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The mimetic notion of fiction that drives the work of mainstream writers from Richardson through Raymond Carver -- the dioramalike illusion of real-seeming people in real-seeming settings and situations, with incidents selected and contrived to give the work a distinct and dramatic shape -- interested the Beats only as reading matter (Burroughs liked to kick back with Frederick Forsyth), not as the proper business of a serious writer.

The critique of American life in "Naked Lunch" isn't essentially different from that in John Cheever's contemporaneous Shady Hill stories. Burroughs evoked "a vast subdivision, antennae of television to the meaningless sky. In lifeproof houses they hover over the young, sop up a little of what they shut out. Only the young bring anything in, and they are not young very long." And he could spin out surreal parodies of TV-commercial consumerism: "AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE (opening a box of Lux): 'Why don't it have an electric eye the box flip open when it see me and hand itself to the Automat Handy Man he should put it inna water already ...'" But it wouldn't have occurred to Burroughs to try to limn AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE's secret sorrows. She's not a character, but simply a voice in one of those "routines," in which you seldom have to dig deep to hit polemical paydirt.

Cheever, on the other hand, half anthropologist and half fabulist, created an imaginary suburbia in rich and convincing (if sometimes ostentatiously loony) detail, and peopled it with plausible (if sometimes ostentatiously loony) imaginary suburbanites. Francis Weed, in "The Country Husband," rebels as bitterly as any Beat from what was then called "conformity" -- he just doesn't have the nerve to do much of anything about it -- and the miracle cure for his seven-year itch (psychiatry and therapeutic woodworking) seems parodic. Yet Cheever -- and in this he's more like the openhearted Kerouac than the fiercer Burroughs -- also saw the sweetness, the covert, ultimately irrepressible anarchy and the admirable if smug and clubby decencies of Shady Hill.

On the one hand, truth and prophetic intensity; on the other, verisimilitude and negative capability. Readers don't really have to choose sides, even if Norman Podhoretz says they do. Anybody's library should have room for the book of Revelation (that most Burroughsian of sacred texts), William Blake and Allen Ginsberg, as well as Shakespeare, Jane Austen and T.S. Eliot. Writers, though -- except in their capacity as readers -- can't afford to keep an open mind. The Beats' ethic of spontaneity, their suspicion of form, their openness to aleatory techniques (as in Burroughs' cut-ups), their extreme subjectivity and their spiritual dogmatism are strong temptations to unformed writers. Kerouac's "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" recommends "no pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained" -- and no revisions after the fact. In a list entitled "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose," he advises writers to "remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibitions" and reminds them, "You're a Genius all the time."

This sounds like a lot more fun than Flaubert sweating bullets all day to grind out two sentences -- more fun for the writer, at least -- and far more productive than Philip Roth's standard practice of writing a hundred pages or so to get a few lines that could serve as the starting point for a novel. But it takes a leap of faith to consider every vagary of consciousness aesthetically sacred, and such faculties as judgment, taste and discrimination unholy mutations, offenses against the spirit. And readers with such faculties may not leap with you.

Next page | Even the Beats revised their work -- sometimes