Alan Ginsberg's "Howl" - Understanding the necessary and complex relationships between power and language

Authors Avatar

As I struggled to understand the message and imagery of Alan Ginsberg’s "Howl", I could not help but be reminded of my own work on the relations between power, gender and language.  This poem dwells on issues of suppression, on the suicidal results of resistance, and the cold, mechanical brutality with which the institutions of the powerful operate.  These themes, however seemingly enormous and political, are subject to similar digestion through the analysis of language as those of gender, and result from comparable interactional contexts between differently influential, yet less fundamentally divided groups.  Ginsberg’s monumental work explores numerous voices, each with their own particular genre, from the mute, calculating cruelty of society’s Moloch, to the range of insanity that made up his fellow Beat writers, to the oppressed wisdom of Carl Solomon.  Even the poem itself constitutes a bold and extraordinary proclamation of resistance against the institutions that he deems criminal.

Thus, even as “the authority of some male linguistic forms and their dominance of social institutions' remain mysterious without a theory of gender,” so must we examine popular conceptions of sanity and normality in order to understand the linguistic forms and dominance of the military-industrial-academic complex that viciously maintained control of American cold-war culture. Therefore, in this paper my aim is to demonstrate that not only amongst the genders does cultural hegemony arise; but also that among white American males in the 1950’s, certain authoritative forms used their linguistic force to “impose on others their group's definition of events, people, and actions.

Toward this end I will first seek to identify the numerous power groups explored by Ginsberg and discuss and exemplify the ways in which the various groups interacted.  I will then elaborate on their individual verbal strategies and how these contributed to the inter-group dynamic.

Join now!

POWER GROUPS OF HOWL

"Howl" begins with the phrase “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” and proceeds to describe their individual downfalls. Descriptions of this group of fallen intellectuals certainly draws the majority of the poems attention, yet their significance as a linguistic group in the power strata of "Howl’s" reality cannot be fully understood without a careful reading of the poem's second part, in which the author explains the source of their minds’ destruction.  “What sphinx... bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? / Moloch!”

In “Moloch,” Ginsberg is ...

This is a preview of the whole essay