Customer Reviews

The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs

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Dr. Lardas' grounding of the early Beats' intellectual program in their communal reading of Oswald Spengler's _Decline of the West_ is an unusually substantive contribution to the field. Too often, monographs on the Beats are either tedious [strange] political treatises masquerading as literary history, or hagiographies of Kerouac's youthful wanderlust, neither of which category of inquiry could possibly add anything to the witness of the individual artists in question through their works. However, Lardas shows that Spengler's vision of the cyclical nature of civilization and the contemporeneity of the end of the Western European cycle led Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg to look for the seeds of the next cycle in the vibrant, marginalized communities of which they were a part.

Dr. Lardas' prose style can best be described as "sparkling ramble". The energy of his ideas, bursting with the Mediterranean vigor of his jacket photo, at times overwhelms the larger structure of the book that is laid upon them. Happily enough this compositional tension congrues with the subject matter.

Bless my soul jelly roll, this is not ordinary literary criticism about sources and influences but an epic drama, a hero's journey. A murderer, a schizophrenic, a male prostitute and an alcoholic read a proto-Nazi theory of everything and find personal redemption through pop culture.

But is this the final frame of reference? Every generation since has struggled to re-frame the meaning of the past day by day, and I suspect that's what this book (or its subject matter anyway) is "really" about. It's post-modern, rock-and-roll, cheese bait and cadillac fins. You be the poem.