Oliver Harris

Minute Particulars of the Counter- Culture: Time, Life, and the Photo-poetics of Allen Ginsberg

Abstract Recent exhibitions of Allen Ginsberg’s photographs, which feature 1950s snapshots of his fellow-Beats Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, have been dismissed by some as marketing exercises for the Beat myth that promote their biocentric image. Ginsberg himself invited comparisons between his work and Robert Frank’s The Americans. However, a detailed material analysis of his work as a poet-photographer, paying close attention to his handwritten captions, recognises it as a complex hybrid that extends his prophetic poetics. In particular, contextualising his work in relation to the 1950s photojournalism of Life and Time establishes the ways in which Ginsberg, and Burroughs, responded to the attacks made on the Beats in those magazines on behalf of Henry Luce’s ‘American Century’.

“Virus-X”: Kerouac’s Visions of Burroughs

The mythic narrative of Beat legends has either been told and retold, taken up by generation after generation of fascinated and uncritical listeners, or it has been critically ignored, dismissed as an essentially false and empty story. Rarely has this narrative been subjected to close textual or historical analysis. But the very durability of Beat myths suggests their cultural power, and that we need to ask questions about their material origins, their precise forms, and their often complex functions and effects. My specific purpose here is to bring together Jack Kerouac, as the greatest Beat mythmaker, the one who joked that he had “worked harder at this legend business” than the rest (Vanity of Duluoz 157), and William S. Burroughs, as the greatest object of Beat mythmaking. I am interested particularly in how representations of Burroughs’s image in Kerouac’s fiction define the role that Burroughs played for the Beats, and the degree to which the legendizing of the Beats shaped not only the reception of Burroughs’s early work but also its production. Going beyond issues of biographical infidelity, my point is that Kerouac’s representations served particular needs for his own work and the work of the Beats at large, and that his image-making had a material impact on Burroughs’s identity and practice as a writer at least as significant as any other influence Kerouac may have had.