To End the “Human War”: Montage in American Poetry of Protest by Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg
Torsa Ghosal
The American literary experience has been very closely interwoven with other forms of art, especially music and cinema. Afro-American literature, both thematically and structurally, can be fully comprehended with reference to jazz and blues. Similarly, Beats and rock music are closely related as are generic films and generic literature produced in America. Thus, American literature’s multidimensionality provides enough scope for interdisciplinary appreciation of texts.
The cinematic technique of montage was incorporated into the structure of American poetry, written especially for socio-political protest and rebellion, by Langston Hughes and Allen Ginsberg. It is important to note that montage here refers to the montage technique as used by Soviet film makers as opposed to that of Hollywood film makers. Hughes and Ginsberg consciously opposed the capitalist and consumer driven concerns of American industries.
Langston Hughes’ poetry attempted to uphold the dreams of black Americans deferred within the inequitable mainstream white American culture. Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, on the other hand, tried to depict that America had become a cultural wasteland post Second World War.
The montage technique is a prominent cinematic method first effectively implemented by Soviet filmmakers like Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, and Vsevolod Pudovkin. It was perfected by Sergei Eisenstein. Eisenstein observed, “montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots” wherein “each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other”.
Sergei Eisenstein’s films implemented montage to get across specific ideas to his audience. The narrative of his films focused on ideas rather than on telling stories. The collisions of shots in Eisenstein’s montage could be based on conflicts of scale, volume, rhythm, motion, as well as more conceptual values such as class, religion and state. In October Eisenstein subverts the concept of an omnipotent divinity through montage. In this famous sequence Eisenstein starts with the shot of a deity taken from a lower angle, thus endowing divinity with authority. The moods in the clips are juxtaposed and finally, the last shot of this montage presents two figures without arms. The gradual transition is from a powerful image to a powerless one. The shots in Eisenstein’s montage are arranged such that thesis and antithesis alternate. The dialectical nature of montage brackets the central idea which is often based on a Marxian premise. Hence, Soviet montage is a consciously political technique. The montage from October is an intellectual montage harping on collision of ideas. Conflict and collision between shots is central to the montage method.
Langston Hughes had visited Russia and planned to collaborate with Eisenstein in 1932. Acquaintance with Eisenstein influenced Hughes’ poetry. He titled his anthology of poetry- Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951). In the volume Hughes deals with a wide range of issues like how to balance modernity and folk culture, how to achieve textual continuity while composing ninety one distinct poetic pieces and so on. Eisenstein’s montage hinges on class, Hughes’ hinges on race.
Hughes’s poem Harlem from the volume uses five images that are disjointed in themselves but connect to the central rhetoric of the poem. The rapidity with which the images flow intensifies their colliding effect creating a durable intellectual montage. Hughes writes in Island:
Between two rivers,
North of the park,
Like darker rivers
The streets are dark.
Black and white,
Gold and Brown-
Chocolate cluster
Pie of a town.
Dream within a dream
Our dream deferred.
Good morning, daddy!
Ain’t you heard?
The poem describes Harlem which is situated between two rivers at the centre of the White dominated New York City. The images that collide in the poem are pigmented black and white symbolizing the skin tones of the Black and White Americans. White America exerts state power and state control which represses the dreams of Black Americans. The rhetoric of equality had existed in America for a long time but was rarely implemented. The streams serve as metonyms for the parallel flow of the two cultural currents within America. The image of ‘Chocolate Cluster/Pie of a town’ is also to be realized in context of the image of food and drink in the poem Harlem. In Harlem Hughes writes:
What happens to a dream deferred?
…
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-
Like a syrupy sweet?
The crust formation over sweet is in conflict with the image of the gold and brown chocolate pie but beneath the apparent conflict is the idea of fermentation. The essence of decay and disintegration underlines Hughes’ volume.
Hughes’ method of constructing meaning from a series of images is reminiscent of the Imagist style but there are major differences between the montage and Imagist methods. The objective of Imagist poems is to evoke a third aspect from the given images but the shots or images in montage contain the meaning within themselves which are then juxtaposed. Imagist poems try to capture a moment of high intensity, often emotional but montage upholds dualities that manifest a sense of crisis, usually political.
Ginsberg’s poetry too uses the montage technique. However, whereas Hughes banks on short lines, Ginsberg’s style in poems like Howl and Sunflower Sutra is marked by excesses. At the core of both these poems lie two colliding ideas. In Howl the psychological space of the best minds of Ginsberg’s generation is juxtaposed with the decadent world around them. In Sunflower Sutra the image of the flower is located within the space of the tin can banana dock:
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust-
The warmth of the sunflower’s hue is subverted by the dead gray shadow that the poet visualizes. What follows is a reverie which is hyper-real. The ‘perfect beauty of the sunflower’ as described by Ginsberg is soon followed by the disillusioning picture of flies and rusty rail roads.
Howl offers an array of colliding ideas, antithetical to each other but compressed within the span of a single line. From Howl’s first section which comprises a seventy eight line sentence the following section can be analysed in this context:
streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,
illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns
In the above passage the flow of supernatural time or eternity is delineated through paradoxical images. The state of timelessness is a static instant which Ginsberg portrays through dynamic images of lightning and shuddering.
Lightning within the mind is a sensation that suspends perceptive faculties while Peyote is a drug that leads to an illusion of timelessness. However, the very concept of America and the infinite possibilities it stands for are temporal. Ginsberg’s antipathy to America’s war tactics and involvement in the Vietnam War is articulated in the poem America where he writes:
I can't stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war?
The growth of America as super power is a temporary moment in the history of the universe. The spiritual decline, on the other hand, is permanent.
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task
The next section of the poem was written by Ginsberg under the influence of peyote. At the core of the first section is the protagonist Who, while the second section is built around the antagonist Moloch. Moloch is the dark side of a state of mind but Ginsberg also claims that everything is holy. Thus, Moloch too is not outside the realm of that holy sphere. The destructive time of Moloch is similarly contested by the time recorded by clocks in space that the hipsters follow.
The backbone of intellectual montage is logic. If a montage uses a dream-like illogicality the focus is on the erosion of sanity as in Howl.
Eisenstein’s montage pitted working class ethics against the upper class exploitation through shots. The idea of conflict within montage carries the impulse of protest and articulates the struggle within. Montages have, thereby, evolved as effective tools to voice anxiety and angst without being overtly didactic.
Ginsberg’s poetry meanders through issues presented in a pseudo-comic fashion while Hughes relies on putting forth his images with precision and lucidity. Both their poems are directed against the values of consumerism, capitalism, exploitation and cultural anarchy dictated by the state and manipulated by the media. Ginsberg specifically uses montage to build up momentum. Hughes does something similar when he writes about the impending explosion of dreams in the last line of Harlem. The rapid succession of images imposed one over the other allows the reader to get involved and extract the argument out of the text.
The multi dimensionality of these poems lie in the way they internalize the idiom of Soviet Cinema to produce texts that capture moments of crisis in American history.
Italian Neo Realism – Reality As It Is. Written by Jivraj Singh.
Reality only exists insofar as one is conscious. With consciousness comes perception. An awareness, which language labels “reality”, is generated by our sense-perception and our ideology. It follows that reality is a conceptual construct which exists only because we are sentient beings with systems of cognition, language and values with which to interpret and label our sense-perception. There is no single entity called reality but as many realities as there are people, motivations and contexts. Reality is value-based and subjective.
Therefore, a film-maker’s representation of reality in a film is definitely subjective as it is a second generation construct of an initial perception which is inherently ideological. The Neo Realist film movement began as a response to the hegemony over cultural artefacts in wartime Italy. “White Telephone” films made with Fascist approval portrayed a reality which was available only to an elite few. The Neo Realist filmic reality was supposedly the reality of the impoverished mass. However, this was a perceived reality of a conceptualized group of people. Also, the Neo Realist filmmakers must have had at least some privilege to have had access to filmmaking tools and technique in the first place.
The Neo Realist filmmakers used a “degree zero” approach which they claimed was devoid of style. What this really meant is that it was devoid of overtly extravagant or manipulative technique, such as the use of soundtracks and effects in Hollywood, disorienting montage in Soviet Cinema, or highly stylized mise-en-scene in German Expressionism. Nonetheless, degree zero was identifiable and reproducible as an approach meaning it was stylized, however subtly. Style is a product of values and ideology. So is reality. Therefore, the Neo Realist depiction of reality was a construct which was stylized and ideologically driven and not simplistically reality as it is.
Meghe Dhaka Tara -A study in multivariate patriarchy by Shahwar Kibria
Neeta as the cloud capped star, symbolizes in the movie, not just a part, but the entire constellation, the galaxy! Before being overawed by such an expansive term, we must trace out relevant sub textual interpretations which help instituting our stand!
Before we delve into a subjective analysis of the characters and the strains of narratorial individuality they represent, we shall at first try an attempt, for the ease of the readers, a strategic delineation of the various strains of patriarchy juxtaposing and scaffolding the narrative in the movie!
Patriarchy as an attitude
“a cerebrally infused, internal psychological manifestation”
What comes out fairly clearly through the movie, is the notion of patriarchy as an attitude, a mental disposition,(abstract) as a frame of mind, and not just denoted or represented by a particular sexual order, but as a mental disposition shared by both sexes alike! Thus in this movie we have Neeta’s mother, representing the attitudinal psyche of a repressive patriarchy, of exercising a dominant thrust over affairs in her household,(which some might argue as the due right of matriarchy as well), but here she not only wields the fulcrum of power, but also plays a decisive role in the articulating decisions made by other characters, and thus she can be rightly claimed to be embodying psychological patriarchy, the power to decide, crafting her apart and elevating her above her rights as the woman of the household(matriarchy)!
In this context we should also spare a thought for the father figure who quite ironically in the movie is the failed patriarch!(here we can co-relate Pride and Prejudice)
Thus flowing from it, the factual consequence, of a turbulent domestic scenario, which suffers, as the leash or the reign of power is man held or rather woman held by a pseudo or unnatural patriarch.
This might also lead some to contemplate, that this is a subtle insinuation of the fact that the natural order of things have been disrupted, the role of the patriarch reverses, also obliquely hinting Ritwik Ghatak’s personal turmoil of being displaced due to partition, his own confrontation with an unnatural patriarch, a stranger patriarch!
A divisional patriarch!
It would not be much of discretion, to discuss, in this context, Neeta’s younger sister, who comes only second to her mother in exercising effective dominance, and which also aids her in luring away her sister’s fiancé to be her own husband! Though not quite a patriarch, but still Neeta’s sister can be seen as the anti-heroine, with tremendous power, and manipulative charm, directorially insinuated in her opening scene, where she is placed in front of a disfigured mirror, which shows not one but a distorted double reflection of her, informing the reading audience of her motives and plan of action later on in the movie!
Patriarchy as an external manifestation:
as discussed in black and white…
The malevolent patriarch
The discussion can not however be triggered off but with a discussion of Neeta’s mother.
She besides exuding a crude attitudinal patriarchy also embodies the malevolent patriarch, deliberately pictured thus, following which, most of her shots are either fully or partially tainted in darkness. She as mentioned earlier is the pseudo patriarch because she is not directly shouldering any responsibility but nonetheless she heads all decisions and actions and also spearheads the life decisions of all major characters in the movie, except Geeta of course, who reigns her destiny, the only achiever in the movie(though in her own subjective way)
The benevolent patriarch
Is no doubt the titular character of the movie Neeta, who like the unflinching tragedy queen sacrifices but to gain nothing at the end! Even nature fails to garner her peace or equilibrium as it stands as the mute observer of her being, though in a way empathizing in her woes as it reverberates her cries, echoes her grief, though back to her, and not transmitting it beyond it’s static barriers to carry it to those altars where they could be redeemed!
Neeta stands at the denouement as the one character to have gained nought, the one character who stands unredeemed or unpaid, the ultimate tragic entity, who gains nothing, even after the tantamount of failed expectations and broken dreams she has to endure…this is not the stereotypical run of the mill, melodramatic extravaganza various critics have blamed Ghatak to exercise discretion with, but a movie with an ending sealed with contentment, this is a movie of failed expectations, and life in general,…in some ways the predecessor of the realist faction spearheaded by Ray! This is not one’s usual staple melodrama, this is life moving in fiction!
Neeta is the star and also the galaxy which absorbs all to illuminate all,but at night is illuminated by stars which are but capped by clouds and thus it doesn’t get illuminated at all, thus double negative achieves no positive quotient for this character in the movie.
Leading us to close our discussion with the notion, of the rewarded and unrewarded patriarch, Neeta’s mother and Neeta, respectively.
Another poignant fragment of the movie is it’s denouement, when things come back on track for the family when the male re establishes itself as the rightful patriarch and turns things for the benefit of all, perhaps suggesting the pros and cons of the natural and unnatural patriarch, perhaps suggesting how the natural course of things should be, to steer the unnatural back to where it rightfully belongs!
To give back power to where it belongs, and also the fate of all Neeta’s alike, to walk but with a broken sandal, a life on crutches!
Y entonces hay el Che (And then there was Che) by Ananya Das
“…that the characters would change and you wouldn’t perceive immediately that they were changing – it’s as if you’re walking in a gentle rain and at the end of your walk you’re completely wet but you don’t know what happened to you…”[1]
No wonder the first shots of The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) directed by Walter Salles (funny first name for a Mexican; no offence meant!) are very home video stylish in context to the choice of framing; simply showing the mundane and necessary objects (especially the inhaler used by Ernesto); being packed for an otherwise epic journey into the unknown Latin America along with the beautiful background piece played with a guitar composed by Gustavo Sataolalla; and the highlighting precise voice-over of the role played by Rodrigo De la Serna as Alberto Granado. For Gael Garcia Bernal is not yet Che, but El Fuser, the rest is heavy asthmatic silence, calm yet firm and with compassionate eyes. And as for the inhaler, being privileged as the first object shown in the film comes later time and again with Ernesto trying to fight his asthmatic bouts, which could be imagined as emblematic to his fight against injustice and for freedom.
The frequent cuts and the steady cam maneuverings largely tries to de-mystify the characters as merely innocent, youthful and adventurous friends setting out on an exploration in their continent they themselves hardly knew. The documentary quality of the film especially depicting the ruins of Incan civilization, the indigenous populace, the little guide boy and Quechua women, can never go unnoticed. They were very much real, so much so that it helped Gael and Rodrigo behave as Ernesto and Alberto would, in response to the vivid texture of the continent, undoubtedly the photographic negative of North America, as Walter reveals in his interview about the film and Che himself revealed in his diary, though in different ways.
It was rather a challenge for screenplay writer José Rivera neither to over-amplify the already weighted, and to some, controversial personality of Che, the Revolutionary that we all know (or pretend to know) of, nor to deify the naïve, coming of age, consciousness and spirit of Ernesto, El Fuser. The whole film blooms in that fulcrum, revealing the third most important character of the film apart from Alberto and Ernesto – vast stretches of the Latin American continent. Rivera himself admits in his interview that certain details in the book itself could not be portrayed in the film to avoid misrepresentation. For example, while Ernesto has an asthmatic attack on the ship someone offers him a cigar; the book mentions it, but Rivera had to chop it off to evade viewers being distracted by such details that may tempt the viewer into thinking that say, in this case, that cigar being his first cigar! While portraying a character and personality such as Che, even in his early life as a rudimentary Che, trivial details carry a lot of meaning and must be dealt with very carefully, and dealt it was. This rudimentary Che in the film doesn’t were a beret and is never seen to be carrying a copy of Das Kapital.[2]
It is the third character (the landscape with its populace) that identifies and connects everyone and everything humane in the narrative, as originally depicted by Che in his book, which was rather impressionistic, elliptical and episodic, unlike the film itself. [3] The film has a proper beginning, climax and a revelation, in the order that any good story could be told in filmic language. In the book, the transformation is largely understood as Che’s diary entries change the addresses from ‘I’ to ‘we’. But the film could not afford to tread the same paths. In other words, it had to be close to real and not be too dramatic, one that of a docu-fiction quality and it was. [4] The fact remains that Rivera, Walter, Gael and Rodrigo transformed the diary entries into a close encounter with Ernesto and Alberto in 1952, so we could cherish, be moved by and dream of changing the world sitting in the comforts of late-capitalism inflicted 2004 or later. It is as if by time machine, albeit really through celluloid, we witness the case of the most complete human being according to Jean-Paul Sartre, while he was not so complete and on the verge of making a choice for the path to achieve that completeness.
The leit-motif trails essentially the journey, on the road, with nothing but only nature behind and beyond the two compaňeros. The rest of the film uses minimal music. The turning point is accentuated by the use of electric guitar and cajón (a kind of Afro-Peruvian musical instrument), when the two sail through the Amazon to visit the leper colony.
One of the most moving and ironic scenes according to me include the one where the two have a conversation with the landless couple looking for a job at the mining industry. That the two’s journey was that for journey’s sake, and theirs a forceful aberration from their roots, a reality that they didn’t at all fancy in the first place, provide the necessary conflict leading to the resolution of Ernesto constantly trying to derive meaning out of his existence in his journey with Alberto. The transformation into the Che avatar later comes as an obvious outcome. This film is only the prelude to Che, the revolutionary.
Lastly, the scene of Ernesto swimming across the Amazon on his birthday marks the climax, where to be or not to be Che is decided upon. I later learn from Walter’s interview (once again) that had it not been for Alberto Granado, the old man himself still alive, breathing and reminiscing, the entire episode would remain buried in the almost unnoticeable half a sentence mention in the diary itself. For it is such that Ernesto Guevara “had a certain timidity” [1] when it came to expressing about himself, a quality that continues fuelling the fervor, compassion and conviction of the great revolutionary icon.
Hasta Siempre Commandante. (Until Always Commander)
REFERENCES:
Walter Salles (2004 Interview). Accessed September 8, 2009
Website: http://www.thenitmustbetrue.com/salles/salles1.html
José Rivera (2004 Interview). Accessed September 8, 2009 Website:http://www.thenitmustbetrue.com/rivera/rivera1.html
Guevara, E. The Motorcycle Diaries. London and New York: Verso. 1995.
Salles, W. The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)