79 Thomas Merton and the Beat Generation: A Subterranean Monastic Community
D AVID B ELCASTRO
Y FEBRUARY OF 1967 Merton's concerns regarding monasticism in
the modern world had come to the point where he believed B significant change was necessary. A journal entry dated the sixth of that month reads: Monasticism. I see more and more the danger of identifying the monastic vocation and spirit with a particular kind of monastic consciousness-a particular traditi o n, h o wever auth en ti c. A monasticism limited to the medieval western - or worse still Byzantine - tradition cannot survive. It is utterly finished. I very much wonder how much the Rule of St Benedict can survive in practice. This is a very serious question. Maybe monasticism needs to b e stated all over again in a new way. I have no knowing how to tackle this idea. It is just beginning to dawn on me.1
After reading Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art,2 I began to explore the possibility of understanding Merton's efforts to redefine monasticism in light of the trickster tradition. In 'An Inquiry into Merton as Trickster,' 3 I demonstrated that the primary characteristics of the trickster are present in Merton, not as marginal but as essential qualities of his person, in particular, the inclination to redefine established institutions. At the end of that paper, I suggested several lines of inquiry for further study, one of which was his place within the American tradition of tricksters, specifically, his relation to Beat writers, a connection that has long been recognized but not as yet fully explored.4 A study of Merton's relationship to the Beat generation provides insight into his effort to find ways to redefine monasticism in and for the modern world. This paper will focus on what I believe to have