The Beat Fairy Tale and Transnational Spectacle Culture: Diane di Prima and William S. Burroughs

Abstract

In 1967, French philosopher Guy Debord (1931–1994) provocatively decreed that everything directly lived has become a representation. In this world, which he laid out in The Society of the Spectacle and later in Comments on The Society of the Spectacle (1988), “the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence” (Society Point 36). The spectacle created is the image-mediated social relationship among people. Jean Baudrillard, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and others have posited similarly, prophesying our current youth-culture obsession with zombies: mirror forms of what the Internet generation subconsciously fears it has become. Their world, a legacy of twentieth-century power exercised predominantly by commodification of freedom through material consumption, perpetuates the spectacle, which spreads virally, globally, as a fluid funhouse of signifiers without a signified. Within this time/space continuum, writers of the Beat Generation have struggled with their own versions of the zombie-walking death that spectacle generates, and as a result, Beat textual representation frets with itself, discursively puncturing and repairing the deigetic membrane of material and spectacle unity. The “frets” of this project are multiple, so it should come as no surprise that border-crossing spectacle developed as an intertextual characteristic of the Beat aesthetic, many writers intentionally blurring high and low cultural artifacts—often freely, sometimes perversely—to replicate, repudiate, and revise representations of nationhood, self, identify, and history.