cultural phenomenon or mood. Rejecting the conformism and stress on normality of the Truman and Eisenhower years, the Beats emphasized an openness to varieties of experience beyond the limits of middle-class society; they explored the cultural underground of bebop jazz, drug use, polymorphous perverse sexuality, and non-Western religions.

The term” Beat” was reportedly coined by Jack Kerouac (1922-1969, American) in the late 1940’s. As he said “Ah, this is nothing but a beat generation” from a specific conversation between Holmes (1926-1988, American) and him, this great movement in American history came into being. Then Holmes’s celebrated article in late 1952 in the New York Times Magazine carried the headline title “This is the Beat Generation”, that caught the public eye. But it became more common at about the time that writers like Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997, American) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919, American) were beginning to get noticed. It was quickly becoming a slang term in America after World War 11, meaning “exhausted” or “beat down” and provided this generation with a definitive label for their personal and social positions and perspectives.

The origins of the word ‘beat‘ are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself. Kerouac, who coined the expression, Beat, insisted that it meant not simply beat down or exhausted, but also beatific. in his The Source of Beat Generation, he explained, the primary meaning of beat was poor, frustrated, penniless, beating down, roaming and sleeping in the subway, but at last it became the revolutionary slogan and label of American society behavior. [1] Holmes said: the so-called” Beat Generation” meant not only tired out., exhausted, upset, but also being ordered, used up, utilized, and the naked intuition and sincerity from deep heart. [2] Ginsberg calls this Beat Generation Legacy and Celebration, conference an ‘intergenerational symposium’… learned from William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Steir. The ideals transmitted ‘involve candor, spontaneity, suspicion of hierarchical authority, a multicultural sophistication, a world revolution’.

2. “The Beats” beating the society

2.1, the living social environment of “The Beats” at that time

It’s a postwar generation, after World War II, life in America was dull and static. Dad went off to work, mom minded the house and it seemed like everyone would have a job, security and happiness. Visionaries at the time, however, saw that this idyllic prosperity was artificial and temporary; they wanted life now, not at age 65. They went on the road, hung out in jazz bars, drank and read poetry and howled at the moon. They created an antithesis called the Beat Generation. The 60s brought such cultural changes as expanded consciousness, rock & roll, civil rights and strengthened democracy. So the whole society fell into a state of depresses, especially the youth who were given up, behaved with naked intuition, went all out, advanced bravely.[3]

2.2, the behavior of “The Beats”

2.2.1, In society

A man is beat whenever he goes for broke and wagers the sum of his resources on a single number; and the young generation has done that continually from early youth. ‘Why don‘t people leave us alone?‘ It was the face of a beat generation, also a spiritual crisis, their misery, protest, exploration and degradation… Its members have an instinctive individuality, needing no bohemianism or imposed eccentricity to express it. Brought up during the collective bad circumstances of a dreary depression, weaned during the collective uprooting of a global war, they distrust collectivity. But they have never been able to keep the world out of their dreams. The fancies of their childhood inhabited the half-light of Munich, the Nazi-Soviet pact, and the eventual blackout.

Some extremes go as follows: Standing before a judge in a Bronx courthouse, being arraigned for stealing a car, this young face looked up into the camera with curious laughter and no guilt. The same face, with a more serious bent, stared from the pages of magazine, representing a graduating class of ex-GI‘s, and said that as it believed small business to be dead, it intended to become a comfortable cog in the largest corporation it could find. A little younger, a little more bewildered, it was this same face that the photographers caught in Illinois when the first non-virgin club was uncovered. The young copywriter, leaning down the bar on Third Avenue, quietly drinking himself into relaxation, and the energetic hotrod driver of Los Angeles, who plays Russian Roulette with a jalopy, is separated only by a continent and a few years. They are the extremes. In between them fall the secretaries wondering whether to sleep with their boyfriends now or wait; the mechanic berring up with the guys and driving off to Detroit on a whim; the models studiously name-dropping at a cocktail party. But the face is the same. Bright, level, realistic, challenging. Any attempt to label an entire generation is unrewarding, and yet the generation which went through the last war, or at least could get a drink easily once it was over, seems to possess a uniform, general quality. Their adolescence was spent in a topsy-turvy world of war bonds, swing shifts, and troop movements. They grew to independent mind on beachheads, in past-midnight arrivals and pre-dawn departures. Their brothers, husbands, fathers or boy friends turned up dead one day at the other end of a telegram. At the four trembling corners of the world, or in the hometown invaded by factories or lonely servicemen, they had intimate experience with the nadir and the zenith of human conduct, and little time for much that came between. The peace they inherited was only as secure as the next headline. It was a cold peace. Their own lust for freedom, and the ability to live at a pace that kills (to which the war had adjusted them), led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity. [4]

2.2.2, In the field of literature

The central Beat writers--William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac became nationally famous thanks to Allen Ginsberg‘s Howl and Other Poems (1956) and the obscenity trial that followed its publication, then Kerouac’s On The Road , Burrough’s (1914-1997, American) Naked Lunch all became the representative work of the Beat Generation. They wrote just as they behaved, living in New York and San Francisco. Besides their enthusiasm for jazz and drugs, the group around Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac shared an interest in literary experimentation. Their work stressed spontaneous and uncensored writing, often based on their own experiences among small-time criminals and drifters. They influenced a whole generation of American youth by their crazy living style, they said: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked”,[5] “I look at this roaring, crazy New York with innocent and strange eyes, millions of people are busy running about life continually, just like a nightmare ---- robbery, loss, heaving and death, only that they can strive for a grave for themselves outside the island.”[6] There is no line between the ‘real world‘ and ‘world of myth and symbol.‘  Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination. I‘m running out of everything now. Out of veins, out of money. The stone world came to me, and said Flesh gives you an hour‘s life. What‘s your road, man? – holy boy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road.  It‘s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Americans should know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.…

2.2.3, In the field of art

In art, the opening of the symposium‘s Beat film festival features an eerie, disorienting, black-and-white film by Jonas Mekas, Guns of the Trees, which tells a fragmented tale of disaffected youth in a bleak Cold War world. Mekas arrived in the United States from Eastern Europe in the 50s, virtually penniless. He slept on floors and ate when he could as he scraped together the resources to make his movie. Mekas remarks that the Beats never knew they were a movement, they just knew they had a lot of friends who were artists. They shared their work and the excitement of their flourishing creativity.

The film Naked Lunch which described a writer who was addicted in writing and drugs, couldn’t distinguish the real and unreal world, the whole film with a surreal skill recorded the hallucinatory world after taking addictive drugs, full of a lot of symbol metaphors and odd sexual hints.

Also a song was sung like this:

“When you cast your eyes upon the skylines

Of this once proud nation

Can you sense the fear and the hatred

Growing in the hearts of it’s population

And our youth, oh youth, are being seduced

By the greedy hands of politics and half truths

The beaten generation, the beaten generation

Reared on a diet of prejudice and mis-information

The beaten generation, the beaten generation

Open your eyes, open your imagination

We’re being sedated by the gasoline fumes

And hypnotized by the satellites

Into believing what is good and what is right

You may be worshipping the temples of mammon

Or lost in the prisons of religion

But can you still walk back to happiness

When you’ve nowhere left to run?

And if they send in the special police

To deliver us from liberty and keep us from peace

Then won’t the words sit ill upon their tongues

When they tell us justice is being done

And that freedom lives in the barrels of a warm gun”

(Mind Bomb)[7]

3.      “The Beats” but not down

3.1, the difference between “the Beat generation” and “the Lost Generation”

It is already being compared to that other postwar generation, which dubbed itself ‘lost‘. The Roaring Twenties, and the generation that made them roar, are going through a sentimental revival, and the comparison is valuable. The Lost Generation was discovered in a roadster, laughing hysterically because nothing meant anything anymore. It migrated to Europe, unsure whether it was looking for the ‘orgiastic future‘ or escaping from the ‘puritanical past.‘ Its symbols were the flapper, the flask of bootleg whiskey, and an attitude of desperate frivolity best expressed by the line: ‘Tennis, anyone?‘ It was caught up in the romance of disillusionment, until even that became an illusion. Every act in its drama of lost ness was a tragic or ironic third act, and T.S. Eliot‘s The Waste Land was more than the dead-end statement of a perceptive poet. The pervading atmosphere of that poem was an almost objectless sense of loss, through which the reader felt immediately that the cohesion of things had disappeared. It was, for an entire generation, an image which expressed, with dreadful accuracy, its own spiritual condition.

But the wild boys of today are not lost. They weren’t reluctant to the valueless things of the mainstream of morality, they were addicted in seeing pleasure and making merry, they experienced sorts of degenerate life with curiosity but no destroy. The only thing that could make them believe was the first-hand experience and then the stimulated thought, their minds were distillated in the free body, brought people the courage facing reality.[8]Their flushed, often scoffing, always intent faces elude the word, and it would sound phony to them. For this generation lacks that eloquent air of bereavement which made so many of the exploits of the Lost Generation symbolic actions. Furthermore, the repeated inventory of shattered ideals, and the laments about the mud in moral currents, which so obsessed the Lost Generation, does not concern young people today. They take these things frighteningly for granted. They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them. They drink to ‘come down‘ or to ‘get high,‘ not to illustrate anything. Their excursions into drugs or promiscuity come out of curiosity, not disillusionment.

Only the most bitter among them would call their reality a nightmare and protest that they have indeed lost something, the future. For ever since they were old enough to imagine one, that has been in jeopardy anyway. The absence of personal and social values is to them, not a revelation shaking the ground beneath them, but a problem demanding a day-to-day solution. To live seems to them much more crucial than why. Unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it. As such, it is a disturbing illustration of Voltaire‘s reliable old joke: ‘If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.‘ Not content to bemoan his absence, they are busily and haphazardly inventing totems for him on all sides.

3.2, The Beats and religion

Among those beats, the most vulgar or the voidest, all concern about the faith. [9] Living in such depressed society, people can’t keep their character, or speak for themselves, but the beats were exploring perseveringly and painfully. It’s a miserable course, most of them fall into perplexity, contradiction and disappointed, so at this time Buddhism begin to spread among them, it‘s an attitude of living without any desire, a philosophy of seizing the hour and making merry in time, all that just accord with the declaration of the generation “rebel without goal, persons who agitate without slogan, revolutionary without guiding principle”. Kerouac, who is the typical person, esteems extremely the Chinese monk Hanshan, pursuing an escape from the weary life. In his work On the Road, the leading role’s family name is Paradise ---- Garden of Eden, and the surname is Sal ---- salvation, all present a return of human nature and distillation of spirit.

This Beat Generation is a religious generation.[10]

3.3, My view on the Beat Generation

“For the study of the Beat Generation in China, it can be divided into two periods. The first one, from the magazine of The World Literature on, which published the earliest comment about the Beat Generation, many critics all put this phenomenon as a typical case, the time in China, the beats were attacked and criticized, and their behaviors were all seemed to depart from the classics, can’t be beard in morality. But the second period, with the flouring sorts of ides from philosophy to literature, people expanded their horizon, and renew the old views, began to treat the Beat Generation in different eyes, the bets aren‘t so bad as before.”[11]

It is understandable the shock that older people feel at the sight of this Beat Generation is, but at its deepest level, not so much repugnance at the facts, as it is distress at the attitudes which move it. Though worried by this distress, they most often argue or legislate in terms of the facts rather than the attitudes. The newspaper reader, studying the eyes of young dope addicts, can only find an outlet for his horror and bewilderment in demands that passers be given the electric chair. Sociologists, with a more academic concern, are just as troubled by the legions of young men whose topmost ambition seems to be to find a secure birth in a monolithic corporation. Contemporary historians express mild surprise at the lack of organized movements, political, religious, or otherwise, among the young. Everywhere people with tidy moralities shake their heads and wonder what is happening to the younger generation.

Perhaps they have not noticed that, behind the excess on the one hand, and the conformity on the other, lies that wait-and-see detachment that results from having to fall back for support more on one‘s capacity for human endurance than on one‘s philosophy of life. Not that the Beat Generation is immune to ideas; they fascinate it. Its wars, both past and future, were and will be wars of ideas. It knows, however, that in the final, private moment of conflict a man is really fighting another man, and not an idea. And that the same goes for love. So it is a generation with a greater facility for entertaining ideas than for believing in them. But it is also the first generation in several centuries for which the act of faith has been an obsessive problem, quite aside from the reasons for having a particular faith or not having it. It exhibits on every side, and in a bewildering number of facets, a perfect craving to believe. Though it is certainly a generation of extremes, including both the hipster and the radical young Republican in its ranks, it renders unto Caesar (i.e, society) what is Caesar‘s and unto God what is God‘s. For the wildest hipster, making a mystique of bop, drugs and the nightlife, there is no desire to shatter the ‘square‘ society in which he lives, only to elude it. To get on a soapbox or write a manifesto would seem to him absurd. Looking at the normal world, where most everything is a ‘drag‘ for him, he nevertheless says: ‘Well, that‘s the Forest of Arden after all. And even jumps if you look at it right.‘

The variety and the extremity of their solutions are only a final indication that for today‘s young people there is not as yet a single external pivot around which they can, as a generation, group their observations and their aspirations. There is no single philosophy, no single party, and no single attitude. The failure of most orthodox moral and social concepts to reflect fully the life they have known is probably the reason for this, but because of it each person becomes a walking, self-contained unit, compelled to meet, or at least endure, the problem of being young in a seemingly helpless world in his own way. More than anything else, this is what is responsible for this generation‘s reluctance to name itself, its reluctance to discuss itself as a group, sometimes its reluctance to be itself. For invented gods invariably disappoint those who worship them. Only the need for them goes on, and it is this need, exhausting one object after another, which projects the Beat Generation forward into the future and will one day deprive it of its beatness.

4.      Conclusion

What could we think of these beats? Strictly speaking, they had never done anything with violence, resent and cruelty; they didn’t endanger the public, weren’t the anti-society, or opposed the social values invariably; they just resisted the conservative views which suppressed individuality, trampled on human nature.[12] Indeed, they despised the authority, they behaved extremely, but in their heart, they were concerned about the faith and the pursuit much more than others, they were sensitive, got hurt easily, couldn’t stand the depressed and constrained atmosphere so as to begin to oppose the mainstream at last.[13] In fact, they weren’t beaten down; they just insisted on pursuing the ultimate meaning of human nature.

It is essentially a spiritual crisis, an age’s view of values shock a generation. People live hard, and they can’t change the reality, only with an extreme behavior to go on a spiritual exploration, constantly set up a new faith and values in this lost-faith age. Those generations, who are special and present irrelevancy, are assets and bear watching.

Bibliography

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[3] 同[5]P57

[4] 杰克.凯鲁亚克. 在路上[M]. 桂林：漓江出版社. 1998.P413-422

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[12] 同[1]P27

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