Análisis de Ginsberg, Allen Aullido.

Condiciones de la producción del texto“La hegemonía constituye todo un cuerpo de prácticas y expectativas en relación con la totalidad de la vida: nuestros sentidos y dosis de energía, las percepciones definidas que tenemos de nosotros mismos y de nuestro mundo. Es un vívido sistema de significados y valores –fundamentales y constitutivos- que en la medida en que son experimentados como prácticas parecen confirmarse recíprocamente. Por lo tanto es un sentido de la realidad para la mayoría de las gentes de la sociedad, un sentido de lo absoluto debido a la realidad experimentada más allá de la cual la movilización de la mayoría de los miembros de la sociedad –en la mayor parte de las áreas de sus vidas- se torna sumamente difícil. Es decir que, en el sentido más firme, es una ‘cultura’, pero una cultura que debe ser considerada asimismo como la vívida dominación y subordinación de clases particulares” (Williams, 1988: 132).

“Una hegemonía dada es siempre un proceso” (Williams, 1988: 134).

“La parte más difícil e interesante de todo análisis cultural, en las sociedades complejas, es la que procura comprender lo hegemónico en sus procesos activos y formativos, pero también en sus procesos de transformación. Las obras de arte, debido a su carácter fundamental y general, son con frecuencia especialmente importantes como fuentes de esta compleja evidencia” (Williams, 1988: 135).

“Formaciones: los movimientos y tendencias efectivos, en la vida intelectual y artística, que tienen una influencia significativa y a veces decisiva sobre el desarrollo activo de una cultura y que presentan una relación variable y a veces solapada con las instituciones formales” (Williams, 1988: 140).

“Las formaciones son más reconocibles como tendencias y movimientos conscientes (literarios, artísticos, filosóficos o científicos) que normalmente pueden ser distinguidos de sus producciones formativas.(...) dentro de una aparente hegemonía, que puede ser fácilmente descrita de un modo general, no sólo existen formaciones alternativas y en oposición (...) sino también dentro de las que pueden reconocerse como formaciones dominantes, variantes que resisten toda reducción simple a alguna función hegemónica generalizada” (Williams, 1988: 141-142).

“...las complejas interrelaciones que existen entre los movimientos y tendencias, tanto dentro como más allá de una dominación efectiva y específica. (...) cómo se relacionan en el proceso cultural total” (Williams, 1988: 143).

“Lo residual, por definición, ha sido formado efectivamente en el pasado, pero todavía se halla en actividad dentro del proceso cultural” (Williams, 1988: 144).

“Por ‘emergente’ quiero significar, en primer término, los nuevos significados y valores, nuevas prácticas, nuevas relaciones y tipos de relaciones que se crean continuamente. Sin embargo, resulta excepcionalmente difícil distinguir entre los elementos que constituyen efectivamente una nueva fase de cultura dominante (...) y los elementos que son esencialmente alternativos o de oposición a ella: en este sentido emergente antes que simplemente nuevo” (Williams, 1988: 149).

“Tales cambios pueden ser definidos como cambios en las estructuras del sentir” (Williams, 1988: 154).

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“Estamos hablando de los elementos característicos de impulso, restricción y tono; elementos especialmente afectivos de la conciencia y las relaciones, y no sentimiento contra pensamiento, sino pensamiento tal como es sentido y sentimiento tal como es pensado; una conciencia práctica de tipo presente, dentro de una continuidad viviente e interrelacionada. En consecuencia estamos definiendo estos elementos como una ‘estructura’: como un grupo con redaciones internas específicas, entrelazadas y a la vez en tensión. Sin embargo, también estamos definiendo una experiencia social que todavía se halla en proceso. (...) ... una estructura del sentir es una hipótesis cultural derivada de los intentos por comprender tales elementos y sus conexiones con una generación o un período, con permanente necesidad de retornar interactivamente a tal evidencia.” (Williams, 1988: 155).

“Las estructuras del sentir pueden ser definidas como experiencias sociales en solución, a diferencia de otras formaciones semánticas sociales que han sido precipitadas y resultan más evidente y más inmediatamente aprovechables. No todo el arte, en modo alguno, se relaciona con una estructura del sentimiento contemporánea. Las formaciones efectivas de la mayor parte del verdadero arte se relacionan con formaciones sociales que ya son manifiestas, dominantes o residuales, y es originariamente con las formaciones emergentes (aunque a menudo en forma de una perturbación o una modificación dentro de las antiguas formas) con las que la estructura del sentimiento se relaciona como solución” (Williams, 1988: 157).

“Estados Unidos respondió con la Doctrina Truman, como se llamó a un discurso que dio Truman al Congreso en la primavera de 1947, en el que pidió 400 millones de dólares para ayudar militar y económicamente a Grecia y Turquía. Truman dijo que los Estados Unidos debían ayudar a ‘los pueblos libres que están resistiendo intentos de subyugación por parte de minorías armadas o por presiones del exterior’.” (Zinn, 1999: 379).

“El 22 de marzo de 1947, dos semanas después de presentar al país la Doctrina Truman para Grecia y Turquía, Truman promulgó la Orden Ejecutiva 9835, iniciando un programa para localizar ‘cualquier infiltración de personas desleales’ en el gobierno norteamericano. Durante los cinco años siguientes, investigaron a unos seis millones de funcionarios del gobiernos. Despidieron a unos 500 por ‘lealtad cuestionable’.” (Zinn, 1999: 382).

“La orden ejecutiva de Truman sobre la lealtad de 1947 exigió que el ministerio de Justicia redactara una lista de organizaciones que le parecieran al dicho ministerio ‘totalitarias, fascistas, comunistas o subversivas, o que pretendieran alterar la forma de gobierno de Estados Unidos con medios inconstitucionales’. Al determinar deslealtad, se consideraría no sólo el ser miembro de cualquier organización de la lista del ministro de Justicia, sino también ‘asociación solidaria’ con dichas organizaciones. En 1954 ya había cientos de agrupaciones en la lista” (Zinn, 1999: 385).

“Toda la cultura estaba impregnada de anticomunismo” (Zinn, 1999: 388).

“La revolución de los negros, tanto del norte como del sur, llegó –como por sorpresa- en las décadas de 1950 y 1960” (Zinn, 1999: 396).

“En los años sesenta y setenta, no sólo hubo un movimiento de mujeres, un movimiento de presos y un movimiento indio. Hubo una revuelta general contra los entonces opresivos, artificiales e incuestionables modos de vida. Esta revuelta afectaba a cada aspecto de la vida personal: el parto, la niñez, el amor, el sexo, el matrimonio, la ropa, la

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música, el arte, los deportes, el lenguaje, la comida, la vivienda, la religión, la literatura, la muerte, las escuelas, etc.” (Zinn, 1999: 479).

El texto

Su primera lectura

“After readings by Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Phillip Whalen and a brief intermission, Allen Ginsberg moved to the podium for his first public reading of "Howl". A number of persons in attendance--including Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Snyder and Whalen--had read “Howl” in Manuscript, but no one was prepared for the impact of Allen’s dramatic reading of the poem. Allen had been drinking wine throughout the evening and, by his own later admission, he was intoxicated by the time the lights dimmed and he began his reading. Somewhat nervous, he started in a calm, quiet tone, letting the poem’s words achieve their own impact, but before long he gained confidence and began to sway rhythmically with the music of his poetry, responding to the enthusiasm of the audience, which was transfixed by "Howl’s" powerful imagery. Jack Kerouac, sitting at the edge of the platform, pounded in accompaniment on a wine jug, shouting “GO!” at the end of each long line. The crowd quickly joined him in punctuating Allen’s lines with shouts of encouragement, and Allen, inspired by the intensity of the room, responded with an even greater flourish to his reading. By the time he had concluded, he was in tears, as was Kenneth Rexroth. The audience erupted in appreciation of the work, as if each person in attendance recognized that literary history had been made.” Six Gallery Reading, San Francisco--October 13, 1955. Text culled from Michael Schumcher’s excellent Dharma Lion -- A Biography of Allen Ginsberg (St. Martin’s Press)

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La censura ante su publicación

In the case of 'Howl,' a line about saintly motorcyclists fucking somebody up the ass did the trick. Moloch played his role to perfection, confiscating 520 copies of the City Lights Pocket Poets edition of 'Howl and Other Poems' in March 1956. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the publisher of City Lights

Books, was arrested and bailed out by the ACLU, who led the legal defense. Nine literary experts testified on the poem's behalf. Ferlinghetti later described the prosecution's attempt at building a case:

The prosecution put only two 'expert witnesses' on the stand -- both very lame samples of academia -- one from the Catholic University of San Francisco and one a private elocution teacher, a beautiful woman, who said, 'You feel like you are going through the gutter when you have to read that stuff. I didn't linger on it too long, I assure you.' The University of San Francisco instructor said: 'The literary value of the poem is negligible ... This poem is apparently dedicated to a long-dead movement, Dadaism, and some late followers of Dadaism. And, therefore, the opportunity is long past for any significant literary contribution of this poem.'

Ferlinghetti was found innocent of publishing obscene books and was quickly set free.

El texto“Aullido ante la infinita soledad en que vive cada ser humano en un mundo masificado. En defnitiva, la contracara del despliegue optimista que había escrito en el siglo anterior uno de los poetas más admirados por Ginsberg, Walt Whitman. En la entonación del poema, Ginsberg buscaba remarcar, con los golpes rítmicos, una voz disfónica, salvaje, la voz necesaria para rebelarse” (Cella, 1996: 256-257).

“Part I of "Howl" really began as an accident. Allen just sat down and began typing not with the purpose of composing any serious masterpiece, but simply "stating [his] imaginative sympathies, whatever they were worth" (Miles xii). He wrote for his own enjoyment, playing around with his form and experimenting with the long line, always thinking that it couldn't be published because of his word choices and because of the "queer content [his] parents shouldn't see anyway" (Simpson 72). Ginsberg had mostly used shorter lines in his previous poems but he was influenced by Jack Kerouac (with his spontaneous prose) and the long saxophone choruses of jazz music. He had also been reading Cezanne and Whitman about the time he composed "Howl".

The same day Ginsberg composed Part I, he also wrote what would become Part III. As Part I was mainly devoted to the actions of many of his friends and his mother, not to mention himself, who had been "destroyed by madness" (Kerouac and Burroughs not included), Part III was dedicated specifically to Solomon. By stating "I'm with you in Rockland", Ginsberg showed "active acceptance of the suffering soul of C. Solomon, saying in effect I am still your amigo tho you are in trouble and think yourself in a

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void..." (Eberhart and Ginsberg 20). Perhaps as he accepted Solomon, he also accepted his mother.” Ami Kaeuffer

Estructura del poema: partes y tensiones

Parte 1

The poem is part Walt Whitman, part Old Testament hellfire ranting, and one-hundred-percent performance art. The lines in the famous first part of the poem tumble over each other in long unbroken breaths, all adding to a single endless sentence:

Ginsberg is describing his fellow travellers, the crazy, lonely members of his community of misunderstood poet artists, unpublished novelists, psychotics, radicals, pranksters, sexual deviants and junkies. At the time that he wrote this he'd seen several of his promising young friends broken or killed:

Se pueden diferenciar algunas “zonas de sentido” que organizan el conjunto:

Los intelectuales marginales

Las experiencias con drogas y alcohol

Distintos tipos de búsquedas y viajes

Sexualidades

Comidas

Distintos tipos de salidas espaciales y temporales

Carl Solomon1 y la locura

Y por último la escritura misma del poema. Hay una cierta identificación con la crucifixión “eli, eli...”

El último verso conecta con la segunda parte

1 Dedicado a Carl Solomon, born on March 30, 1928 in the Bronx, is mainly famous for having inspired the poem "Howl", rather than for any achievements of his own. He and Ginsberg met in a waiting room at a psychiatric hospital where Ginsberg was visiting his mother. Solomon was a regular there. Despite his mental problems he had a hyperactive intelligence, and was able to instruct Ginsberg (not exactly a dummy himself) on many literary points, despite the fact that Ginsberg was two years older.

Carl Solomon's uncle was A. A. Wyn, publisher of Ace paperback books. Carl worked intermittently for his uncle, and Ginsberg pleaded with Carl and his uncle to help publish his then-unpublishable friends William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Ace Books finally used Burroughs' first novel, 'Junky,' as half of a pulp thriller "Two Books In One." But they were among the many publishers who turned down Kerouac's 'On The Road.'

Solomon was never a writer himself, although readers of "Howl" often assumed he was. Later in life he gave in and fulfilled the expectation by writing two book of elliptical, erudite and quaintly psychotic short essays, "Mishap, Perhaps" in 1966 and "More Mishaps" in 1968. His "Emergency Messages," more in the same vein, was published in 1989.

It's interesting that Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg each travelled with a "doppelganger" -- a mirror image sidekick with less literary training but more "authenticity". Kerouac had the free-spirited charismatic Neal Cassady and Burrroughs had the street smart true junkie Herbert Huncke. Ginsberg, who seemed to always inspire to the state of insanity, had Carl Solomon.

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El uso de la anáfora. Posibles agrupaciones. La estructura de algunos versos. Parataxis.

Each of these describe real-life events by people Ginsberg knew, but the poem is especially dedicated to Carl Solomon, Ginsberg's crazy-insane hyper-intellectual friend who he'd met in a mental hospital years before:

It is Carl Solomon's insanity that drove Ginsberg to write this poem, especially because it reminded him of his mother's own unspeakable insanity (which he finally wrote about in 'Kaddish,' but here he can only say 'with mother finally ******'). Carl's insanity also reminds him of himself:

Parte 2

One night he and Peter took peyote and walked around the streets of San Francisco where they walked to the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. Allen could see the Hotel from his window at home and thought it looked like a robot. But when he saw the hotel with peyote-enhanced vision, he saw it as a monster. This monster he dubbed Moloch, "the Canaanite fire god who was worshipped in a rite in which parents burned their children in sacrifice" (Schumacher 206). He wandered around the streets and then went into a cafeteria where he composed much of Part II of "Howl".

Ginsberg had recently been contemplating the fate of America, with its nuclear weapons, the Korean War, and the coming of the Cold War. He wrote to Kerouac, "...are we losing? Is the Fall of America upon us? The Great Fall we once prophesied?" (Schumacher 209). The realistic possibility of parents sacrificing their children to the American version of Moloch seemed terrifying to Ginsberg. This section provided the link he needed between Parts I and III of "Howl".

The first part of the poem, the single long sentence, gives way to the second part, a long curse spit at Moloch, 'sphinx of cement and aluminum':

According to biblical tradition, Moloch was a Canaanite idol to whom children had been sacrificed as burnt offerings. In Leviticus 18:21: 'You shall not give any of your children to devote them by fire to Molech, and so profane the name of your God; I am the Lord.' Moloch appears in the poetry of Milton and Coleridge. Ginsberg is cursing the false idols to which human beings are still sacrificed today.

Moloc es al mismo tiempo la esfinge igualmente carnicera que ha devorado a los hipsters.

Hay una descripción del cuerpo de Moloc y de su alma. Su nombre es “Mente”, está introyectado en el individuo: “penetró temprano en mi alma”. El poeta lo abandona. Termina con una enumeración de cualidades. Visión babélica de Moloc.

Parte 3

and imagines Solomon behind the walls of the upstate New York psychiatric hospital.

Vuelve el tema de la mitología cristiana bajo la forma de revolución/resurrección

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Locura, comunismo, homosexualidad, enfermedad, Oeste y revolución son puestas en un mismo campo semántico. Por el otro están la prisión, terapias, riqueza, ciudad, crucifixión.

Parte 4

And finally, the last part of "Howl", the Footnote, was written on a bus Francisco. It is for his mother who died in the mental hospital. Ginsberg said, "it says I loved her anyway & that even in worst conditions life is holy" (Simpson 73).

This section is followed by a 'Footnote to Howl,' in which the name of Moloch is replaced by the word 'Holy':

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is eternity! Everyman's an angel!

La escritura de Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg's Mind Writing Slogans

"First thought is best in art, second in other matters."--William Blake

I Ground (situation, or primary perception)

1 "First Thought, Best Thought" -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

2 "Take a friendly attitude toward your thoughts.' -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

3 "The Mind must be loose." -John Adams

4 "One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception." -Charles Olsen,   "Projective Verse"

5 "My writing is a picture of the mind moving." -Phillip Whalen

6 Surprise Mind -Allen Ginsberg

7 "The Old pond, the frog jumps in, Kerplunk!" -Basho

8 "Magic is the total delight (appreciation) of chance." -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

9 "Do I contradict myself?  very well, I contradict myself.  I am large. I contain multitudes." -Walt Whitman

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10 "...What quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature?...Negative   capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without   any irritable reaching after fact & reason" -John Keats

11 "Form is never more than an extension of content." -Robert Creely to Charles Olsen

12 "Form follows function." -Frank Loyd Wright

13 Ordinary Mind includes eternal perceptions -A.G.

14 "Nothing is better for being eternal  Nor so white as the white that dies of a day." -Louis Zukofsky

15 Notice what you notice -A.G.

16 Catch yourself thinking -A.G>

17 Observe what's vivid -A.G.

18 Vividness is self-selecting -A.G.

19 "Spots of Time" -William Wordsworth

20 If we don't show anyone we're free to write anything -A.G.

21 "My mind is open to itself." -Gelek Rinpoche

22 "Each on his bed spoke to himself alone, making no sound." -Charles Reznikoff

II Path (method or recognition)

23 "No ideas but in things."..."No ideas but in facts." -William Carlos Williams,

24 "Close to the nose." -W.C. Williams

25 Sight is where the eye hits." -Louis Zukofsky

26 "Clamp the mind down on objects." -W.C. Wiliams

27 "Direct treatment of the thing...(or object,)" -Ezra Pound

28 "Presentation, not reference." -Ezra Pound

29 "Give me a for instance." -Vernacular

30 "Show not tell." -Vernacular

31 "The natural object is always the adequate symbol." -Ezra Pound

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32 "Things are symbols of themselves." -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

33 "Labor well the minute particulars, take care of the little    onesHe who would do good for another must do it in minute    particularsGeneral Good is the plea of the Scoundrel Hypocrite and    FlattererFor Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized    particulars." -William Blake

34 "And being old she put a skin/ on everything she said." -W.B. Yeats

35 "Don't think of words when you stop but to see the picture better." -Jack Kerouac

36 Details are the life of prose." -Jack Kerouac

37 Intense fragments of spoken idiom, best. -A.G.

38 "Economy of Words" -Ezra Pound

39 "Tailoring" -Gregory Corso

40 Maximum information, minimum number of syllables. -A.G.

41 Syntax condensed, sound is solid. -A.G.

42 Savor vowels, appreciate consonants. -A.G.

43 "Compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome" -Ezra Pound

44 "...awareness...of the tone leading of the vowels." -Ezra Pound

45 "...an attempt to approximate classical quantitative meters..." -Ezra Pound

46 "Lower limit speech, upper limit song" -Louis Zukofsky

47 "Phanopoela, Melopoeia, Logopoela." -Ezra Pound

48 "Sight, Sound, Intellect." -Louis Zukofsky

49 "Only emotion objectified endures." -Louis Zukofsky

III Fruition (result or appreciation)

50 Spiritus = Breathing = Inspiration = Unobstructed Breath

51 "Alone with the Alone." -Plotinus

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52 Sunyata (skt.) = Ku (Japanese) = Emptiness

53 "What's the sound of one hand clapping?" -Zen Koan

54 "What's the face you had before you were born?" -Zen Koan

55 Vipassana (skt.) = Clear Seeing

56 "Stop the world" -Carlos Casteneda

57 "The purpose of art is to stop time." -Bob Dylan

58 "The unspeakable visions of the individual." -J.K.

59 "I'm going to try speaking some reckless words, and I want you to try to listen recklessly."   -Chuang Tzu, (Tr. Burton Watson)

60 "Candor" -Whitman

61 "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." -W. Shakespeare

62 "Contact" -A Magazine, Nathaniel West & W.C. Williams, Eds.

63 "God appears & God is Light  To those poor souls who dwell in Night.  But does a Human Form Display  To those who Dwell in Realms of day." -W. Blake

64 "Subject is known by what she sees." -A.G.

65 Others can measure their visions by what we see. -A.G.

66 Candor ends paranoia. -A.G.

67 "Willingness to be Fool." -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

68 "Day & Night / you're all right." -Gregory Corso

69 Tyger: "Humility is Beatness." -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche & A.G.

70 Lion: "Surprise Mind" -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche & A.G.

71 Garuda: "Crazy Wisdom Outrageousness" -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

72 Dragon: "Unborn Inscrutability" -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

73 "To be men not destroyers" -Ezra Pound

74 "Speach synchronizes mind & body" -Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

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76 "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" -Shelley

77 "Make it new" -Ezra Pound

78 "When the mode of music changes, the walls of the city shake" -Plato

79 "Every third thought shall be my grave" -W. Shakespeare, The Tempest

80 "That in black ink love may still shine bright" -W. Shakespeare, Sonnets

81 "Only emotion endures" Ezra Pound

82 "Well while I'm here I'll    do the work-  and what's the Work?    To ease the pain of living.  Everything else, drunken    dumbshow." -A.G.

83 "...Kindness, sweetest  of the small notes  in the world's ache,  most modest & gentle  entered man before history  and became his daily  connection, let no man  tell you otherwise." -Carl Rakosi

84 "To diminish the mass of human and sentient sufferings." -Gelek Rinpoche

Naropa Institute, July 1992New York, 5 March 1993New York, 27 June 1993

Procedimientos

La referencia al jazz (Lester leaps in de Charlie Parker) en la versificación. Be-bop jazz: un estilo de compleja estructura que surge en los años ’40. Se caracteriza por un encadenamiento de acordes y una superposición de tonos. La melodía se sustituye por una cascada de notas breves que brotan entre frases musicales entrecortadas.

One of the governing maxims of the Beat style of writing was expressed by Allen Ginsberg when he paraphrased an old Zen Buddhist philosophy in his words, "First thought, best thought." Ginsberg called this improvisational technique applied to writing "composing on the tongue," and it was used in one way or another by many of the Beat writers. The rhythm, meter and length of verse was also distinctly more similar to jazz music than it was to traditionally European styles. Ted Joans, a poet and friend of the Beat authors, once said, "I could see that [Ginsberg] was picking up the language and rhythm of jazz, that he wasn't following the European

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tradition". Ginsberg fancied himself a poet in the style of a bebop musician because he lengthened the poetic line to fit the length of his own breath, paused for air, and launched another line, sometimes starting with the same word as the last line. Jazz music is distinct in its stressing of the second and fourth beats, as in traditional African music, as opposed to the stressing of the first and third beats, as in Western music. Beat poetry frequently has a much looser, more syncopated rhythm, similar to jazz.

This technique is perhaps best exemplified in Ginsberg's classic poem 'Howl', which was to Beat poetry what Kerouac's 'On the Road' was to Beat prose. "I depended on the word 'who' to keep the beat, a base to keep measure, return to and take off again onto another streak of invention," Ginsberg said in a 1959 essay about his approach to poetry. The verbal technique of 'Howl' can easily be compared to a Charlie Parker song, in which Parker plays a series of improvisational phrases upon the same theme, pausing for breath and starting another. But Ginsberg said, "Lester Young, actually, is what I was thinking about... 'Howl' is all "Lester Leaps In." And I got that from Kerouac. Or paid attention to it on account of Kerouac, surely--he made me listen to it".

As Ginsberg said that 'Howl' was all "Lester Leaps In,".

Según Gregory Corso, “el servicio más importante de la generación beat a la poesía fue la ruptura con la cadencia tradicional”. Procedimientos: uso del habla cotidiana, ritmo bop, imágenes que mezclan realidad y delirio, alargamiento de vocales, utilización de cortes inusuales en los versos

i. La referencia a la estética cézanniana

Moloch y otros símbolos y metáforas

Una mezcla del Moloc bíblico con la tradición miltoniana y el Leviatán de Hobbes.

The name of a heathen divinity whose worship figures largely in the later history of the kingdom of Judah. As the

national god of the Ammonites, he is known as "Milcom" (1   Kings 11:5,7 ), or "Malcam" ("Malcan" is an alternative

reading in 2   Samuel 12:30,31 ; compare Jeremiah 49:1,3; Zec 1:5, where the Revised Version margin reads "their

king"). The use of basileus, and archon, as a translation of the name by the Septuagint suggests that it may have been

originally the Hebrew word for "king," melekh. Molech is obtained from melekh by the substitution of the vowel

points of Hebrew bosheth, signifying "shame." From the obscure and difficult passage, Amos 5:26, the Revised

Version (British and American) has removed "your Moloch" and given "your king," but Septuagint had here

translated "Moloch," and from the Septuagint it found its way into the Ac (7:43), the only occurrence of the name in

the New Testament.

When we come to consider the nature of this worship it is remarkable how few details are given regarding it in

Scripture. The place where it was practiced from the days of Ahaz and Manasseh was the Valley of Hinnom where

Topheth stood, a huge altar-pyre for the burning of the sacrificial victims. There is no evidence connecting the

worship with the temple in Jerusalem. Ezekiel's vision of sun-worshippers in the temple is purely ideal (Ezekiel 8). A

priesthood is spoken of as attached to the services (Jeremiah 49:3; compare Zechariah 1:4,5). The victims offered to

the divinity were not burnt alive, but were killed as sacrifices, and then presented as burnt offerings. "To pass through

the fire" has been taken to mean a lustration or purification of the child by fire, not involving death. But the prophets

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clearly speak of slaughter and sacrifice, and of high places built to burn the children in the fire as burnt offerings

(Jeremiah 19:5; Ezekiel 16:20,21).

The popular conception, molded for English readers largely by Milton's "Moloch, horrid king" as described in

Paradise Lost, Book I, is derived from the accounts given in late Latin and Greek writers, especially the account

which Diodorus Siculus gives in his History of the Carthaginian Kronos or Moloch. The image of Moloch was a

human figure with a bull's head and outstretched arms, ready to receive the children destined for sacrifice. The image

of metal was heated red hot by a fire kindled within, and the children laid on its arms rolled off into the fiery pit

below. In order to drown the cries of the victims, flutes were played, and drums were beaten; and mothers stood by

without tears or sobs, to give the impression of the voluntary character of the offering (see Rawlinson's Phoenicia,

113, for fuller details).

LEVIATHAN by Thomas Hobbes

INTRODUCTION NATURE (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of Nature, man. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE (in Latin, CIVITAS), which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which fastened to the seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to perform his duty) are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural; the wealth and riches of all the particular members are the strength; salus populi (the people's salvation) its business; counsellors, by whom all things needful for it to know are suggested unto it, are the memory; equity and laws, an artificial reason and will; concord, health; sedition, sickness; and civil war, death. Lastly, the pacts and covenants, by which the parts of this body politic were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation.

Moloch was a familiar figure who took on many forms, but he was still demanding sacrifices of the generation’s children. He breathed the fire of plutonium, of warfare, of racism, of misguided nationalism that led to mistrust and hatred.

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Intertexualidad y contactos con otras poéticasb. García Lorca

c. Whitman

d. Rimbaud

e. Blake

Ginsberg attempted to turn on every famous cultural figure in his address book, including Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Robert Lowell and Jack Kerouac (whose cranky response sent Timothy Leary on his first bum trip).

Bibliografía Cella, Susana (1996) “Beat” en Para leer sin parar. Antología del lector joven. El

Ateneo. Buenos Aires.

Williams, Raymond (1988) Marxismo y literatura. Península/Biblos. Barcelona.

Zinn, Howard (1999) La otra historia de los Estados Unidos. Otras voces. Hondarribia.

Sitios Webwww.learner.org/amerpass/index.html Sitio de enseñanza de literatura norteamericana K-12

www.gbltq.com Sitio especializado en culturas de minorías sexuales. Tiene una sección de literatura

http://www.litkicks.com/ Sitio sobre literatura norteamericana

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