Abstract
This thesis explores two main questions: First, why is allusion to the filmic trope of theOutsider so prevalent throughout the literature of Charles Bukowski and the Beat
Generation writers? Second, how does this filmic allusion affect the writing? My
hypothesis is that the masculine figure of the Outsider in Beat literature is heavily
informed by that of the Outsider appearing in twentieth-century American cinema,
portrayed by actors like Charles Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, George Raft
and Burt Lancaster. I argue that these hyper-masculine cinematic portrayals significantly
impacted Bukowski and the Beats, affecting the written expression of their
autobiographical identities plus their fictional characters. I examine how film created a
generation-wide and oft-overlooked cinephilia — a collective love of film that inspired
these writers in their literary experimentations, manifesting itself in their works in the
figure of a transposed filmic Outsider-poet hybrid.
My critical approach is principally socio-historical; I juxtapose selected
literature with contemporarily evolving film genres (e.g. gangster movies and film noir),
employing the lenses of cultural discourses and theories emergent around the Beat
coming-of-age (e.g. existentialism and the Self). Primary sources by Bukowski include
what I argue are film-inspired poems like “upon this most delicate profession” and “the
bluebird”. Other foci include: Jack Kerouac’s “The Origins of the Beat Generation”; Frank
O’Hara’s “To the Film Industry in Crisis”; Gregory Corso’s “The Last Gangster”. Critiques
employed to contextualize Bukowski with the Beats include those by Paul Clements,
Russell Harrison, Julian Smith and Jean-François Duval. Studies selected to explore the
cinema-literature relationship include those by Laurence Goldstein, David Trotter and
David Sterritt. Treatise cited to analyze the Outsider, the Other and the Liminal include
those by Jean-Paul Sartre, Colin Wilson, Albert Camus, Victor Turner and R. D. Laing.
My contribution reveals two new literary techniques, namely: (1) Perflection
— the act of ‘performance-based reflection’ employed by an author or character in
imitation of what the author has seen in cinema. I show that Bukowski’s on-page
machismo (his construction of Self as Other) is a perflection of the onscreen disaffected
manner that he observed in Outsider performances by macho character actors like Bogart
and Cagney; correspondingly, I suggest that Kerouac’s method for writing On the Road on
an elongated paper scroll is a perflection of filmmaking technique which similarly employs a film reel. (2) Perjection — the act of ‘performance-based projection’ used by an
author or character to project (mentally) an image through a real or imagined glass lens
(e.g. window or car windscreen) onto a character beyond in voyeuristic imitation of that
seen in cinema. Perjection is a mode of seeing from the Outsider position, involving a
psycho-mechanical self-metamorphosis that transforms the author’s or character’s eye
into (essentially) a projector. My cultural–theoretical contextualizing throughout the
thesis helps to highlight the location and role of the filmic Outsider in Beat thought, while
perflection and perjection elucidate how Bukowski et al employ the filmic Outsider to
dynamize their writing.
| Date of Award | 2021 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Gina Wisker (Supervisor) & John Wrighton (Supervisor) |