Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, The

College Literature, Fall 2002 by Chandarlapaty, Raj

Lardas, John. 2001. The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. $39.95 hc. 316 pp.

John Lardas's analysis of the Beat Generation-Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs-in The Bop Apocalypse, doesn't cover a lot of new territory when it comes to Beat scholarship. He relies on the apocalyptic grounding of German philosopher Oswald Spengler and details in a very thorough manner how the Beats anticipated and reacted against what they perceived to be the spiritual crises of American culture; this notion of "spiritual crisis" is a common theme in much Beat scholarship. At times, moreover, The Bop Apocalypse exhibits some logical contradictions and questionable insights, avoiding direct mention of the theoretical axes of literature-namely the "post" theories-and reflecting some confusion of these points. Nonetheless, his account is thorough and a valuable recollection of how apocalypitic writers such as Spengler exercise a powerful and directing influence on the ideologies of the Beats.

In the introduction, Lardas proposes the opposition of the Beats' view of religion as a "process" which implies learning and spiritual fluctuations with the stagnating vision of official religion during the early Cold war period (7-8). He notes that, with respect to the Beats,"the sacred refers to those moments that defy easy categorization, those events that out-imagine the mind" (7). This understanding of the sacred ties in nicely with Neal Cassady's comment in On the Road that "God exists without qualms" (120). Lardas's first chapter anchors his interpretation of the Beats' apocalyptic vision along the lines of Spengler's division of experience into mutually opposed discourses of"capital" and "spirit," articulated in Decline of the West (41). He then phrases the Beats' sense of the apocalyptic in terms of both the Cold War and the Beats' mythic "exceptionalism" that "lay beneath expressions of pessimism and doubt" (52). This comment sets the tone for the rest of the book, as the Beats themselves struggle mightily with the spiritual ailments that for them have overtaken society. Lardas also sees the Beats as modernists who "rejected materialism and atheism" (54), seeking instead the mythic dimensions of culture and spirituality. However, his interpretation of the Spenglerian opposition in terms of a "Hegelian dialectic" (66) contradicts the idea of an "apocalypse" and may not apply to the Beats, who arguably viewed capital and spirit as opposed, not as creating synthesis. Nonetheless, Lardas cleverly types American commercialism as "Faustian," something that usurped spiritual and mythic authority, and something that Kerouac felt needed to be "exorcised" (67-68). After this analysis he pursues central texts, first discussing Kerouac's The Town and the City, which emphasizes the opposition between Kerouac's sense of rural piety and the commercial, decadent influences of the city (75).

The chapter titled "Sex, Drugs, and Theology" analyzes all the components of the spiritual danger that the Beats sensed-with respect to individualism, intellectual freedom, and social and cultural diversity (81-84). His sense that the Beats' drug use and criminality based itself along the lines of Burroughs's discussion of "a brutalizing climate of ignorance and conformity" (89) is reflective of the popular view that the Beats addressed spiritual crisis and created countercultural ideology. However, his separation of the Beats into two camps-the visceral and insidious world of Burroughs on the one hand, the optimism and spiritual renewal found in Kerouac and Ginsberg on the other (114), ignores the fact that Ginsberg wrote many torrid, vulgar, and terrifying visions into his poetry. Moreover, his assessment of the Beats' opposition to the "scientific" approach of New Criticism (138-39) and the assumption of a structureless, uncontrolled writing hand that shattered traditional poetics and "yielded a more authentic self subject to personal, even self-destructive, desires" (152) suggests a postmodern immediacy. Nevertheless, his assessmsent of the Beats as seeking "culture language" that could express their "utopian" vision-Burroughs through the interiority and language of heroin addiction, Kerouac and Ginsberg through a confessional style centered on community-is clear and consistent with the Spenglerian opposition. The section on "Beat Language" is also a useful introduction into the poetics of utopia and dystopia, subjects with which all three writers were consumed.

Lardas's assessment of the role Mexico plays in the Beats' view of themselves as "participants in an apocalyptic drama" is insightful. He points out that the Beats explore the significance of Mexico, with Burroughs focusing on the "perpetual state of corruption and degradation" (181) and Ginsburg and Kerouac focusing on the regenerative and timeless aspects of ancient Mexico. At the same time he notes Burroughs's awareness of regenerative historical-cultural consciousness in ancient Mexico, and the modern United States, through the taking of yage, a Mayan sacrament (187), to suggest a larger circle of agreement among the Beats about Mexico related to drugs and consciousness. Lardas postulates that, to Burroughs, Spengler's critique of a capitalism that directs "animate energy through the physical universe" translated into an interrogation of the whole of commercial and capitalist culture and language through the taking of drugs (194). At length, he makes similar assessments of Kerouac and Ginsberg, but cites their continual interest in Eastern mysticism as the medium for spiritual renewal (239).