Mount Vernon’s Scott MacFarlane examines the key works of prose of the hippie movement of the 1960s and early 1970s and how the works are reflective of the counterculture.
Q: Until you wrote this book, there really was no defined genre of hippie narrative. How did you decide what to include?
A: First, I was surprised that no similar book has been written on the literature related to the hippie counterculture. When researching “The Hippie Narrative,” I focused on literary works that were either strong portrayals of the rise, crest or ebb of the hippie counterculture, directly about hippies or narratives that greatly influenced the hippies.
The 15 books and three essays I examined are, in my estimation, the most genuine literary reflections I could find from the hippie era. There is enough commonality of style and tone linked to the period to argue that these works comprise a canon of countercultural literature.
In my narrowing process, I differentiated the liberationist movements of the era, all based on the struggle for enfranchisement, from the hippie role in the counterculture, made up of the enfranchised heirs of those in the establishment. The hippies were not driven by ethnicity or gender, but voluntarily rejected the consumerism, militarism, racism and unfettered “progress” of the mainstream. For this reason, books from the mid-’60s such as “The Feminine Mystique” or “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” did not fit my criteria as hippie narratives.
Q: How do the writing styles of the Beats differ from the writing styles of the hippie narrative?
A: The writing of the Beats is notable for its jazz-like intensity and feel of spontaneity sustained throughout the entire novel or poem. This dithyrambic quality was supplanted, in these hippie narratives, by a tone that is less frenetic, less dark, and with a style that exhibits more playfulness and sense of whimsy.
The Eastern and Bohemian philosophies articulated in Beat literature vectored through the counterculture that followed. The hippie narratives carried forth the Beat preference for roguish characters and an “underground” posture of disaffection toward mainstream society. Both periods featured unconventional realism as mainstays and produced some wonderfully “alternative,” often picaresque, visions of the American experience.
In the ’60s and ’70s, hippierelated literature demonstrated wider experimentation with the narrative form including a heavier use of juxtapositional irony, surrealistic interludes and the intersubjective innovations of New Journalism, which is now called narrative journalism and is a seminal influence on today’s dominant literary genre –– creative nonfiction.
Q: In a recent interview with Tom Robbins in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, he refers to his years of “pursuing phantasmagorical novels down shadowy hallways.” Does that reconcile with your view of his writings and with other fiction writers of this time period?
A: The unconventional realism seen in the novels of Tom Robbins is, indeed, “phantasmagoric,” and I sense that the “shadowy hallways” are the author’s way of suggesting that he employs a comic surrealism to probe deeper philosophical and cultural issues. Of the works I chose to include in “The Hippie Narrative,” only “The Fan Man” by William Kotzwinkle is as overtly comic in tone and delivery as “Another Roadside Attraction” and “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.”
However, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” by Hunter S. Thompson, “Trout Fishing in America” by Richard Brautigan, and “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., rely on juxtapositional irony to convey the absurdity and fast-paced fragmentation of our American existence. By the 1980s this condition was labeled “postmodern.”
Other works I examine –– “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Sometimes a Great Notion,” “Divine Right’s Trip” and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” –– feature hallucinated tones, but as dramatic narratives, these books are more serious (as opposed to comic).
Q: Kotzwinkle has said that his characterization of E.T. “has a quality of humanity that is yet to come, and it has to do with love.” Furthermore, one critic has said that E.T. “senses the spiritual grandeur that modern technology is obliterating.” Can you place the hippie narrative in the context of those ideas? And perhaps carry it further, to ideas of utopia, for example?
A: The peace and love ethos of the hippies was, at its essence, intent on redefining the quality of our humanity. It’s certainly fair to ask when such yearning for spiritual grandeur crosses the line into utopianism.
Rather than using “utopian” as a dismissive label, perhaps we should ask ourselves to question when such a shift in consciousness is essential to our sustained survival as a species and when our quests are purely escapist.
Literary characters such as Chief Broom, Vivian Stamper, Valentine Michael Smith, Billy Pilgrim, Divine Right/David Ray, Horse Badorties and Marx Marvelous — all in very different ways — sought spiritual transcendence to cope with a modern malaise.
Q: How was the West a bed of fertility for the blossoming of such writers as Kesey and Brautigan, and how did their writings differ from those of Thompson, Mailer and Vonnegut?
A: Kesey and Brautigan structured their narratives in radically different ways. However, “Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Great Notion” and “Trout Fishing” were profoundly influenced by the loss of the pastoral and the shifting role of the wilderness in the human psyche. Both authors were born in 1935 and grew up in the Pacific Northwest. They developed Beat sensibilities after moving to the San Francisco area in the late ’50s. Unlike the works of East Coast writers Wolfe, Mailer, and Vonnegut, the writings of Kesey and Brautigan were shaped by the loss of frontier.
The spirit of Western rugged individualism and the wilderness to be confronted in post-World War II, modern America was suddenly more internal than external. In many ways, the back-tothe- land movement, and the psychedelia that flourished most strongly on the West Coast can be better understood within the context of America’s manifest destiny reverberating back on itself.
Q: Why was this book fun to write?
A: Once I decided to work chronologically from 1962 to 1976 and to (largely) devote one chapter for each work, the project took on a momentum of its own.
I enjoyed the way each author provided a different lens on this era of tumultuous change. The fun came from mining each work for its unique perspective on the era. For example, “The Armies of the Night” takes on the political climate of the times, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” looks at the sociology behind the burgeoning psychedelia and “Divine Right’s Trip” shows a young hippie couple trying to find an alternative path in the wake of what was arguably the largest bacchanalian upsurge that the world has ever witnessed.
It’s exceedingly difficult to write comprehensively about the explosion of change in the ’60s and ’70s, so letting these authors lead the way was fascinating. Their perspectives –– taken as a whole –– render an intriguing Gestalt of the hippie epoch.
Q: Do you think the readers of the novels and New Journalism who were in their 20s in the 1960s or who had some background in literary technique had a different understanding of what was being said in those works than perhaps those “over 30.” And how does your reflective analysis differ from those who were reading and perhaps changing their lives because they were reading “Siddhartha,” for example, in 1969?
A: My own reading of the texts in “The Hippie Narrative” was to examine authorial design and expression within the context of the ’60s and ’70s counterculture. I chose to include “Siddhartha,” written in 1922, and “Stranger in a Strange Land,” published in 1961, because these narratives shaped the formation of a hippie counterculture. Authors Hesse and Heinlein, in this regard, were in no way trying to communicate to a readership of hippies.
The mostly pejorative term “hippie” was largely media driven and very seldom used until 1967, when it became immediately widespread. However, these two books in particular became textual blueprints that helped these youth “share a community of meaning” and formulate lifestyles that broke from conventional Judeo-Christianity and traditions of monogamy.
In many ways, the hippie sense of “underground” community was created within a social vacuum of chaos. Certain music, art, poetry, comics and literature resonated within a youthful paradigm of free-spirited rebellion and hopefulness and led to what was called “the generation gap.” “Siddhartha,” with simple eloquence, suggested a new spiritual path. “Stranger” illustrated a Dionysian collectivism that came to be at the core of the hippie phenomenon. Heinlein, however, was shocked at the way hippies actualized his work of sci-fi to justify communalism, ecstatic religious practices and open relationships.
Reach Margaret Bikman at margaret.bikman@bellinghamherald.com or 715-2273.