Ginsberg’s poem ‘‘Howl.’’ At two key junctures
in the poem, Ginsberg incorporates the image of
a Ping-Pong game into descriptions of his lover
Carl Solomon. In part 1, Ginsberg uses Ping-
Pong to satirize the medical treatments adminis-
tered to Solomon in a mental asylum and to
dramatize the human struggle for self-expression.
By evoking the repetitive, almost mindless nature
of the game and its frivolity as a pastime, Gins-
berg illuminates the moral and spiritual empti-
ness of Solomon’s hospital experiences. Then, in
part 3, he returns to the metaphor of Ping-Pong
to explore the forces of love and death that oper-
ate on Solomon. At the end of ‘‘Howl,’’ Gins-
berg’s destabilizing images of Ping-Pong have
transformed the seemingly innocuous word into
a round, complex symbol that speaks to his rela-
tionship with his lover, his project as a poet, and
his notion of death; Ginsberg may be the game-
playing type, but he makes Ping-Pong a very
serious affair.
When he equates the modern treatment
methods of mental hospitals with Ping-Pong,
Ginsberg mocks the methods’ effectiveness by
implicitly reducing them to the level of a mere
game. He writes, ‘‘and who were given instead
the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity
hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational ther-
apy pingpong & amnesia,’’ when he first describes
the ‘‘madhouse’’ that Carl Solomon inhabits in
part 1. As Ginsberg goes down the line of treat-
ments, they become increasingly more obscure
and less physical, from intravenous drugs (insulin
and Metrazol), to shock treatment (electricity
hydrotherapy), to mental conditioning (psycho-
therapy and occupational therapy), and finally to
Ping-Pong. Ironically, all of the zealous, invasive
treatment methods of modern medicine resolve
into the child’s game of Ping-Pong, the stereo-
typical form of amusement allowed hospital
patients. The unfeeling doctors may have victi-
mized his lover Solomon and countless others at
the mental ward, but Ginsberg turns the tables of
power by denigrating their work in his poetry.
Although it ridicules the practices of the
madhouse, Ping-Pong’s inclusion in the list of
treatments also extends Ginsberg’s image of the
‘‘concrete void’’ at the heart of mental hospitals.
Through his elision of the commas that would
normally separate the different treatments in
prose, Ginsberg casts them as a single entity,
impossibly unified like ‘‘concrete’’ and ‘‘void.’’
As a result, each item in the laundry list of treat-
ments loses its individual meaning, just as each
recipient of these treatments risks losing his
individual personality. ‘‘Amnesia’’—the ultimate
detachment from and erasure of one’s own self—
awaits the mental patient at the end of the day. By
not differentiating the items in his catalogue of
treatments, Ginsberg thus personifies their dehu-
manizing effects. The banality of Ping-Pong
(which one imagines most patients playing just
to pass the time) and its apparent disjunction
from the other items in the list further extend
this sense of dehumanization, of meaninglessness.
Ping-Pong may be a symbol for Ginsberg’s power
as a writer, but it also serves as a symbol for his
helplessness to protect his lover Solomon from
the tortures of the asylum.
Beyond its symbolic implications for Solo-
mon’s treatment and his personal plight, the
repetitions that Ginsberg creates around ‘‘ping-
pong’’ also engage the image in a deeper, more
abstract dialogue on the human condition.
Entering the poem after three consecutive uses
of ‘‘therapy,’’ the word ‘‘pingpong’’ has its own
internal rhyming quality. Though ‘‘Ping-Pong’’
is the correct spelling, Ginsberg marks the sig-
nificance of the word and highlights its internal
rhyme by omitting the dash. Embedded in the
external repetitions of the catalogue of treat-
ments, the internal repetition of sounds in ‘‘ping-
pong’’ places the word at the core of the concrete
void, a point driven home by Solomon’s decision
in the next stanza to overturn ‘‘one symbolic
pingpong table.’’ Although the aggressive treat-
ments of mental hospitals, such as forced drug
injections and electric shocks tend to provoke
the loudest public objections, Ginsberg locates
the empty monotony of ‘‘pingpong’’ at the core
of the concrete void’s suffocating darkness.ALTHOUGH THE AGGRESSIVE TREATMENTS OF
MENTAL HOSPITALS, SUCH AS FORCED DRUG INJEC-
TIONS AND ELECTRIC SHOCKS TEND TO PROVOKE THELOUDEST PUBLIC OBJECTIONS, GINSBERG LOCATES THE
EMPTY MONOTONY OF ‘PINGPONG’ AT THE CORE OF
THE CONCRETE VOID’S SUFFOCATING DARKNESS.’’Howl