Howling Cry of Dystopia

S. A. Kalikar

Hislop College, Nagpur, India

Keywords: Howl, Hysteria, Cry, Dystopia, Anaphora, Subversive, Mental Health, War.

Abstract: Howl, hysteria, cry all these words seem to portray a complete derangement of mind, body and soul. It is very

natural of humans to experience such pain if the social conditions are unfavourable. One such poem that had

made news is Howl by Allen Ginsberg. This paper attempts to examine why anaphora is the most striking

feature of this poem? How it makes the rhetoric more appealing at the same time subversive? Does the epic-

like structure of this poem and its sheer nakedness create an atmosphere of high drama or of pity or both?

Further the paper will try to analyze how the poem brings to fore the most neglected aspect of human

existence- the psychological well-being! Howl talks about war, counterculture and about mental health. Can

we read Howl in the context of our present situation? The immortality of the poem in stark contrast of a

fastchanging world is miraculous! Howl is a phenomenon of dystopia.

1 INTRODUCTION

It is this fine, yet wild piece of poetry titled Howl that

has stood testimony to the power of the man and

power of the moment (Arnold, 1865). It is often

quoted how literature has always been the voice of the

subaltern or the voiceless who are unable to express

their agony in public, fearing hegemonic backlash.

Howl, the cacophony of the oppressed has echoed

ever since this piece was penned by Allen Ginsberg

in 1954-5. Dystopia, Hysteria, Mental Illness,

Sexuality, Drug Culture, Politics, Religion, War,

Capitalism, and Injustice are the visible themes that

have given this composition the power to subvert and

be heard. It has successfully created room for the

silenced voices to express their agony and pain freely.

Dystopia is the core and mantle of this revolutionary

poem of 112 paragraph like lines. Vagueness its crust.

A prose poem in free verse had left its readers

spellbound and utterly shocked back then. Howl also

known as Howl for Carl Solomon was first published

in 1956 in a collection titled Howl and Other Poems.

This immersive and subversive message of angst was

first presented to public on October 7, 1955, at the Six

Gallery in San Francisco. It had not only created

ripples but also a storm that left everyone in a haze.

Horror and disgust was in the air and the audiences

were left paralyzed by its sheer obscenity. The non-

conformity exhibited with such a tremendous velocity

was difficult to ignore as it howled and howled

resonating fiercely in everyone’s ears. The poem’s

deafening howl left people dumbstruck. Howl indeed

is a breathless poem which had left the authority

grasping for breath.

Howl resembles an epic form in three cantos and

speaks about the best minds of the generation who are

distraught with the apocalyptic scene of the post-war

world. The world filled with capitalistic hysteria, the

post-war world that left people handicapped both in

mind and spirit and the world which was spiritually

degrading. The entire poem looks haphazard and wild

to naked eye, but its soul lies with the disillusioned

minds of the lost generation. Its absurdity, its

vagueness and its broken spirit is its essence. Howl is

the looking-glass to be used for retrospection as well

as introspection. A mirror of the society, where the

image looks distorted as well as scattered. Howl

seems representative of T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland, a

land where disillusionment and spiritual decay ruled.

A land of utter chaos and derangement. It may be

stated that The Wasteland is a prequel to Howl. Three

decades apart, yet both are symbolic of dystopia. Both

speak volumes of the aftermaths of war. Both The

Wasteland and Howl have stayed news and made

news too. This reminds us of Ezra Pound who once

said, ‘Literature is news that stays news’ (Sen, 1975).

These two poems are the distorted images of the then

contemporary society. Howl being the most recent

ones among the two poems, this paper attempts to

showcase how the epic like structure of Howl is

Kalikar, S.

Howling Cry of Dystopia.

DOI: 10.5220/0012492700003792

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 1st Pamir Transboundar y Conference for Sustainable Societies (PAMIR 2023), pages 529-532

ISBN: 978-989-758-687-3

529

instrumental in portraying the dystopia of the 1950s

and why the howling echoes even today.

Let us first examine the word ‘who’ in the poem

Howl. The enigma of the word is such that, it compels

the reader to dig deeper and deeper into its context.

The word ‘who’ which appears every now and then is

like an incantation more or less similar to an

invocation in an epic and is indicative of the best

minds of the generation. Anaphora is the most

striking feature of this poem. The word ‘who’ is

repeatedly used at the beginning of the poetic lines of

the first canto. The continuous hammering of this

word probably secures a permanent place in the

reader’s mind. The poet hints at those people who

were the best minds of the generation who had gone

wild and out of control. The young generation who

engaged themselves into drugs, free sex, and

homosexuality and were eager to break all the norms

of the society exemplified the Beat philosophy.

Madness was in the air, and everybody breathed the

same. Non-conformity against religion, against

authority, against parental pressure was their anthem

and they sung in unity. They shared the same

‘structure of feeling’. ‘Who’ appears approximately

sixty times in the first part of the poem and changes

its form to ‘whose’ in the second part. This deliberate

reinforcement has amplified the idea of decay and

debauch of the best minds of the generation. The

poem signifies how war, industrialization and

capitalism had encroached and derailed the entire

system. This over indulgence had caused the

cessation of human values, morality was going down

the drain. Anarchy was loosed upon the world and the

best minds of the generation were left aghast and

broke. These destitute banded together leaving

parental control behind. They wandered the streets

and towns sometimes hungry and most of the times

distraught. They breathed the same philosophy and

were against war. It is this anti-war ideology that

landed them in trouble. Their non-materialistic

approach to life, alienation from conventional beliefs

and non-conformity towards the hegemonic tradition

made them experiment with psychedelic drugs that

left them in a hallucinated state of mind. The poet

successfully and consecutively repeats the word

‘who’ to register protest against the disastrous

repercussions of war and of military expansion of

America. The best minds of the generation whose

souls were destroyed by the capitalist hysteria were

lost in the maddening crowd. They had become brain

dead with no space for creativity. So many deaths, so

many battered skulls and so many drained of their

brilliance! It was a war of two worlds. One of freedom

and one of control. Anaphora has cleverly been used

by the poet to enhance the face and form of the poem.

It acts as an exemplary tool to make the rhetoric sound

powerful, appealing and at the same time subversive.

The poem Howl and its long narrative technique takes

it nearer to the epic poetry. Its lofty style and series of

events with a detailed narration makes it resemble an

epic. Also, the communal character of Howl that

embodies the thought process of an entire generation

and its high seriousness of speech makes it akin to the

epic form although not entirely so. The poet has

deliberately chosen this form to intensify the theme

of the poem eventually dropping the bomb on its

readers. The almost breathless structure of this

composition also compels one to experience the

temperament of the starving, the naked, and the

hysterical lightheaded hipsters who rebelled against

the societal norms. Some part of the poem makes

sense, is logical and flows thematically but later takes

the form of jazz. So, it may be called as an ‘epic in

jazz form’. The boldness, the obscenity, the free use

of foul words and the explicit portrayal of stark reality

arouses a heightened sensory awareness among its

readers. Howl wouldn’t have lit a spark had it not

followed the epic structure. It would have not been

read and reread had it not portrayed the philosophy of

the Beats. The spontaneity of the poem and its

vagueness adds fuel to the fire. The epic like structure

and its sheer nakedness definitely holds the key to

reveal its true essence. It does create an atmosphere

of high drama and pity as the reader too feels dystopic

with the loss of the best minds of the generation. This

loss is big enough, this loss is exhausting enough for

the readers to feel the pain and agony. The horror of

the sufferings is difficult to ignore. The blood

curdling reality of Howl strikes the right chord. It hits

the reader with full force and the impact is heart

wrenching.

Mental Health is an area which has remained

neglected for centuries together. The continuous

discontinuity and abruptness of the poem engages the

reader and makes one think whether the poem makes

any sense or is simply a foolish endeavour of a mad

man. This immediately reminds the reader of ‘the

mad woman in the attic’ (Bronte, 1847) and how

madness is perceived by the world. If it is possible to

politicize the word ‘mad’ then it may be stated that

anybody who subverts the ideology of the dominant

class is declared to be ‘mad’ because it is the easiest

way to handle any kind of revolt. It is often said that

a child, an artist and a mad person can get away with

any socially unaccepted remark. It is this mad man of

Howl and his continuous unwarranted speech that has

given voice to the marginalized. The marginalized are

the ones who are oppressed and sidelined by the

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people in the center, for being too vocal about their

rights and for being the ones who cannot tolerate

injustice. Madness is considered to be a crime in this

self-proclaimed sane world. The derangement of

mind is stigmatized and looked down upon. This

poem is a mouth piece of this social stigma. Why

nobody tries to examine the cause of this

derangement? Why are these insane minds locked

behind walls? Michel Foucault has answered these

questions in his book titled, The History of Sexuality

(Banerjee, 2021). According to Foucault, human

body becomes the site of power- he has termed it as

‘Bio-power’. He further points out how Law and

Medicine mapped and categorized the body. Certain

sections of the human population are classified as

sick, mad or criminals. This regime of surveillance of

keeping the mad in the asylum, the sick in the hospital

and the criminal in prison was questioned by

Foucault. Our identities are constructed, conditioned,

and controlled by the powerful in the society. Howl

too appears to talk about this very ideology of

Foucault. All the 112 lines in this poem emphasize the

importance of not just physical attributes of man but

psychological well-being too. The quasi mad men of

Howl who talked continuously, who suffered from

drug abuse, who got busted by the police, who

wandered hungry and lonesome, who bit detectives,

who distributed Super Communist pamphlets, who

broke down crying in the asylums naked, and

shivering, who had suicidal tendencies, who

demanded sanity trials, who dreamt of justice, who

gave out a saxophone cry were the best minds of the

lost generation. Howl can be said to be a metaphor for

mental instability and hysteria. The entire

‘yacketayakking’ a term used by the poet in the poem

for non-stop talking/ blabbering of vague words

seems to be unreasonable and unfathomable to an

average reader. But a critical and close reading of the

poem reveals the truth. Howl is a burning example of

mental agony and pain; it is a channel through which

the poet has attracted the world’s attention to the most

neglected aspect of human existence. It is a

composition full of deliberate absurdity and obscenity

to make sure everybody who reads the poem is left

speechless and when the real meaning of the poem

sinks in, the truth is revealed upon the reader. Howl

successfully brings to fore the most deserted facet of

human psychology.

Is there a moral connect between Howl and The

Wasteland? As discussed earlier in this paper, both

the poems speak about the aftermaths of war. Both the

poems have deliberately painted a dystopian picture

through an equally dystopian composition. Both the

poems have an angle of delusions and destabilized

minds. Howl connects not only to the past (The

Wasteland) but with the present as well. Howl is like

a war cry, post war of the 1900s and the ongoing war

of the 21

century. One should quickly understand

how Ginsberg had made a bold statement through this

poem. The counter culture practices of the Beat

generation- the Beatniks who witnessed the horrors of

war, who reacted against the orthodox and

conservative attitudes of the then contemporary

society, who revolted against the policing of the

hegemonic forces, are brought together by the poet to

counter question the ideologies of the prevalent

system. Beats exemplified the true nature of man. The

more the suppression, the more is the rebellion. This

oppression and alterity gave birth to this rebellious

poem. The second part of Howl disclosed how

urbanization, industrialization had corrupted

everyone’s mind. The political machinery of

capitalistic society overruled the merits of education.

The merciless ‘scholars of war’ who fed their desires

and wants sacrificed the young and gullible who were

the best of the minds, by throwing them in the

clutches of war. The poet has named the dollar

obsessed mind of these scholars of war as ‘Moloch’

and tries hard to wake the mind from its deep slumber.

Is there a hidden motive of Ginsberg behind the use

of the word ‘Moloch’? One may associate this name

with the practice of child sacrifice. In the 19

century,

‘Moloch’ came to be used allegorically for any cause

requiring excessive sacrifice. The ‘Moloch’ of Howl

surely took his share. The sacrifice had no limits.

Moloch, the mind who was without a conscience! The

mind which was full of greed. The mind who pulled

the poet out of his natural state, a state of pure bliss

and threw him into an abyss. The abyss of oil and

stone, the abyss of electricity and a cloud of

hydrogen, the abyss in which the poet sat lonely

dreaming of a utopian world but was woken up from

this dream only to find himself in the dark vacuum

where he was just a ‘consciousness without a body’!

The second part is the soul of this poem. It ends with

the poet’s portrayal of absolute dystopia. Soulless

apartments, skeleton treasuries, demonic industries,

spectral nations, invincible madhouses, monstrous

bombs embody ‘Moloch’, the mind. The disastrous

effect these materialistic ambitions had on the best

minds of the generation were impossible to fathom.

Further in the second part, the poet has used ‘Moloch’

as a metaphor for the city of New York. He has been

vocal about how the Beat generation were beaten with

the burden of lifting ‘Moloch’ (the city of New York)

to Heaven with a capital ‘H’ symbolizing the so called

industrial revolution and the American Dream. The

poet remarks that this chase left the best minds of the

Howling Cry of Dystopia

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generation broken and disillusioned. The visions, the

omens, the hallucinations, the miracles and the

ecstasies of the Beat generation all drowned in the

American river. Their aspirations literally went down

the drain. The trauma was such that these people bade

farewell to this overwhelming remorse by jumping

off the roofs onto to the street or into the river. Their

end came when they had just begun their lives, an

abrupt end, and a violent end! An end to the dreams,

to the adorations, to the illuminations, and to the

epiphanies! The best minds of the generation jumped

off the roof to solitude! ‘Mad generation down on the

rocks of Time’, says the poet.

The last part of the poem puts forth the idea of mental

asylums. The most pathetic and inhuman living

conditions where the unstable are dehumanized. The

poet mentions his mother and his dear friend Carl

Solomon. The wild screams of the innocent souls

shuttling between consciousness and hallucinations

were capable of moving the most hard-hearted. Yet,

nobody cared! The poem ends with the poet

mentioning that he too is with his friend in the same

asylum where they wake up electrified after the shock

treatments still hearing roaring airplanes above. The

poet dreaming of liberating themselves from the binds

of the society compel the reader to ask these

questions. Were they born mad? If not, then what

made them go crazy? These questions are very

disturbing. One can imagine, if merely probing these

questions have such an impact on individuals what

must have happened to the best minds experiencing

such catastrophic events. Their tender minds and

youth was robbed of its delicateness and beauty. They

were left devastated, aimless, and wandering in the

ghost cities and towns post war. One needs to

understand, these were ‘the best minds of the

generation’. If the best minds had gone bereft what

about the mediocre? War had such disastrous and

holocaustic effect on the entire generation who

witnessed the calamity closely. To add to the

grossness, nobody bothered or cared to give it a

second thought. The best minds were lost in time!

2 CONCLUSION

Time is a very strange phenomenon. The Wheel of

Time brings us back to the same setting. It is often

said, ‘History repeats itself’. Today, the world is

placed in the same setting that was true during the

1950s when Howl was penned down. Even today,

humanity is facing the same calamities- of war, of

materialistic goals, of rapid industrialization, of

dystopic pleasures. Mental Health is still a taboo.

Thus, Howl can be read in the present context too. It

is news that has stayed news. Its immortality is no

surprise. The immortality of a nation depends upon

the youth as the young are its assets. The youth are

considered to be the hope of a nation. Howl

contemplates this idea! Ironically, the youth of Howl

were sans hope, sans aspirations, and were lost in

dystopia! “Only in war does the madman become

sane” (Ryan, 2015) is a befitting reply to those who

considered the best minds of Howl to be mad, to be

insane to write against the grain. Howl, the cry of

dystopia is indeed a cry for justice!

REFERENCES

Arnold, M. (1865). Essays in Criticism: The Function Of

Criticism At The Present Time. Macmillan and Co.,

Limited

Banerjee, P. (2021). Cultural Studies: Texts and Contexts.

Dattsons.

Bronte, C. (1847). Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. Smith,

Elder & Co.

Foucault, M. (1976). The History of Sexuality. Editions

Gallimard.

Ryan, A. (2015). Queen of Fire – Raven’s Shadow # 3.

Orbit.

Sen, S. (1975). T.S Eliot: The Waste Land and Other Poems

(A Critical Evaluation). Unique Publishers.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howl_(poem)

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