On the Avenue of the Mystery : The Postwar Counterculture in Novels and Film

This volume is a study of eight major novels from the postwar period (1945–65) in conjunction with the films made from them during a later period of a little less than three decades straddling the millennium (1985–2012). The comparison of these novels (by Ken Kesey, Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, William Burroughs, and Peter Matthiessen) with their film adaptations offers the opportunity for a historical reassessment not only of the novelsthemselves but also of the global counterculture of the years 1965–75, which they prefigure in a variety of ways. Appearing more than a decade after the waning of the counterculture and in some cases as much as fifty years after the novels on which they are based, the films display significant revisions and omissions prompted by the historical and cultural changes of the intervening years. Whereas these changes are nowadays often interpreted in purely political terms, this book argues that the experience of mystery and its decline is central to the novels and films and is a key feature of the period of cultural transformation that they bookend. At once a work of literary criticism, film studies, and cultural history, this book has the potential to reach both an academic audience and the broader readership that has long existed for these novels as well as the even broader one interested in reappraising the period of the global counterculture—among the most important of the influences that have shaped the contemporary world. Chapters 1 and 2 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDFs under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at This volume is a study of eight major novels from the postwar period (1945–65) in conjunction with the films made from them during a later period of a little less than three decades straddling the millennium (1985–2012). The comparison of these novels (by Ken Kesey, Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, William Burroughs, and Peter Matthiessen) with their film adaptations offers the opportunity for a historical reassessment not only of the novelsthemselves but also of the global counterculture of the years 1965–75, which they prefigure in a variety of ways. Appearing more than a decade after the waning of the counterculture and in some cases as much as fifty years after the novels on which they are based, the films display significant revisions and omissions prompted by the historical and cultural changes of the intervening years. Whereas these changes are nowadays often interpreted in purely political terms, this book argues that the experience of mystery and its decline is central to the novels and films and is a key feature of the period of cultural transformation that they bookend. At once a work of literary criticism, film studies, and cultural history, this book has the potential to reach both an academic audience and the broader readership that has long existed for these novels as well as the even broader one interested in reappraising the period of the global counterculture—among the most important of the influences that have shaped the contemporary world.Chapters 1 and 2 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDFs under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com "This volume is a study of eight major novels from the postwar period (1945-65) in conjunction with the films made from them during a later period of a little less than three decades straddling the millennium (1985-2012). The comparison of these novels (by Ken Kesey, Paul Bowles, Carson McCullers, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, Alexander Trocchi, William Burroughs, and Peter Matthiessen) with their film adaptations offers the opportunity for a historical reassessment not only of the novels themselves but also of the global counterculture of the years 1965-75, which they prefigure in a variety of ways. Appearing more than a decade after the waning of the counterculture and in some cases as much as fifty years after the novels on which they are based, the films display significant revisions and omissions prompted by the historical and cultural changes of the intervening years. Whereas these changes are nowadays often interpreted in purely political terms, this book argues that the religious theme of mystery and its decline is central to the novels and films and is a key feature of the period of cultural transformation that they bookend. At once a work of literary criticism, film studies, and cultural history, this text has the potential to reach both an academic audience and the broader readership that has long existed for these novels as well as the even broader one interested in reappraising the period of the global counterculture-among the most important of the influences that have shaped the contemporary world"-- Provided by publisher This volume is a study of eight major novels from the postwar period (1945-65) in conjunction with the films made from them during a later period of a little less than three decades straddling the millennium (1985-2012). Cover 1 Half Title 2 Series Page 3 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Table of Contents 6 Preface 7 Chapter 1 After the Rebellion: The Postwar Counterculture and Its Legacy 10 Chapter 2 The Sands of Abjection in The Sheltering Sky 46 Chapter 3 The Ballad of the Sad Café and the Worldhood of the World 69 Chapter 4 On the Road and the Varieties of Religious Experience 91 Chapter 5 The Visionary Cinema of James Baldwin: Mystery and Contradiction in Go Tell It on the Mountain 120 Chapter 6 Counterculture Revisited: Young Adam Fifty Years Later 152 Chapter 7 The Gay Science of William Burroughs: Naked Lunch on Page and Screen 174 Chapter 8 At Play in the Fields of the Lord and the Ethnographic Imagination 212 Chapter 9 Mystery, Myth, and Ritual: The Aftermath of the Counterculture 239 Index 280 Postwar,Counterculture;,Cinema,of,James,Baldwin;,Gay,Science,of,William,Burroughs;,Ethnographic,Imagination;,On,the,Road;,The,Sheltering,Sky;,Young,Adam Postwar Counterculture,Cinema of James Baldwin,Gay Science of William Burroughs,Ethnographic Imagination,On the Road,The Sheltering Sky,Young Adam An extensive introductory chapter presents a critical history of the major conceptual and aesthetic influences that shaped the postwar counterculture in the strong form of their earliest statements. Although these are usually taken to be entirely heterogeneous and unrelated, the chapter demonstrates that each has at its core a form of mystery and that even those schools of thought that break most decisively with the Judeo-Christian tradition nevertheless preserve and recast this defining theme. It also proposes an intellectual framework within which the diverse currents of thought might be understood: the traditional distinction between "cataphatic" and "apophatic" theologies. The chapter ends with a reading of the novel and film that represent the single most successful assimilation of a countercultural narrative by the mainstream and suggests that One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest owed its period triumph to its inclusion of every one of these major themes, offering an anthology of the postwar counterculture's most significant intellectual influences