The Role Of Parhesia In Literature

The attempt to go against the dominant conventional ethics and to make visible the problems of the contemporary socio-politico-literary scene is what relates the Beat Generation Movement of the 1950s in the USA and the Hungry Generation Movement of the 1960s in India in a thread. Diverse in cultural, social, political contexts, these two movements arguably attempted to tear apart the existing modes of literary conventions and to (sometimes violently) critique the existing centres of power which no other literary movement claimed to promote. In the process of understanding and analyzing their attack on the conventions, the classical concept of Parrhesia ("free speech") and the Foucauldian relocation of the term in the modern day contexts are

To understand and analyze whether these two movements pursue their claim to truth and thereby follow the notion of parrhesiaor not, an overview of the concept is imperative here. As Michel Foucault, in a lecture series, talks about, the word parrhesia appears for the first time in Greek literature in Euripides and then continues to be found in the classical texts. Parrhesia is generally translated into English as "free speech" and the parrhesiastes is the one who uses parrhesia or the one who speaks the truth. "Etymologically, parrhesiazesthai means to say everything - from pan (everything) and rhema (that which is said). The one who uses parrhesia, the parrhesiastes, is someone who says everything he has in mind: he does not hide anything" (Foucault 12). Moreover, according to Foucault, in parrhesia, the speaker himself is the subject of the opinion he upholds. What proves the sincerity of a parrhesiastes is his courage and the risk involved in his act, as Foucault says, "Someone is said to use parrhesia and merits considertation as a parrhesiastes only if there is a risk or danger for him in telling the truth" (16). Parrhesia, in the Foucauldian notion, is essentially linked to the centre(s) of power as the function of always happens in a

Allen Ginsberg, for example, has repeatedly been mentioned as the poet who was courageous enough to speak the truth through Howl and other poems. A most famous witness for the defense of the Howl trial, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, argues that Ginsberg was an "honest poet" (qtd. in Raskin 221). Tennesse Williams saw the 1955 Six Gallery reading as something "brave and honest" (Raskin 6). In his introduction to Empty Mirror, Williams comapred Ginsberg to Dante and said that Ginsberg saw "the truth, undressed" (qtd. in Raskin 108). In fact, in a later poem, America, Ginsberg asks God to inspire him to "salvage some remnant of the truth/ of all society" (qtd. in Raskin 119), which clearly points out his claims to be a parrhesiastic figure who thinks it to be his duty to speak the truth. Raskin confirms, "[T]hat was Allen Ginsberg 's project; he wanted to tell the truth in poetry in his own way . . ." (122). Raskin says, when Ginsberg wrote, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical, naked," he meant to be literal and not metaphorical; he professed that he had in fact stood witness as many of the brightest literary figures of his generation, like Kerouac, Carl Solomon, William and Joan Burroughs had gone crazy (165). He was a reporter and his obligation, as