in the tormented intensity and sudden illuminations of the underground world; now in Part
II, strengthened by his descent and return, he can confront his persecutor angrily, his
words striving for magical force as they strike, like a series of hammer blows, against
the iron walls of Moloch. As we have just seen, Moloch is an ancient deity to whom
children were sacrificed, just as the "rains and imagination" of the present
generation are devoured by a jealous and cruel social system. Moloch stands broadly for
authority—familial, social, literary—and Ginsberg does not share the young
Adrienne Rich’s belief in an authority that is "tenderly severe."
Manifest in skyscrapers, prisons, factories, banks, madhouses, armies, governments,
technology, money, bombs, Moloch represented a vast, all-encompassing social reality that
is at best unresponsive (a "concrete void") , at worst a malign presence that
feeds off individuality and difference, Moloch—"whose mind is pure
machinery"—is Ginsberg’s version of Blake’s Urizen, pure reason and
abstract form. A clear contrast to the grave yet tender voice that Ginsberg heard in the
first of his visions, Moloch is also "the heavy judger of men," the parent whose
chilling glance can terrify the child, paralyze him with self-doubt and make him feel
"crazy" and "queer." Moloch, then, is the principle of separation and
conflict in life, an external force so powerful that it eats its way inside and divides
the self against itself. "Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a
consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!" It
is Moloch who is the origin of all the poem’s images of stony coldness (the granite steps
of the madhouse, the body turned to stone, the sphinx of cement and aluminum,
the vast stone of war, the rocks of time, etc.). Like the Medusa of
classical myth, Moloch petrifies. Ginsberg’s driving, heated repetition of the name,
moreover, creates the feeling that Moloch is everywhere, surrounding, enclosing–a cement
or iron structure inside of which the spirit, devoured, sits imprisoned and languishing;
and so Moloch is also the source of all the poem’s images of enclosure (head, room,
asylum, jail).
"Moloch whom I abandon!" Ginsberg cries out at one point. Yet in spite of all
the imprecations and even humor directed against this ubiquitous presence, the release of
pent-up rage is finally not liberating; anger is not the way out. Part II begins with
bristling defiance, but it ends with loss, futility, and self-contempt ass Ginsberg sees
all he values, "visions! Omens! Hallucinations! Miracles!
Ecstasies!"—"the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit"—"gone
down the American river!" And so the mood at the close of Part II, similar to the
moment in Part I when the hipsters with shaven heads and harlequin speech, present
themselves for lobotomy, the mood here is hysterically suicidal, with anger, laughter, and
helplessness combining in a giddy self-destructiveness:
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells!
They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying
flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
An outpouring of anger against constricting authority may be a stage in the process of
self-liberation, but is not its end; anger, perpetuating division, perpetuates Moloch. In
fact, as the last line of Part II shows, such rage, futile in its beatings against the
stony consciousness of Moloch, at last turns back on the self in acts that are, however
zany, suicidal.
But in Part III, dramatically shifting from self-consuming rage to renewal in love, a
kind of self-integration, a balancing of destructive and creative impulses, is sought.
"Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland," Ginsberg begins, turning from angry
declamatory rhetoric to a simple, colloquial line, affectionate and reassuring in its
gently rocking rhythm. Repeated, this line becomes the base phrase for Part III, its
utterance each time followed by a response that further defines both Rockland and Solomon,
and this unfolding characterization provides the dramatic movement of this section as well
as the resolution of the entire poem. At first, the responses stress Rockland as prison
and Solomon as victim–
where you’re madder than I am
where you must feel very strange
where you imitate the shade of my mother–
but these are balanced against the following three responses, which stress the power of
the "madman" to transcend his mere physical imprisonment.
where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries
where you laugh at this invisible humor
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
A little more than halfway through, however, beginning with–
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it
should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse–
the answers begin to get longer, faster in movement, more surrealistic in imagery, as
they, proclaiming a social/political/religious/sexual revolution, affirm the transcendent
freedom of the self. Part III’s refrain thus establishes a context of emotional
support and spiritual communion, and it is from this "base," taking off in
increasingly more daring flights of rebellious energy, that Ginsberg finally arrives at
his "real" self.
I’m with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’
airplanes
roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital
illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run
outside
O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory
forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway
across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
Again, boundaries ("imaginary walls") collapse, in a soaring moment of
apocalyptic release; and the self–which is "innocent and immortal"–breaks free
of Moloch, of whom Rockland’s walls are an extension. The poem, then, does not
close with the suicidal deliverance of Part II; nor does it end with a comic apocalypse
("O victory forget your underwear we’re free"); it closes, instead, with a
Whitmanesque image of love and reunion. "Howl" moves from the ordeal of
separation, through the casting out of the principle of division, toward unification, a
process that happens primarily within the self.
According to Ginsberg, Part III of "Howl" is a "litany of affirmation of
the Lamb in its glory." His repetition of the colloquial "I’m with you in
Rockland" turns it into an elevated liturgical chant. Words, no longer weapons as
they were in Part I, build a magical incantation which delivers us into a vision of the
"innocent" Lamb, the eternal Spirit locked inside Rockland, or inside the hard
surfaces of a defensive personality. Carl Solomon functions partly as a surrogate for
Naomi Ginsberg, still hospitalized in Pilgrim State when "Howl" was written;
Ginsberg, who hints as much in the poem ("where you imitate the shade of my
mother"), has recently conceded this to be the case. But less important than
identifying the real-life referents in the poem is to see that a literal person has been
transformed into eternal archetype, the Lamb of both Christian and Blakean mythology, and
that Ginsberg’s loving reassurance is primarily directed to this eternally innocent aspect
of himself. The refrain line in Part II articulates the human sympathy of the poet, while
his responses uncover his messianic and visionary self which at first rendered him
terrified and incommunicado but later yielded what Ginsberg calls in "Kaddish"
the "key" to unlock the door of the encapsulated self. "Howl" closes
with Ginsberg’s loving acceptance of–himself; the part of him that had been lost and
banished in time in The Gates of Wrath has been reborn ("dripping from a
sea-journey") and reintegrated. The mirror is no longer empty.
Yet this unity, occurring only in a dream, is attained by means of flight and return.
"Howl" struggles for autonomy, but Ginsberg, as he had when he moved to the West
Coast, keeps looking back over his shoulder, affirming his fidelity to Carl Solomon, to
Naomi Ginsberg, to images from his past life. Similarly, he says the tradition is "a
complete fuck-up so you’re on your own," but Ginsberg leans for support on Blake and
Whitman, both of whom he perceives as maternal, tender, and therefore non-threatening
authorities. Ginsberg in fact ends by withdrawing from the social, historical present
which he so powerfully creates in the poem. He stuffs the poem with things from
modern urban life; but materiality functions in the poem as a kind of whip, flagellating
Ginsberg into vision. Moloch, it seems, cannot be exorcised, only eluded through a
vertical transcendence; what starts out as a poem of social protest ends by retreating
into private religious/erotic vision, and Ginsberg’s tacit assumption of the
immutability of social reality establishes one respect in which he is a child of the
fifties rather than of the universe. Ginsberg decided not to "write a poem"
so that he could express his "real" self–which turned out to be his idealized
self: the Lamb in its glory. Confessional poetry often presents not an exposure but a
mythologizing of the self, as Plath’s poems strive to enact her transformation into
"the fine, white flying myth" of Ariel. In "Howl" Ginsberg wants to
recover an original wholeness that has been lost in time; he wants to preserve a
self-image which he can only preserve by keeping it separate from temporal, physical
reality. Compositional self-exploration turns out to be compositional self-idealization.
"The only way to be like Whitman is to write unlike Whitman," Williams
believed. Ginsberg certainly did take over some specific technical features of Whitman’s
work–the long line, the catalog, the syntactic parallelisms; he was in fact rereading Leaves
of Grass as he was working on "Howl." Is it possible, then, that in learning
to write unlike Williams Ginsberg ended up writing like Whitman and thus being like
neither of these independent and innovative poets? The answer, I think, is that while
Ginsberg did not accomplish the absolute fresh start that he sometimes liked to imagine,
he does not merely repeat the literary past. He imagines Whitman as the founder; Ginsberg
wants to move forward along lines initiated by the earlier writer. "Whitman’s form
had rarely been further explored," Ginsberg said; the character of his advance can be
defined by comparing the first two lines of one of Whitman’s long catalogs in "Song
of Myself "–
The pure contralto sings in the organ loft,
The carpenter’s plane whistles its wild, ascending lisp,
with two lines near the beginning of Part I of "Howl":
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on
tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and
Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war
Both poets build a catalog out of long, end-stopped lines that are syntactically
parallel. Yet Whitman’s lines, each recording a single observed image in a
transparent style, are simple and move with an easy insouciance, while Ginsberg, an
embattled visionary, packs his lines with surrealistic images, and makes them move with an
almost manic intensity. As he does here, Ginsberg works throughout the poem by juxtaposing
the language of the street ("El," "staggering," "tenement
roofs," "illuminated") in electrifying ways. "Howl" thus arrives
at the visionary by way of the literal, as the poems in The Gates of Wrath did not;
and Ginsberg here creates "images / That strike like lightning from eternal
mind" rather than discussing the possibility. Ginsberg’s language incarnates
gaps–between street and heaven, literal and visionary–then leaps across them in "a
sudden flash." His use of "images juxtaposed" shows that Ginsberg came to
Whitman by way of the modern poets; but the resulting line is his own. The line serves an
expressive purpose in baring the tormented mystic consciousness of the poet; but it serves
a rhetorical purpose as well–seeking "to break people’s mind systems open" by
rationally subverting ("mechanical") consciousness and replacing it with a wild
associative logic which sees connections where before there were oppositions. As a final
example we can look at the line
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward
poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between
At first the line moves toward a terrifying dead-end ("blind streets") but
then the landscape is internalized ("in the mind") and a flash illuminates the
temporal world and releases "the archangel of the soul" from the dead-end of
time. As we have seen, the poem as a whole–immersing us in the literal and temporal, then
releasing us in a moment of vision–works in just this way.
By James E.B. Breslin. Copyright ? 1983, 1994 by University of Chicago