UNIT 7:

QUESTIONS FOR SELF-ASSESSMENT (“HOWL”)

a) Why is Ginsberg’s poem named “Howl”? Does it reflect in the tone

employed?

The poem’s title reflects the anger and anxiety of the speaker, whose pitch
encompasses his growing concern. “Howl” shows an increscendo tone derived from
the accumulative effect on the repetitive denunciations. It reveals an increasing
parataxis towards its closing, where the voice gains a climatic pitch through a
discourse below or beyond conversational levels. The poem ends abruptly,
unpunctuated, as if the voice carrying the howl had been extinguished, or as if
stopped by a sudden awakening or collapse.

b) What is the function of juxtaposition in the poem?

Incongruous images are fused to present a shocking, surrealistic reality. This

strategy challenges the readers’ rational assumptions and expectations. Images of
the natural and the inorganic, however disparate, are united in the poem. Line 3
“Starry dynamo in the machinery of night” is a significant sample of unusual
juxtaposition. Equally unusual is the combination of the divine and the unholy,
the spiritually high and the socially low. Sentences are placed together without
connective words (parataxis) in order to string them into a discursive
juxtaposition. A litany-like composition is thus achieved.

c)Which senses are appealed by the imagery employed?

Ginsberg’s work was intensely audience-conscious, performative and oratorical.

Whitmanesque long linges, incantantory repetitions and syncopated rhythms can be
traced in “Howl”. The author arranged his creations according to what he called
“breath units”. “Howl” is composed of lines that remind of Jazz improvisation,
explorations of tones and rhythms that always return to a certain pattern.
Ginsberg creates through the use of anaphora, rhythmic sequences and thematic
units. Other sound effects as alliteration are used to reinforce musicality.
Therefore, his poems resemble songs or chants, rhythmic sequences and thematic
units.

d)How does jazz music inspire and shape the poem?

Beat poetry developed out of public poetry readings. Beat verse was focused on
orality because it was composed to be read out in clubs. Ginsberg would find in
jazz patterns a most suitable rhythmic structure for his poems. He used anaphora,
a rhythmic and rhyming mechanism by which the initial word or phrase of a line is
repeated along two or more lines of a poem. In order to prepare the reader for
the exploration of new concepts and feelings, “Howl” is composed of lines that
remind of jazz improvisation, exploration of tones and rhythms that always return
to a certain pattern.
e)To what extent does “Howl” represent the Beat spirit?

The Beats had a romantic idealization of pre-industrial primitive folk that they
associated with lower-class African-Americans and some other underclass members:
hipsters, hoboes, delinquents… for their uncompromising nature and their refusal
of the establishment. These outcasts of their day populate “Howl”. The poem is a
Beats manifesto in praise of the American outsiders. The use of visual and
musical strategies to reproduce altered states of perception, free verse, and the
conception of awareness through meditation is common to Ginsberg and the Beats.
Following Beat philosophy, he understood the role and creative process of the
poet as intensely linked to extreme states of consciousness, whatever the methods
employed to achieve such state.

f) How is the influence of Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe traceable
in “Howl”?

Ginsberg’s style greatly reminds us of Walt Whitman’s poetics. Whitman even appears
as a character in some of Ginsberg’s poems. Whitmanesque long lines, incantantory
repetitions and syncopated rhythms can be traced in “Howl”. Poe was among the
first poets that the author read as a child. Poe’s long-line structure in such
poems as “The Raven” and its hypnotic musicality inspired Ginsberg’s theory of
the reunion of body and the mind through poetic composition and reading.

g) In what way allusions contribute to the overall ideas of the poem?

And paronomasia?

The allusive power of the poem situates concepts in space, history and art, thus
creating a network of cultural references in which the poet’s “Howl” is deeply
embedded (New York, Paradise Alley, Laredo…). Allusion to H. G. Wells’ “Moloch”
denounces greed and industrialization. Paronomasia (or puns) operate on the
polysemic character of some words. For example “El” in line 5 refers both to the
New York elevated train and to the Hebrew word for god. A similar word play can
be found in line 32 where the “wall” stands for “Wall Street” and the “Wailing
Wall”: again the combination of the divine and the unholy, the spiritually high
and the socially low.

h) How does the poem challenge the myths about American life that
prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s?

“Howl” is a literary denunciation of the unbalancing effects of modern culture and

the Eisenhower period. It depicts a spiritually void America, ruined by Moloch –
Ginsberg’s image for greed and industrialization and an allusion to H. G. Wells’
The Time Machine.
i)What rhetorical devices does the poem employ?

1. The “breath units” by which a line takes the linguistic space provided
by one physical breath.

2. Anaphora –repetition- which creates rhythmic sequences and thematic

units.

3. Parallelism, repetition, alliteration... These devices provide the poem

with an internal rhyme that replace the tyranny of end rhyme and that
enlivens the musicality proper to the verse form.

4. Juxtaposition of images: incongruous images are fused to present a

shocking surrealist reality.

5. Allusions.

6. Parataxis: sentences placed together without connective words in order

to string them into a discursive juxtaposition. A litany-like
composition is thus achieved.

7. Paronomasia or puns.

j)How are the pastoral and the inorganic and/or industrial

articulated in the poem?

The first part of the poem censures the lamentable damage done to the poet’s
contemporaries. In “Howl” a spiritually void America is depicted. The second
part is a poetic charge on the “pure machinery of Moloch”. The third part
extends the boundaries of Rockland, the mental asylum where Carl Solomon was
voluntarily confined to contemporary America. Ginsberg thus juxtaposes the
spiritual poverty of modern life with mental breakdowns, soul and reason being
equally injured by literal and figurative machinery.
QUESTIONS FOR SELF-ASSESSMENT: “ENTROPY”

a) Why is “Entropy” an appropriate title for this story?

Broadly speaking, entropy is the random but irreversible tendency of a system to

lose energy and finally, to run down. Entropy enters the story in its three main
definitions:

1. As the measure of randomness in a closed system

2. The measure of thermal energy not available to work.

3. The measure of the loss of information in the transmission of a message.

These three types of entropic occurrences take place in the three households
mentioned in the story: Meatball’s, Callisto’s and Saul’s.

b) How does informational entropy interact with thermodynamic entropy in

the story?

Communication theory and the physical laws of thermodynamics inform Pynchon’s works.
The former lends the term “White noise” to the ideas of meaning implicit in the
literary text, and it refers to the superabundance of communicative acts, which form
an indeterminate texture from where it is difficult to single out independent
elocutions. Thermodynamics enter Pynchon’s narratives with the notions of entropy
and “heat death”, which are applied to situations where irrevocable disintegration
occurs.

c) How do cultural references work in it?

The story takes place in Washington, D. C., in 1957. It reflects the Red Scare
Time, that is, those years in the history of the United States when leftist ideas
were considered threatening to the welfare of the nation. But the contextual
information also hints at the cultural heterogeneity of the moment, certainly more
plural than the master discourses of the day revealed or desired. Characters in
“Entropy” mirror the countercultural ambience that prevailed in the United States
from the late fifties through the sixties and seventies. Several forms of
counterculture or subculture contested the dominant discourse and they entered the
literary arena by adopting several structures: as the “other” histories sought by
minorities, as the emerging cyberpunk literature that explored the lives of those
at the margins of technoculture, and as the conspirational stories that offered
alternatives to the established system. In “Entropy”, Pynchon briefly explores the
second trend of the American subculture of the fifties.

d) What is the function of musical imagery in “Entropy”?

Ineffectual communication is neutralized by musical patterns in the story. Musical

imagery is important in “Entropy”, for music supplies organized structures of sounds
that create meaning and harmony. The story employs a fugue-like structure with
patterns and counter-patterns. A fugal structure is a musical composition in which a
theme or themes is developed through counterpoints or combinations of musical lines.
A theme is stated, and then reiterated by a second voice. The exposition of entropy,
therefore, very ironically adopts a harmonious frame that reaches its peak with the
crescendo of the party’s wildest moment. Aubade’s character senses all acoustic
input at sound, as against the noise that pervades the story “to which she had
continually to adjust lest the whole structure shiver into a disarray of discrete
 and meaningless signals”. Musical imagery permeates the narrative until the
“graceful diminuendo” of the bird’s heartbeat announces a closure in narrative and
existential terms. In music, this moment of tension in a fugue is called “pedal
point”, of which music theoreticians indicate two types: dominant (for increasing
tension) and tonic (for releasing tension). Both concepts are mentioned in the last
lines of “Entropy”: “and the hovering, curious dominant of their separate lives
should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion”.

e) How does the story herald the Postmodern sensibility?

If Postmodern literature is called the literature of entropy or chaos because it has

rejected the creation of meaning as its main objective, Pynchon is one of the best
literary representatives of the moment. Pynchon’s narrative mirrors Postmodern life
and sensibility in the protagonist paranoiac search for certainty. Pynchon’s works
communicate the idea that technological progress is behind modern distress, and they
also revise the meaning of thought.

f) How does space configure the theme of the story?

Spatial disposition is highly relevant to the story. Pynchon would favor

labyrinthine structure in his futures novels, but in “Entropy” he chose a binary
setting for the unfolding of events. On the one hand, Meatball’s apartment is what
could be defined as highly disordered place. In scientific terms, nevertheless, it
is an open system that harbors diverse forms of energy. Callisto’s apartment, on the
other hand, is a closed system designed to resist the heat-death that Callisto
presumes outside. Both settings share the suggestion that the uniformity outside and
its subsequent decline require some form of opposition, although both attempts
(Meatball’s uncontrolled party and Callisto’s hothouse) prove unsuccessful.

g) In what ways is the scientific concept of heat-death important in

this story?

The author stretches scientific concepts in order to apply them to a cultural

condition which seems to be reaching its “heat-death”, that is to say, a point of
exhaustion of energy. When the particles of a system have reached thermodynamic
uniformity, energy cannot be generated unless it is provided from outside that
system. The uniformity (assuming the form of cultural expressions and temperature)
of the world outside the building in the story seems to announce such a heat-death,
in contrast to the excess of “difference” and energy in Meatball’s apartment –a
system of high entropic level. The failure to combat the exhaustion of functional
energy is manifest in the double closure of the story. In Callisto’s apartment, the
absence of energy makes it impossible for him to communicate life to the bird he has
been trying to relive. Heat-death, in other words, has reached his hothouse.
Meatball’s break-leasing party becomes so frantic that energy becomes unmanageable
and only leaking occurs.

h) What is the role of humor in “Entropy”?

Humor is ubiquitous in Pynchon’s prose. He delights in presenting absurd situations,

unexpected plot turns, and thought-provoking names to defy the reader’s encounter
with the text. A story like “Entropy” advances these Pynchonian traits, and in
addition it mostly plays with the overloading referentiality of cultural allusions.
It acquires a farcical tone in its exploration of solemn issues through bizarre
characters and events. Many of the characters at Meatball’s wild party have
responsibilities in national institutions but are nonetheless portrayed as pitiful
and unproductive figures. Take, for instance, the government girls who “had passed
out on couches, chairs and in one case the bathroom sink”, or the ex-Hungarian
freedom fighter who loses all varnish of heroism when he is described as a
 salivating Don Giavanni. Thus, Pynchon challenges usual characterization frames by
drawing on irony, that is, the device that offers the opposite to what is expected.

i) Why does Callisto dictate his autobiography in the third person?

This character dictates his autobiography to Aubade, so that an overall narrative

voice is not necessary for the provision of a framework that accounts for Callisto’s
strange life. Nevertheless, by making Callisto impose third-person perspective on
the narrative of his own life, Pynchon merges his authorial voice –the voice of the
creator of Callisto- and Callisto’s voice, thus providing another exercise of
blending. The strategy of the autobiography, moreover, makes the scientific context
and its implications available to the reader.

j) How are the characters made know to the reader?

As the narrative shifts from upstairs to downstairs space, the point of view shifts
as well. Another consequence of this shifting setting is the distribution of
characters according to the space they occupy, to the point that characterization
techniques are minimal in “Entropy”. Space and action convey all the information
that readers need to know. Moreover, Pynchon avoids providing extra-details about
the characters’ background by making Callisto himself supply those details.