Moloch and the Lamb: The Holy War of Conformism and Proto-Counter Culture in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl

During the 1950’s a large movement of American writers, artists, and musicians achieved considerable notoriety for creating literature, works of art and music that dissented from what they deemed the prejudiced and oppressive mainstream American ideals of conformism and materialism. Out of this movement, which soon became known as the “Beat Generation,” a counterculture manifesto entitled Howl by Allen Ginsberg was spawned. Since Ginsberg brought his groundbreaking work to the forefront of the American consciousness, it has become a defining work of beat literature.

Howl is written in free verse, a form of poetry that does not adhere to a uniform rhyme or meter. According to Robert Henson in his article entitled “Howl in the Classroom”, the authorial decision to write in this fashion demonstrates Ginsberg’s personal belief that the “mind is shapely” and when “practiced in spontaneity” it “invents form in its own image” (Henson 8). Howl in and of itself is a repudiation of adherence to uniform rhyme and meter as the sole path to creating poetry that can be considered art. Literary criticism has also defined works such as Howl as stream of consciousness narrative, a term adopted from psychological discourse. Stream-of-consciousness narrative is a mode of narration meant to represent the thought process of the narrator. Therefore not only is Howl a protest against conformity but an authorial confession in which Ginsberg bears his heart and soul for all the world to see.

The poem was originally written in three sections with a fourth section written some time later. Much more than a mere protest, Howl can easily be defined as the chronicle of a holy war that was waged between conformist, materialist, mainstream American culture and the burgeoning proto-counter culture movement of the 1940’s and 1950’s. The first three sections can be read as three waves of attack. Drawing from Ginsberg’s personal experience and that of other poets, artists, dissidents, musicians, junkies, and psychiatric patients, the first section offers a deeply troubling portrayal of the marginalized, pathologized and essentially beaten down members of society whom Ginsberg would refer to as the “lamb” in later reflections upon the poem. In the poem’s opening line Ginsberg tells us “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” (Norton Anthology 2576). Those who Ginsberg defines as the “best minds” would have been perceived by the mainstream culture as societal rejects. As Mark Doty points out in his article entitled “Human Seraphim: Howl, Sex, and Holiness”, these marginalized members of American society were under the constant threat of being jailed, medicated, or hospitalized because those who refused to adhere to a binary system of heteronormativity, those who exercised their right to political dissent, those who sought enlightenment through experimentation with illicit drugs were deemed deviant and deranged (Doty 7). For Ginsberg to define people who have been driven to insanity as “the best minds” is an audacious and deliberate subversion of conventionality and an attack against what the “Beat Generation” deemed a conformist and materialistic society.

Of the people whom mainstream American culture perceived to be a generation of degenerates, homosexuals and drugs addicts were considered most perverse. Homosexual imagery and experimentation with illicit drugs abound in this first attack. Not only does Ginsberg portray homosexual acts and drug use with shameless candor, he employs religious terminology and mythological allusions in an effort to make these aspects of the human condition holy. Mark Doty echoes this sentiment when he defines Howl as “a chronicle of friends seeking…transcendence…through whatever means they find at hand” (Doty 7). Drug addicts experiencing withdrawals are suddenly transformed into “angelheaded” figures yearning for an “ancient heavenly connection”, homosexual men performing filatio become “human seraphim” and anal sex is “saintly”. In terms of war, homosexuality and drugs become Ginsberg’s artillery as they obliterate preconceived notions of heteronormativity and what it means to be a respectable human being.

The second section of Howl, which was inspired during a drug-fueled hallucinatory experience, attacks the destructive forces of materialism and conformism. Ginsberg opens with the following rhetorical question: “What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?” (Norton 2581). Ginsberg immediately answers with “Moloch…unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!” (Norton 2581). The true state of America, Ginsberg claims, is one of perverted faith, oppression and neglect. It is the capitalistic idolatry of materialism and conformism, which Ginsberg characterizes as “Moloch”, that has transformed the American psyche into an inhuman mechanism perpetually and fruitlessly pining after the almighty buck, that abandons starving children in the streets, that requires young men to perish on the battlefield in service of “democracy”, and that proclaims members of elder generations dead before their time.

This culture, in which skyscrapers, factories, laboratories, and asylums mark the otherwise barren landscape like altars to technological and scientific advancement, subdues the masses into blind acceptance of a hollow existence or drives them to insanity and rebellion. “Moloch” frightens us out of our “natural ecstasy”, transmogrifying the sexual passion of men into “granite cocks”. We “Wake up in Moloch” for it has stolen our dreams and replaced them with its nightmarish visions of death and insanity. In the Old Testament of the Bible, it is written that Moloch was a Hebrew idol that required the sacrifice of children as burnt offerings. “And you shall let any of your seed pass through the fire to Moloch, and so profane the name of your God; I am the Lord” (Leviticus 18:21). By likening the mechanized state of industrialized civilization to “Moloch”, Ginsberg condemns the false idols of materialism and conformism to which he perceives “the lambs” of society are being sacrificed. His condemnation of these false idols is a clarion call for all those under the oppression of materialism and conformism to take up arms.

The third section of Howl is addressed to Carl Solomon, a man Ginsberg befriended while both were patients at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute in Rockland, New York. This is perhaps the most powerful section of Howl. Like those “who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons” (Norton Anthology 2578), Solomon embodies “the lamb” brought to complete mental ruin by the oppressive force of the psychiatric hospital that seeks to “cure” homosexuals and drug users of their perversity. Ginsberg writes, “I’m with you in Rockland where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void” (Norton Anthology 2583). In this disturbing image of electroshock therapy, Solomon becomes a casualty of war. He has paid the ultimate price for insurrection against conformist society – his freedom and sanity. Comparable to his efforts in the first section to sanctify homosexual acts and experimentation with drugs, Ginsberg employs religious imagery in his depiction of Solomon’s descent into spiritual death. Solomon makes a “pilgrimage” to a “cross” shaped table upon which he will receive “treatment”. This image is reminiscent of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. Ginsberg is likening Solomon’s demise to a messianic sacrifice, one that will result in the redemption of humankind. However, Ginsberg does draw a difference between Solomon and Christ. Whereas Christ rose from the dead, Solomon’s body will never regain his soul. He is trapped within a “concrete void of insulin metrasol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy”, spiritually dead (Norton Anthology 2580). The sole redemption that can be derived from Solomon’s suffering is that the world will be awakened to the barbaric practices of mental institutions and the prejudiced, intolerant nature of the society which allows for such crimes against humanity to occur.

In the fourth and final section of the poem, entitled “Footnote to Howl”, Ginsberg claims “Everything is holy ! everybody’s holy ! everywhere is holy !” (Norton Anthology 2583). This can be read as Ginsberg extending an olive branch to “Moloch” or industrialized civilization. It is essentially an armistice drafted by Ginsberg on behalf of the Beat Generation, inspired by the transcendentalist notion that transcendence or holiness can be discovered in every aspect of the human condition.

Works Cited

Doty, Mark. "Human Seraphim: Howl, Sex, and Holiness." American Poetry Review 35 (2006): 6-8.

Ginsberg, Allen. "Howl." The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Seventh Edition: Volume E 1945 to the Present. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. 2576-584.

Henson, Robert. "Howl in the Classroom." CEA Critic 23 (1961): 8-9.

The New English Bible. NY: Oxford University Press, 1972.


Moloch and the Lamb: The Holy War of Conformism and Proto-Counter Culture in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl by Joshua Alan Blodgett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at verboseprose86.blogspot.com.

Emancipation of the Soul

For nearly 150 years, the institution of slavery was a legal practice in the United States. Beginning with anti-slavery sentiments during the War of American Independence, a large movement to abolish slavery grew throughout the greater part of the 19th century eventually leading to the American Civil War and the emancipation of all African American slaves. Perhaps America’s most powerful speaker of the abolitionist movement was Frederick Douglass, a former slave and author of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Douglass’s text, in which he relates his journey from a life of servitude in the south to his eventual freedom in the north, is an example of what is now known as the slave narrative, a literary form that documented the life experience of African slaves. Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, authors of Walden and I Sing the Body Electric, Song of Myself respectively, were contemporaries of Frederick Douglass and also fellow advocates of the abolitionist cause. The following aims to compare Walden and Song of Myself with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and examine them as slave narratives in service of the transcendent, pleas for liberation of the human soul.

In Narrative, Douglass demonstrates that the institution of slavery not only dehumanizes slaves but their masters as well. The spiritual health of slave owners is jeopardized by the horrors they inflict upon their slaves. He claims that slaveholding patriarchs have not only subjected their female slaves to brutal beatings but have raped them and fathered children with them as well. Such acts of barbarism, Douglass states, lead to a disintegration of family values as slave owners eventually sell their own children into servitude or subject them to severe punishments over the course of their lives. “The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of his slaves…for, unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother…and ply the gory lash to his naked back” (Narrative 2073) In an effort to deny the atrociousness of their transgressions, slaveholders such as Thomas and Sophia Auld adopt a transmogrified religiosity. Douglass makes a point to differentiate between genuine Christianity which teaches love for all of humankind and the perverted form of Christianity which proponents of slavery utilize to justify their subjugation and brutalization of fellow human beings. “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land” (Narrative 2125). He states that when slave holders claim to be Christian it is by no means an indication of their good nature, but rather a duplicitous act serving as a hollow justification of the horrors they enact upon their slaves.

Sophia Auld, who serves as Douglass's primary representation of the devastating consequences slaveholding has on the spiritual health of slave holders, is described as being transformed from an individual of lofty ideals into a callous fiend. “That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon” (Narrative 2086). By illustrating the devastating consequences slaveholding has had on the morality of Thomas and Sophia Auld, Douglass is essentially making the claim that the abolition of slavery is necessary in order to revitalize the spiritual health of all humankind.

In Walden, Thoreau reasons that true freedom can only be attained by becoming both economically and socially self-reliant. One could even say that Thoreau takes an approach to matters of economics that mirrors the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin who said that the greatest sin was debt. When one is in debt they are beholden to another person or an institution and therefore very much a slave. In other words, autonomy possesses the greatest weight in economics and human social interaction. To be in need is essentially to be in chains. However, Thoreau’s vision of self-reliance is the transcendent gratification of one’s ability to construct the reality in which they exist rather than merely living debt free.

To express the ability of the individual to construct their own reality, Thoreau speaks of life as a river and tells us to use a metaphorical tool he calls the “Realometer”. Like with the Nilometer, a measurement tool allegedly used in determining the depth of the Nile, we are encouraged by Thoreau to use the “Realometer” (our divine intellect) in order to sift through the sediment (trivial matters of the life) until we reach the bottom (reality). According to Thoreau, only when we reach the bottom can we can say “This is” reality. What is very interesting and important to discuss is this saying is reminiscent of God’s repeated command in the Book of Genesis “Let there be”. When Thoreau constructs his home on the shore of Walden Pond he likens this endeavor to God’s creation of the world. His intent in likening himself to God is not in any way an attempt to place himself above the rest of humanity, but rather to show all of humanity that they too possess the divine within themselves and can create little worlds of their own.

It is also important to note that Thoreau’s vision of self-reliance did not repudiate the value of friendship but rather welcomed it with open arms. “I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings…from…a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much…” (Walden 1944). It was the refusal of need that Thoreau tried to convey. One must remember that an important belief of the transcendentalist movement, influenced greatly by eastern philosophical traditions, was that the body and soul have always been entitled to ultimate provision. The natural world possesses everything required of the body for nourishment and the soul has always been in possession of everything there is to know. It is simply up to the individual to utilize nature’s bounty and to seek the knowledge that is inherent within their soul through various forms of meditation. True enlightenment or freedom comes with the ability to meditate and find peace in every act of life. Therefore, when Thoreau aggrandizes solitude he is not speaking of loneliness or seclusion but rather the act of looking deep within oneself. Thoreau states that one can experience lonesomeness amidst a vast crowd if they share no connection with those people. “We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers…Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows” (Walden 1943). Thoreau sees solitude not in terms of physical proximity to others but rather as a state of consciousness which for him nears nirvana.

For Whitman, human bodies can unite with others sexually and spiritually, and are essentially one in the same. The body is the intermediary between one’s soul and the physical world. In the sections seven and eight of I Sing the Body Electric, the reader is presented with an image of a male and female slave at an auction. The poet tells us that he has aided in the auctioning of these slaves by offering a morbid taxonomy of their physical and reproductive the prowess. Both slaves are advertized as the progenitors of generations:

This is not only one man, this is the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns, In him the start of populous states and rich republics,
Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments

She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers, She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.

Ultimately these slaves become merely potential subjects of animal husbandry for would be buyers. This image of the slaves being treated like cattle ultimately employs Whitman’s own body-centric belief as a satirical device and reveals slave auctions as a transmogrified version of worshipping the human body that slavery has lead humanity to. In fifth section of Song of Myself, Whitman focuses less upon the body and speaks of wisdom that transcends the physical:

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass
all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my
sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love (Whitman 2213)

In this stanza, Whitman is claiming unity with the God and unity with every man and woman that has ever been born. Because he is one with God and one with all of humankind, humankind is unified with God as well. Like Thoreau, Whitman is informing every human being of the divinity they possess within themselves. The peace and knowledge Whitman claims surpasses every human struggle is that because we are all one with God there can be no distinction made between us that condemns one and elevates the other. Though it is not said outright, Whitman vision of unity encompasses African American slaves and thus refutes the legitimacy of an institution that would seek to justify the subjugation of spiritual equals.

For slaves, the road to liberation was not simply comprised of the tales they would later relate but was ultimately defined by the telling of those stories. This was certainly true for Thoreau and Whitman as well. Narrative in the Life of Frederick Douglass, Walden, I Sing the Body Electric and Song of Myself were not merely documentations of a journey from servitude to liberation, but were distinctive decrees of physically and spiritually freed men, the final chapter, so to speak, in the authors’ quests for spiritual freedom. These slave narratives were not merely stories but acts of liberation in and of themselves from the spiritual oppression of nineteenth century conventions. Though completely escaping racism was impossible for Douglass, Thoreau, and Whitman, despite the all encompassing nature of their progressive thought, they each created and taught to others a vision of self not bound by ignorance and fear. Whitman, Thoreau and Douglass all insisted on not merely liberation of the body but rather liberation of the soul. They sought liberation in service of the transcendent.

Emancipation of the Soul by Joshua Alan Blodgett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at verboseprose86.blogspot.com.