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Definitions of Beat, Beat Generation and Beatniks
definitions of beat
As
Fernanda
Pivano said in her introductory essay to “On the Road”(Mondadori,
1974), the
word beat was used for the first time in Chicago by Herbert
Huncke (a
thief and drug-addict friend of William
Burrough’s), and then it was taken up
by Ginsberg and Kerouac, who later claimed the primacy of having used
the
expression “ Beat Generation [I1] [F1]
[ES1][E2] ”. The first historian of “the Beat
style of life”, though, was John Clellon Holmes, who wrote an article
by the
title “This is the Beat Generation” (published on The New
York Times
of Nov. 16, 1952). In this article he wrote:
“[..] Everyone who has lived through war,
any
sort of war, knows that beat means, not so much weariness, as
rawness of
the nerves; not so much being ‘filled up to here’ as being emptied
out.It
describes a state of mind from which all unessentials have been
stripped,
leaving it receptive to everything around it, but impatient with
trivial
obstructions. To be beat is to be at the bottom of your personality,
looking
up; to be existential in the Kierkegaard [F1] rather than the Jean Paul
Sartre sense
[…]”.
As
Kerouac
himself is reported to have said (in the Introduction to“On the Road”,
Mondadori, 1974): “[In the jargon of Afro-Americans,] the word beat
originally
meant poor, down and out, dead-beat, on the bum, sad, sleeping in
subways.[…]
now Beat Generation has simply become the slogan for a
revolution in
manners in America[…]. But yet, but yet, woe to those who think that
the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality...
woe unto those who don't realize that America must, will, is, changing
now, for the better I say[...]".
Kerouac described his own and his friends' attitude to Post-World War
II American society as "a sort of furtiveness...a weariness with all
forms, all the conventions of the world [...]."
So,
the word beat had
different connotations: it meant "tired", "dissatisfied", "defeated",
and it also suggested the idea of living to the quick rhythm of jazz
music.
The "Beatniks" were a group
of young people who reacted against the way they saw society :
they felt controlled, dissatisfied with the passive acceptance of
heartless competitivity in all kinds of activities
and with the spread of capitalism and puritanical standard
middle-class values, which they described as "square". They acted
on first impulse, did whatever they felt like doing, explored
sexuality, pushed their senses to the limits; they used to take
hallucinogenic drugs (LSD, for example) and alcohol to expand their
world and sensations. They attracted attention because they were
different, disregarding the conventions of dress and personal
cleanliness: they used to wear their hair long, they grew beards; old
T-shirts and sandals were their uniform. They contributed to the
creation of a so-called "underground culture", which included jazz
music (appreciated because of its spontaneous flow and freedom of
expression), poetry and the oriental philosophy of Zen Buddhism .
The
first to use the term "beatnik"
(a nickname that wasn't appreciated at all by the people it portrayed),
seems to be a San Franciscan journalist, Herb Caen: in the autumn
of '57, On the Road was
published and in that same period the Soviet Union launched the
artificial satellite "Sputnik I" : from Caen's association of ideas came
"beatnik", a word made up of beat- plus the Yiddish [I1] diminutive
suffix -ik.
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