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Howl 39
was tried for obscenity. Although the ideology of fear, oaths of loyalty,
black lists, and public denunciations were winding down by 1955,
the nation was still deeply conflicted on questions of loyalty, sexual
deviance, and race. Segregation had just been pronounced unconstitutional
in 1954, but racial tensions were higher than ever, and Emmett
Till was murdered the next year.
Preceded by the notoriety gained from the San Francisco trial,
Howl burst onto this scene like a firebomb. Perhaps the high degree
of societal repression demanded the appearance of a book like Howl.
Whatever one may have thought of it as poetry, Howl represented the
return of the repressed—aesthetically, sexually, spiritually, and politically.
Like all prophetic and mystical texts, Howl transgresses sanity
and reason in favor of “mad,” paranoid, surreal, apocalyptical consciousness.
Of course any incantatory, irrational speech or writing is to some
degree anti-hegemonic. But in Ginsberg, the content is explicit. Do
radios read minds? Was the CIA involved in publishers’ rejections of
Kerouac’s manuscripts? Do scholars support wars? These conspiracy
theories, in retrospect, were not outrageous. Frances Stonor Saunders’
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1999)
makes it clear that the CIA (and its literary-artistic arm “Congress of
Cultural Freedom”) was involved in cultural interventions that no one,
certainly not the unwitting participants (including Jackson Pollock,
Stephen Spender, and Robert Lowell), could have imagined.
The taboos Ginsberg violated with such force in Howl were those
most entrenched in society: 1. the taboo against the unrestrained
sociopathic speech of madness and irrationality; 2. the taboo against
sexuality outside of marriage and other moral constraints; and, chiefly,
3. the taboo against mocking and destabilizing the traditional partition
between the sacred and the profane, against treating all phenomena,
high and low, spiritual and physical, as simultaneous and on an equal
plane. Every society is structured upon a division between the sacred
and the profane. Indeed, that division can be said to define a society.
In the “Footnote to Howl,” one can see the collapse of the sacred and
profane in a single line:
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose
is holy! The tongue and
cock and hand and asshole holy! (27)