When I first read Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” during high school, I was mesmerized by its foreboding fascination with the chaos of youth. That’s all it really was at first, this love of rebellion and an appreciation for its historical context that a teenager could appreciate. Though I was already doing some amateur research on the history of psychiatric institutions in the U.S., I didn’t make connections where I should have. My interests in the Beat Generation and psychiatric history were, for a while, separate.
One particular symbol in the lines of “Howl” that has continually stuck with me, though, is the game of ping pong.
I’m with you in Rockland where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss”
The game itself pops up three times in the poem, twice in Part I and once in Part III, specifically in lines that refer to Carl Solomon. While I understood ping pong is widely used as occupational therapy in mental health facilities, that was really the extent of it. In my mind, I could see the ball going back and forth and quickly chalked the symbolism up to chaos in a controlled (or, rather, controlling) environment. It evoked the falcon in Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” fleeing from its handler into a world of chaos and anarchy.
As I’ve grown and read “Howl” over and over again, ping pong has stood out to me against the rest of the poem’s rabidly mortal imagery. Something about a hollow ball being knocked between the force of two paddles seems, at times, even more human to me.
After a reading of the poem once more during my junior year here at the University of Richmond, I realized how much there was to learn about the effect of psychiatry on some of my favorite literature. I zeroed in on Part III and began to think more critically about the realities of Rockland. What does it say that this setting takes up such a sizable amount of this poem? Does Rockland seep into any of the rest of this poem or, for that matter, any of Ginsberg’s other works? How about the works of other Beat writers?