Ideology in Allen Ginsberg’s “America” and “Sunflower Sutra”
Ideology is a very important topic as it relates to literature. Literature is one of the primary methods in which people that perhaps are not within the mainstream of culture, politics and society employ to question hegemonic power structures. Dominant power structures are often posed primarily as the synthesis of modernity, objective reality, logocentrism, patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism, which are often cited in shorthand as “imperialism.” The United States, after the Second World War the period in which Allen Ginsberg and the other beat generation writers were most active was arguably the point in world history in which all of these processes peaked. The United States and the rest of the Free World in the midst of fighting the Cold War had chosen this ideology of imperialism as the best way to assure their success in that struggle. These ideologies put together are the complex of thought which American ideological institutions tried to construct a hegemonic ideology. Ginsberg in “America” and “Sunflower Sutra” attempts to interrogate the weaknesses of the American ideology which was at its strongest and most prevalent at the time. The use of postmodernism as a style as well as an analytical tool may be seen as separate endeavors, but as a matter of fact, they work to question the same things, power structures, ideology and the nature of knowledge. The role of the subjectivity is also something which plays heavily into the conception of what ideology means and how it influences Ginsberg’s poetry.
It is very hard to talk about the works of one the most important members of the Beat Generation without giving some background on the movement as a whole. The Beat writer Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Paul Bowles, among others represented “a fascinating literary phenomenon, the solitary aesthetic gesture during a repressive and anesthetized age to combat intolerance, naïve pro-Americanism, and conservative politics.” (Newhouse 168) Beat literature, although it was never a social movement had in it a strong enough strain of anger and revolt to the values and ideology of the era which allowed it to take its place as “archetypal American oppositional literature.” (Newhouse 168) Furthermore, Beat literature stood up as something unique by focusing on identity, the marginalized peoples and subjects became an “essential precursor to multiculturalist postmodern trends.” (Newhouse 168) If postmodernism is defined as equivalent with a rejection of ideology and the triumph of the subject, then the Beat Generation were an example par excellence of the rejection of everything that they thought was tied to tradition and convention, to culture.
The Beat Generation in this context was the predecessor to the counterculture which would manifest itself later in the 1960s. The Beats and the counterculture according to Irving Kristol as self-consciously as counterculture which was not just another dissenting movement, not another stylistic revolution accomplished by a new and younger avant-garde.” Instead, Kristol posited it as a movement that sees itself against culture. It emerged out of an avowed hostility to “culture” itself – and this on the part of intellectuals, professors, and artists. (Kristol 137) Kristol continues, by explaining that the counterculture was a rebellion against “culture and art seen as autonomous, secular human activities.” (Kristol 138) This impulse, to question the logic which had undergirded so much of human endeavor for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was a jarring moment in Western history because it led to a crisis of belief in the power of the institutions of modernity. Modernity itself was an ideology, the blend of methods which included the belief in “objective truth and rationality” as well as the “expectations of inevitable progress.” (Soccio 447) The postmodern moment, which was inaugurated with the Beat Generation was one of the first manifestations of a rejection of these values. The rejection of the particular ideology which was captured by modernism, capitalism and industrial progress was Ginsberg’s purpose in writing “America” and “Sunflower Sutra”
The ideology of the Beat Generation and Ginsberg is laid out above as an anti-intellectual, anti-modernist, reaction to cultural and social developments of modernity: the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But exactly what makes an ideology an ideology? According to Louis Althusser, a Marxist thinker, ideology is conflated with the “crude Marxist notion of ideology as false consciousness.” (Bennett and Royle 172) Moreover, Althusser works to posit ideology as something which isn’t real, unlike the materialist realities of economics and class relations. (Bennet and Royle 172) Ideology for Althusser a thoroughgoing Marxist thinker if ever there was one constructs it as “an imagined representation of reality; it is false, distorted by definition.” (Bennet and Royle 172) In the Marxist sense, ideology is not real and furthermore it is something which works to cloud real class relations and the materialist basis of knowledge.
Although “America” and “Sunflower Sutra” seem to critique two very separate and distinct facets of American ideology, society and culture they both have a common theme of rejection of the ideology laid out above, the certainty of progress and the supremacy of objective truth forwarded by modernist ideology. The power of ideology is to create categories as well as to create the conditions necessary for turning an object into something else. Industry and capitalism are processes which work to change nature and through that process, reducing the purity and beauty of the natural world. Humanity, especially in modernity, with their focus on trying to dominate and subjugate nature and other human beings for the sake of profit and progress create the world where everything is seemingly in contradiction with each other. This is Ginsberg's point in “Sunflower Sutra”. The sunflower which was growing seemingly against all odds in the harshest and most industrial of environments a train yard is an act of rebellion against the order of things which had been created by capitalism and industrialization. The sunflower is not only a symbol of beauty, but also of steadfast rebellion against the hegemonic culture of the day. The strength of the seemingly unassailable modernist, objective logic was not enough to hold back a solitary piece of resistance to it.
The sunflower is a very effective stand-in for subjectivity, in the poststructuralist sense. The Beat writers’ emphasis on the rejection of modernity, primarily as it related to the treatment of the individual. Along with their questioning of a social and cultural ideology which was oppressive through its insistence on conformity and valuing logic over emotion. The sunflower can be seen as both as a simple symbol of nature thriving in what should be very unforgiving environment or it can be a much more complex case of acting as a simulacrum for the values held by Ginsberg and the other members of the Beat Generation. The work of creating contrast and of a dialectic between nature and modernity. As posited by this excerpt from the poem
Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past— and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye— (Ginsberg)
The affirmation of subjectivity and the valuing of the emotional over the logical are key facets of a post-structuralist and postmodernist conception of the world. The rejection of ideology and of the unquestioned superiority of modernity and its categories.
Ginsberg’s intention in writing “America” unlike “Sunflower Sutra” was much less of an assertion of an ideology but instead an interrogation of a political reality. Ideology is most trenchant as a category when it relates to politics. In Ginsberg's world American political ideology was mostly directed at maintaining order and most significantly at containing Communism both at home and abroad. “America” is Ginsberg's critique of American Cold War ideology, especially militarism, and anti-Communism. The United States a country which had values freedom of expression as one of its main tenets had effectively turned its back on those values because of ideology. One of the main ways in which the United States during the Cold War moved away from the belief in freedom and instead focused on censoring and blackballing Communists and sympathizers in order to attempt to maintain social order at home and to fight Communism abroad. Ginsberg's assessment of politics as laid out in the poem as a critique of American policies in the normative sense and what they actually were as a result of the Cold War. “America” in this sense, can easily be portrayed as
Ginsberg’s poem, “America,” is very honest about he thinks are the primary factors which define American ideology and they are mostly things which we would consider logical, political things. Passages like “Asia is rising, against me. I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance. I’d better consider my national resources.” (Ginsberg) Conflate the personal and the political and it speaks to the power of subjectivity in literature and how the experience of the Cold War can be more than just political but it can actually be very much personal. The location of ideology, that is the subject, is the one that has agency and creates language. In this context, Ginsberg is easily explained as an author where subjectivity and ideology becomes one of the primary concerns. As argued by Bennett and Royle, “subjects – people – make their own ideology at the same as ideology makes them subjects. (Bennet and Royle 173) The narrator of “America” doesn’t seem to be logical or to have an ideology, instead, he seems to be obsessed with subjectivity and desire.
One of the main stylistic and literary features of the Beats and one that is very present in “America” is the use of stream of consciousness and the prioritization of spontaneity and form over function. Literary form and style are very important parts of determining a genre’s or author’s ideology. Bennett and Royle explain, that detective fiction is an essentially conservative genre because it relies on the “reestablishment of order by the discovery of the criminal – after which the jewels are returned or the murderer is punished (or both).” (Bennett and Royle 175) Similarly, detective fiction relies on the logic of rational actors and individual agency as prerequisites for the story to be told within the structure of the genre. (Bennett and Royle 175) If genre connotes ideology, then it is very easy to say that Beat literature as a whole and Ginsberg here in “America” and “Sunflower Sutra” with its emphasis on emotion, spontaneity, randomness and lack of rationality represents an ideology which promotes desire, emotion subjectivity. The rejection of rationality and of objective truth is equivalent to the rejection of modernity or at least moving past it, that is, postmodernity.
Literature in their eyes was much more than just an intellectual exercise instead it had the purpose of creating emotions, like the excerpt below shows.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers (Ginsberg)
This shows Ginsberg’s willingness to talk about American ideology and history, fears, anxieties and injustices, the hard to justify stuff using language which already existed. Ginsberg thus in the Lacanian sense enters into the “Symbolic” and he is “compelled, therefore, to engage in the world of the reality of the signifier.” (Fuery 16) The signifiers in the poem, Russians, Chinamen, Siberia, Bureaucracy, are all “Others” which are, things which Lacan mentions are defined by alienation from the self and desire. These words all have meanings, but they ultimately only have definitions which are shaped by subjectivity, desire, and alienation. Ginsberg’s estrangement from all of these things in large part plays a role in creating a desire to have them defined and to create an ideology and a subjectivity.
Ginsberg’s “America” and “Sunflower Sutra” are two very good examples of the power of subjectivity, postmodernism, and post-structuralism as theoretical precepts of the Beat generation. Ginsberg and others like him represented a questioning of many of the values which had become dominant in the United States and the Western world. Modernism, capitalism, imperialism, and militarism all ideologies which reduced the role of subjectivity, emotion and the individual were anathema to the Beats. Instead, the Beats as a literary community embodied the creation of “consciousness into political critique,” which although it attempted to elevate subjectivities and to question power structures they created was ultimately ignorant of the politics of the Third World. (Chandraparty 167) Desire and subjectivity is vitally important to Ginsberg’s works here and the power with which they have to change the meanings of words and to question the accepted logic of a time and place.
Works Cited
Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. An introduction to literature, criticism and theory. Routledge, 2014.
Chandarlapaty, Raj. The Beat Generation and Counterculture: Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Print.
Fuery, Patrick. "Theories of desire." (1995).
Ginsberg, Allen. "America." Ginsberg, America. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 June 2016.
Ginsberg, Allen. "Sunflower Sutra." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 16 June 2016.
Kristol, Irving. Neoconservatism: the autobiography of an idea. Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Newhouse, Thomas. The Beat Generation and the Popular Novel in the United States, 1945-1970. Jefferson, NC [u.a.: McFarland, 2000. Print.
Soccio, Douglas. Archetypes of wisdom: An introduction to philosophy. Nelson Education, 2015.
