Was Michel Foucault Right About Jack Kerouac?
Kerouac and the Beat writers were often viewed by mainstream America as thugs and delinquent youth. To most of society, the Beats were outsiders. But were the Beats - as Foucault might suggest - simply reinforcing a prison-like societal structure? Foucault argues: "it is true that prison punishes delinquency, delinquency is for the most part produced in and by an incarceration which, ultimately, prison perpetuates in its turn.... The delinquent is an institutional product" (1642). The delinquent gives those in power the ability to have an example, a myth which can be held up to keep the mass populous in check. Ginsberg's Howl, while it seems to have produced a large awareness in America of a new type of writing, was simultaneously a product of power.
It's hard not to agree with Foucault to some extent. But isn't it possible that Kerouac helped to achieved some kind of progress? Didn't the Beat writers heighten awareness to some degree in America? These are some of the questions that I will have to wrestle with as I delve into the meaning of the rebel hero mythology in Post WWII America.
Work Cited
Foucault, Michel. From Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 1636-47.
Published by James Kerley
Part of the Yahoo! Contributor Network team. I'm your best contact for sports related questions. I grew up in New Mexico before moving to Colorado for school. I love weird and experimental writing an... View profile
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4 Comments
Post a CommentTwo things you need to understand about the fraud of French deconstructionists: The right-wingers were apologizing for their collaboration with the Nazis, and the fascistic works they had produced. (Prod any Frenchman and they'll admit that Celine was the great writer of the 1930s & '40s and he was a vicious anti-Semite). The Marxists like Foucault were collaborationists of their own kind, with the Gaullist regime. The leading Marxist/communist intellectuals like Althusser didn't throw their lot with the students & workers in May '68 as they had such a sweet spot in The Establishment. They didn't have the guts/balls to go to the barricades, as they didn't want to piss away their bourgeois positions, as professional (and well-cared for) "critical spirits". Nothing they say has any meaning as they themselves were meaningless, playing shell games. Sounds like post-Vietnam American academics, doesn't it?
One thing you should understand is that ONE THE ROAD was as pivotal a book as THE SUN ALSO RISES. It was a very liberating experience for Americans in the Eisenhower years to embrace Kerouac's "spontaneous" (that is to say, beatific or joyous) prose, just as Hemingway liberated American letters from Victorian fiction. Interestingly, Hemingway's idea of machismo was rooted in the Victorian, and spiritually, well.... Did he get as far as Kerouac did? Did Kerouac surpass him in liberating the spirit? I just wish Kerouac had had some of Papa's discipline. His post-Dharma Bums (a work for hire) output can be pretty unreadable.
Screw Foucault. Why put yourself in that kind of solipsistic straight jacket? Don't you realize you are being burlesqued? Read Sartre's "St. Genet" -- and realize there is a joke involved. More to the point: You fail to mention Norman Mailer and "The White Negro." Mailer was more of a revolutionary than was Kerouac when it came to liberating American letters, as he gave us the New Journalism. "The White Negro" speaks directly to juvenile delinquency.
Foucault wasn't aiming this towards the Beats in particular so clarify you're heading
But also keep in mind, Foucault was aiming this observation at how these "marginal literature" or "lyricism of marginality" was being used in society, not at how its original creators intended their products. And as products in consumer society, I agree with Foucault entirely, they do have this affect on consumers. The popular image of the outsider or outlaw becomes a form of common social cliche and control as people buy into this common construction by reading this marginal work. Remember Foucault is not denying its originality but he is merely analyzing it from the standpoint of its function in society. As a social function, not as a personal standard of art, which he wouldn't deny. And yes, whatever revolutionary effect they may have originally had, gradually got neutralized to a form of commercial advertisement for classic "outlaw literature". Foucault would also probably say the same thing of t