Allen Ginsberg“Supermarket in California”-Analysis

Kozyreva Margarita

（Southwest Jiaotong Technical University，Chengdu Sichuan 614202）

Abstract：Irwin Allen Ginsberg?(June 3, 1926 April 5,1997) was and still is the most respected acclaimed American poet, philosopher and writer. He is considered to be one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation during the 1950s and the Counterculture of the 60th that soon followed. Ginsberg as well as other new generation poets rebelled against the conventions of mainstream American life and writing. He was one of many influential American writers of his time known as the Beat Generation, which included famous writers such as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs who sought to write in an authentic unfettered style.The Beat Generation?was a literary movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s.Central elements of Beat culture are advocating for personal release, purification, and illumination through the heightened sensory awareness that might be induced by jazz, disciplines of Zen Buddhism etc.Ginsberg took part in decades of non-violent political protests against everything from the Vietnam War to the War on Drugs.His collection The Fall of America shared the annual U.S. National Book Award for Poetry in 1974.In 1979 he received the National Arts Club gold medal and was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Ginsberg was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986-1992.

Key words：Ginsberg；poetry；beat generation

“A Supermarket in California”is both an ode to Ginsberg’s poetic hero and major influence, Walt Whitman, as well as an early experimentation with many of the themes that would dominate his work throughout his career. Whitman, a nineteenth century poet, experimented with meter and rhythm and eschewed the structured line and stanza which was the standard form for poetry of his time. Additionally, Whitman’s poems often glorified a sexually expressive mode of being, using veiled references to promote both a spiritual and sexual freedom. Ginsberg sought to continue Whitman’s legacy stylistically and thematically.

Ginsberg also pays homage to another influence in“A Supermarket,”Garcia Lorca. Lorca was an influential Spanish poet in the early 20th century. Lorca was killed at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War by the right wing Spanish Nationalists for his own leftist political views. Lorca was an influence on Ginsberg mainly for his own homage to Whitman in his own poetry. Like Ginsberg, Lorca saw as an influence Whitman’s disregard for poetic rules and structure and for his controversial subject matter that prized free thought and expression over cultural conformity.

“A Supermarket in California”begins with Ginsberg recounting a particular vision he had one night while living in Berkeley, California. He opens by setting the scene: he is walking down a street, under trees and a full moon, having “thoughts”of Walt Whitman.For Ginsberg, the setting is important here. He feels pulled by two sides of life, one represented by the urban landscape of Berkeley and the Bay Area, the second is the natural world symbolized by the trees and the moon. These symbols remind him of Whitman, who sought to find a truer world and identity in nature.

Ginsberg, with a “headache” (2) and in a“hungry fatigue”that is part physical and part spiritual, who is looking for solace from the existential crisis he is facing, wanders into what he terms as a “neon /fruit supermarket”(4-5). He is“dreaming”of Whitman’s “enumerations,”meaning that he hopes the supermarket will hold a glimpse of the world Whitman spoke of in his poetry. Ginsberg is looking to history to help him answer the economic and social questions that his modern world has posed. The term“neon,”a harsh false light, foreshadows the inevitable disappointment that the reader knows Ginsberg will find.

Ginsberg enters the supermarket hoping to find beauty in the natural products of the supermarket. His hope is that he can look beyond the commodification of modern society. Line six illustrates Ginsberg’s surprise and cynicism for what he finds there. “What peaches and what penumbras!”he exclaims. The penumbras, a word meaning “shroud”or “partial illumination,”are meant to designate the secrets that such displays of nature and domesticity hide. These secrets are hidden the “Whole families shopping at / night!,”night being another allusion to the darkness of industrialized society that demanded the illusion of the perfect nuclear family. Line eight ends the poem first stanza and is a brief homage to another Whitman admirer, Garcia Lorca.

The second stanza begins Ginsberg’s imaginative encounter with Walt Whitman. Ginsberg claims that“I saw you, Walt Whitman...poking / among the meats...and eyeing the grocery boys” (9-10). Ginsberg means these lines to be a double entendre, “poking among the meats”being a crude term for male intercourse and“eyeing the grocery boys”an acknowledgement for Whitman’s alleged sexual fondness for young boys. Ginsberg continues the sexual imagery in lines eleven and twelve when he claims that Whitman asked “Who killed the pork chops? / What price bananas? Are you my Angel?”These lines use supermarket imagery to denote a primal kind of sexuality, rooted in nature but bastardized by the profit motive of industrialized society.

But Whitman gives him a vision of another kind of life because Whitman is able to find the beauty in the mass of commodities that confronts him. Ginsberg follows Whitman “in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans” (13) and watches him “tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the /cashier”(16-17). Whitman is the one figure in the poem able to bypass the demands of profit and payment that the supermarket demands. Instead, he is able to taste the food, the symbol of the natural, without having to pay for its pleasures.

The final stanza of the poem finds Ginsberg less optimistic of the world that he now inhabits. He questions Whitman: “Where are we going...The doors close in an hour” (18). This is a tacit acknowledgment that the vision he is having cannot last. Whitman’s glorification of the natural world cannot stand in the face of economic modernity where everything is for sale and everything has a price. Ginsberg admits that he feels“absurd”for having such an optimistic vision of seeing the esthetic beauty in a supermarket’s commodities(20-21). Ginsberg knows that there is no place that he and Whitman can go to find Whitman’s pure vision of the natural society and the natural man. Their quest through the “solitary streets,” past symbols of a“lost America”such as cars and dark houses will lead them only to loneliness (22-25).

To sum up, the poem is meant to show the change from 19th century optimism to the "ennui" portrayed in Ginsberg's poems. Ginsberg's portrayal of the evolution of society is shown within the lines, "I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas?"?In Whitman's day, he would have known the answer to those questions because back then, one would go to the farmer directly to get the products unlike the modern American supermarkets where one does not know where the products come from.