Cultural Shift through the Eyes of Ginsberg and Kerouac :: Allen Ginsberg

Cultural Shift through the Eyes of Ginsberg and Kerouac Brothers of the San Francisco Beat scene, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg lived in the midst of a consumer cultural revolution, patriots of a forgotten mindset. While the regional characters of the nation were quickly being homogenized by television, Kerouac and Ginsberg wrote poetry and prose that both captured and contemplated the moment. They were contemporaries, sharing the similar circle of friends and drawing from the same influences but produced works seeking divergent means to the same conceptual end. Kerouac wrote with an enlightened nostalgia, fascinated with preserving a form of the pioneer spirit of individuals and t on the whole tales in the midst of cultural change, while Ginsbergs poetry directly criticized the shortcomings and decay of society neither author completing the picture or the message, leaving something for the other. American socialisation of the mid nineteen fifties and early sixties is described with disgust and rejection in both Kerouacs and Ginsbergs works. They bore witness to and documented a rich, variant kitchen-gardening homogenized and sterilized by Dial television ads and The Saturday Evening Post. Beat calls to rebellion and cancerous grey images show America on the decline and cooking for revolution. In Kerouacs novel The Dharma Bums, Japhys ideal revolutionary rejects the new developments of American culture, refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production, and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didnt really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general tear apart you finally always see a week later in the garage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume...(97). Their America was a land of mass-marketed uselessness. At a time when stores across the nation carried identical products, and everybody saw the same three channels of television, the sparkle of regional character started to evaporate. Kerouac paints his Dharma Bums as the heirs of Whitman, poetic thoughtful wanderers. Ginsberg also used Whitman to link the past to the present in the poem A Supermarket in California, asking the bard volition we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, well both be lonely. / Will we stroll dreaming of the alienated America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?