Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.
Interpretation
Ginsberg emphasizes the enduring impact of 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' and its potential to shock and provoke thought long after its release.
In this quote, Allen Ginsberg expresses his belief that 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' is a powerful and transformative work of literature that should impact its readers profoundly. He envisions the book as a provocative force, serving as a critique of American society, and believes that its relevance will persist for generations, provoking reactions similar to 'a rusty hellish bombshell'. Ginsberg's desire for the book to be read and appreciated a century later reflects his view of its significance in challenging societal norms and igniting discussions about its themes.
In practice
In a literature class discussing impactful novels, this quote can highlight the lasting significance of controversial books.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.
Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness.
Many seek and never see, anyone can tell them why. O they weep and O they cry and never take until they try unless they try it in their sleep and never some until they die. I ask many, they ask me. This is a great mystery.
What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?
Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.
Sometime Iβll lay down my wrath, As I lay my body down Between the ache of breath and breath, Golden slumber in the bone.
All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.
The short story is still like the novel's wayward younger brother, we know that it's not respectable - but I think that can also add to the glory of it.
When we talk about books, we rarely talk about the economic side of writing, especially of writing literary works, and that, at base, it's a pretty costly enterprise.
You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book.
Race is the true protagonist of the American novel. Our most popular classic fictions have known this, from 'Moby Dick' to 'Beloved;' all these books take on race or talk it out, often in other forms; they are less 'horror stories for boys' than ghost stories from a haunted conscience.
The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.
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