ABSTRACT
Like everything else "Belgian", its reality defies the scenario of straight lines that may apply to older cultures with a much more stable and strongly unified sense of identity. This chapter proposes to go beyond an exclusively philological-textual approach in its effort to understand what the Beat legacy has done within Francophone Belgium to writers' and artists' imagining of their own world in their own language. Equally importantly, in parallel with this aspiration to roam between languages, cultures, and mental states, the Belgian Francophone transmutation of the Beat generation has often been less a question of recycling actual texts than particular energies. Here again, the spirit of the Beats—"spirit" both in the sense of "primordial breath" and disembodied presence in the background—looms large, with the recitative energies of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Waldman permeating such performance-oriented creations.
