The Ambiguous
Valorisation of Madness in Beat Literature
Bent Sørensen
Well-known
works such as
Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl and Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road contain a substantial
discourse about the positive valorisation of madness as a
countercultural
identity strategy. Other works by the same authors in fact examine
madness on a
far deeper level. I am thinking here of Ginsberg’s elegy (Kaddish) for his mother who died in an
insane asylum, and Kerouac’s
Buddhist novel, The
Dharma
Bums and its
praise of “Zen Lunatics”. My paper will examine all these four works,
charting
the ambivalent constructions of madness in these seminal Beat
Generation texts,
ultimately seeking to work out the economy of affect invested by the
two
writers in re-valorising madness.
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