Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Howl 43
by name, but in “Howl,” Cassady is always “N.C.,” the sexual hero
whose bisexuality is in fact concealed:
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen
night-cars,
N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis
of Denver—
joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in
empty lots and diner backyards. . . . (14)
After Cassady’s death in 1968, Ginsberg makes their sadomasochistic
relationship clear in the poem “Please Master”; it is even clearer in
his journals, where he confesses, “I want to be your slave, suck your
ass, suck your cock, you fuck me, you master me, you humiliate me
. . .” (qtd. in Raskin 147). Although the homosexuality is repressed
in Howl, the poem’s redundant homosociality and Whitmanic male
camaraderie—as in On the Road—has led to well-founded charges
of misogyny. Most of the women in Howl are shrews, to whom the
narrator’s friends have “lost their loveboys” (14). The “three old shrews
of fate” are whore-like, seductive, greedy, and “one-eyed.”
Much of the transgressiveness of Howl can be subsumed under
the heading of a particular theme, what one might call the trope of
nakedness in U.S. literature—the sense of immediacy, that the reader
is getting something more “real” for being unadorned and unabashed.
For Whitman, stripping bare is a general metaphor for release. This is
equally true of Ginsberg, with the additional dimension that Ginsberg
actually stripped naked in front of audiences, breaking a taboo that
Whitman, though he took considerable risks for the late nineteenth
century, surely never contemplated.
Song of Myself is full of tropes of nakedness, often with reference
to immediacy, freshness, and originality: When Whitman writes,
“Voices long veil’d, and I remove the veil,” the “veil” over the voice is
that of custom. He is releasing the voice, his own and those of others
heretofore silenced. When he writes, “Loose the stop from your
throat” (35), alluding to the stop in an organ that opens and closes
the valve through which the air rushes to form a tone, he addresses
the impediment of shame or fear in oneself that thwarts speech at its
source. Consider the context: