A Following

Charles Bukowski

Fiction | Poem | Adult

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Postwar Independent Literary Culture

Thanks in part to the invention of the mimeograph machine, a low-cost means of reproducing print that the photocopier eventually replaced in the late 1960s, the 1950s, and early 60s saw a proliferation of small independent literary magazines and presses across the country. These artist communities operated in relative independence from both the academy and the philanthropic foundations and nonprofit corporations that fund much of the arts today. Bukowski’s main publisher, John Martin, used earnings from his office supply business to create Black Sparrow Press with the specific intent to support Bukowski, who Martin considered the “new Walt Whitman” (Smith, Jonathan. "'I Never Saw Him Drunk’: An Interview with Bukowski’s Longtime Publisher." Vice, 20 June 2014. Accessed 10 April 2019.). Martin offered Bukowski a monthly stipend of $100 to quit his job at the post office and focus on writing full time. This was a game changing development for Bukowski, who had previously published his work through small chapbooks and cheap pamphlets. Martin’s office supply business afforded him access to an actual printing press, which became the basis for the signature boutique style of Black Sparrow Press’s publications. Black Sparrow Press’s first publication was a broadside for Bukowski’s poem “True Story,” published in an edition of 30. “A Following” seems to assume the audience’s familiarity with the independent literary culture of the postwar years as it lovingly and mockingly satirizes the haphazard, ad hoc nature of publishing and literary production at that time.

Obscenity Trials of the 19th and 20th Century

While themes of censorship in literary works extend at least as far back as the Roman poet Ovid’s masked allusions to his exile at the behest of Augustus Caesar in his Metamorphoses, modern and modernist literature has a particularly rich history of controversies over free speech and censorship, yielding spirited debates over the artistic value of obscenity. Gustave Flaubert was brought to trial in 1857 when his novel Madame Bovary represented a married woman involved in an affair. Allen Ginsberg’s publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti won a case in court after having been arrested for publishing Ginsberg’s poem “Howl.” The judge decided that the poem’s references to illicit drug use and sex with straight and gay partners were of “redeeming social importance” due to the work’s aesthetic and literary status (Ferlinghetti, Lawrence. “Horn on Howl.” On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg, edited by Lewis Hyde, University of Michigan Press, 1984, pp. 42-53). As with the previous example of literary subcultures, Bukowski seems to assume his audience’s familiarity with such debates about censorship, obscenity, and the social or literary value of profanity when the poem associates the third caller’s disembodied “voice” with blue language. Within the context of these debates, such seemingly transgressive acts were at times seen to have an inherently authentic, and so socially redemptive, value. But the poem’s ambivalent stance toward the callers, expressed in Chinaski’s final lines, seems also to throw into question whether merely hurling obscenities in a poem would automatically invest it with literary value.