| Introduction, continued |
 |
| 3. Kerouac's 'Spontaneous'
Style |
| Those familiar with criticism
of Kerouac must by now have observed that I have diverged
a long way from most lines of argument concerning his
writing. Instead of placing stress on his attainment of
spontaneous authenticity, I have instead suggested his
narrators simultaneously pursue such authenticity and
call this enterprise into continuous question - most concertedly
in the period 1950 to 1956. This is a core feature of
Kerouac's famous prose style: it generates a series of
free-flowing long sentences, on the one hand seeking to
recapture experience whilst on the other demonstrating
its fluid elusiveness - a contradictory enterprise galvanized
by what he himself, in his essay 'Essentials of Spontaneous
Prose', terms 'jewel centers': 'CENTER OF INTEREST. Begin
not from preconceived idea of what to say about image
but from jewel center of interest in subject of image
at moment of writing, and write outwards'.33
Leroi Jones usefully re-christens these jewel centers
Kerouac's 'trigger inferences', points in the prose which
are 'usually very easy to recognize [as] the key-image
... acts as a trigger'.34
These sequences are always carefully located to mark a
particular moment of excitement, ecstasy, communion or
transport - in a very real sense a moment of transcendence
related to American transcendentalism's idealism (Kerouac,
like all the Beats, knew the transcendentalist writers
intimately).35
In the jazz-club passage above, the trigger-inference
'blow his top' fires the narrator's flood of recollection.
|
| Jazz 'bop' improvisation is
a major source of this 'jewel-center' triggering, as it
was more generally upon Kerouac's prose style, which draws
upon what Clark Coolidge describes as bop's 'ghost of
an off-beat' and 'longer lines'.36
Also important were the letters of Neal Cassady to Kerouac,
with their stylistic 'muscular rush', and Ed White's suggestion
to him that he 'sketch' with words in the early nineteen-fifties:
'Why don't you just sketch in the streets like a painter
but with words'.37
But its mixed literary antecedents need to be named as
well: particularly Whitman's use of anaphora in his construction
of long, ecstatic catalogues and rhapsodies, Proust's
long sentences unfolding Marcel's remembrances, and the
writing of Wolfe and Faulkner.38
Kerouac's 'spontaneous bop prosody' is in fact very artful.
It does not offer in any unadulterated way the spontaneity
of free-association and intuitive psychological processes
- though these play a key part. Paradoxically, it is its
very artfulness that raises doubts about how authentic
spontaneity can actually be. Inevitably, perhaps, given
the harrowing intensity of this self-flagellating process,
attempts at rapid spontaneity rarely dominate Kerouac's
writing for more than a few pages. Rather his writing
carefully builds up to these explosive moments. |
| I need to take a pause here
in my argument to confront what other critics have focused
upon: the fact that in his expository essays 'The Essentials
of Spontaneous Prose' and 'Belief and Technique for Modern
Prose' much of what Kerouac says misleadingly seems to
suggest a highly subconscious process, which would be
disrupted by any revision. This is why Kerouac's endless
writing practice was so important to honing his style.
His continual practice of the art of writing facilitates
transfer to the written page of a free-flowingness that
is almost peerless when at its best. But I am not convinced
that what is sought is any release of the subconscious.
The evidence offered by Kerouac's expository essays is
not decisive , and anyway is contradicted to some extent
by a passage in Desolation Angels, where the narrator,
Duluoz gets in an argument with two other writers (both
poets) and concedes that even in 'absolute spontaneity'
there is '"a certain amount of control going on"'
(DA, 280). In the same way, as Gerald Nicosia points out,
'a writer can learn to cut words in his head before he
puts pen to paper', so that he is 'virtually writing
it in his head', leading to minimal revision when
putting it on the page.39
|
| The point that, as James T.
Jones puts it, Kerouac therefore always 'admits a measure
of control' needs considerable emphasis, since so much
stress has understandably often been placed on the spontaneity
of Kerouac's 'spontaneous bop prosody'.40
Nicosia's final stricture in this respect is one with
which I wish to align myself: 'Kerouac understood that
certain types of writing require revision'.41
Indeed, Visions of Cody, which is usually (and
accurately) represented as the text produced when Kerouac
was most actively developing his ideas concerning writing
spontaneously, confronts the way that there is never any
escape from 'recall' and patently draws upon a
battery of different literary and popular cultural styles.
It is less of an unconscious flow and more of a
highly contrived and practiced exploration and questioning
of author-ity than simple talk of spontaneity can
allow. Indeed, it points to the way that learning to write
'spontaneously' involved Kerouac in arduous hours of practice.42
|
| Kerouac's spontaneous writing
is in fact highly artful. Indeed, to label it 'spontaneous'
at all may be irretrievably misleading (and in this respect
it is perhaps worth recalling that the two essays that
formulate this theory, 'Belief and Technique' and 'Essentials'
were not composed until 1953, after completion of The
Subterraneans). Designed to explore the issue of attaining
authenticity in writing, his style paradoxically draws
on two non-verbal art forms (sketching, jazz), as a means
of confronting the contradictions inherent in seeking
to use language spontaneously: improvisation is, after
all, improvisation upon something. Language-meanings inevitably
mobilize processes of memory and connotation. Drawing
extensively on James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness practices
in this respect, Kerouac can, in James T. Jones' phrase,
accept and appreciate 'the discontinuity of personality'.43
Kerouac's practice comes to illuminate Bakhtin's thesis
concerning language's culturally-rooted multiplicity.
This is why author-ity becomes such a central issue
in Kerouac's writing, and, indeed, why his narrators are
unreliable. |
| These issues are raised throughout
Kerouac's writing: moments of 'spontaneous' outpouring
are repeatedly framed by the introduction of or allusions
to other writing styles. These serve as a counterweight
to any suspension of narrative constraint in a flood of
spontaneity.44
The effect is to create a narrative voice which is highly
self-conscious: aware of the limits of author-ity,
of other voices beyond these limits, and of how spontaneity
is therefore always constrained. And this, in turn, further
complements and supports the deployment of narrative open-endedness.
There can be no sense of stable achievement, no moment
of artistic closure, and this is often set up in the implicit
or (as in Visions of Cody) explicit dialogue between
different stylistic modes, as well as in the play of different
viewpoints. |
| Bakhtin notes how 'self-consciousness'
is a characteristic of the protagonist in double-voiced
writing, which, in first-person narratives like Notes
from the Underground, will produce what he describes
as 'a vicious circle'.45
This vicious circle is indeed what we find in Kerouac's
fiction: firstly in his narrators' recognition of their
own limitations and the inevitability of these limitations,
setting up a play between their viewpoints and the voices
of others, and secondly, in the style in which they express
this recognition. |
| This study will explore how
these stylistic and narrative features of Kerouac's writing
evolve and modulate in the sixteen texts selected for
detailed examination.46
Kerouac's particularly insistent infusion of popular cultural
forms and styles into the writing that results marks him
out as a particular type of modernist writer: one definitively
concerned with exploratory 'high < > low' cultural
transgression, matching his unease with borders and boundaries
in the socio-cultural. |
| I do not mean to suggest that
Kerouac's writing has no links or debts in other directions,
beyond the ones I explore. Kerouac's reading is multi-layered:
the list of authors which we know he read is long, and
includes most major American and European modernists.
Julia Kristeva observes (in line with Bakhtin and Foucault)
that all writing is inevitable linked, as a discourse,
to other discourses which have preceded it and which surround
it - other 'texts' in the broadest sense of this word.47
I am suggesting, in other words, that the open-ended qualities
of Kerouac's texts are enhanced by their use of an enormous
range of self-conscious literary and cultural borrowing.
I view this very much as part of Kerouac's project, always
tending to maximize the circulation of meanings in his
texts, especially in his early to middle phase, problematizing
notions of identity, authenticity and hierarchialization.
Hybridity is central to Kerouac's art.48
|
| Yet this hybridity is chiefly
liberated by the way in which, like Proust's Marcel, Kerouac's
narrators have 'no power of detached observation'.49
Instead they become literally immersed in the ebb and
flow of their times and cultures. Rather than considering,
then, Kerouac's place in literary history, a central concern
of my study will be to explore the saturated relationship
between Kerouac's writings and their socio-cultural contexts,
and how this bears upon Kerouac's representations of subjectivity.
|
|
|
| Footnotes |
Jack Kerouac, 'Essentials of Spontaneous Prose', Evergreen
Review, Vol.2 No.5 (Summer 1958), p. 73.
Leroi Jones, 'Letter to the Editors', Evergreen
Review Vol.2 No.8 (Spring 1959), pp. 254-5.
See Cynthia Hamilton, 'The Prisoner of Self: The Work
of John Clellon Holmes', A. Robert Lee, ed., The
Beat Generation Writers, London: Pluto Press,
1996, p. 125.
Clark Coolidge, 'Kerouac', The American Poetry
Review, Vol. 24, Jan./Feb., 1995, p. 45.
Kerouac, 'Letter to Neal Cassady', Dec. 27, 1950,
Charters, ed., Selected Letters, p. 242; Ed
White, 1951, quoted in John Tytell, Naked Angels:
the lives and literature of the Beat Generation,
New York: McGraw Hill, 1976, p. 143.
In some cases, Proust's own 'trigger-inference' can
be quite apparent, as when the word 'telephone' triggers
a long memory-flow, in Remembrance of Things Past:
1, pp. 133-134. See also Kilmartin's description of
Proust's 'elaborate sentences [with] their spiralling
subordinate clauses', 'Note on the Translation', ibid.,
p. xi. See also, Wolfe's use of space-dashes and,
contingently, long sentences in Of Time and the
River, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1935 rpt. 1971,
pp. 422-423; William Faulkner's long sentences, often
used to arrest motion and taking on board the ideas
of Bergson about 'duration', bear in particular on
Kerouac's descriptions of ecstatic responses elicited
by jazz solos - see Absalom, Absalom!, 1936,
rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, pp. 112-3: 'the
same sphinx face... - The face ...' and The
Unvanquished, 1938, rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1984, p. 10.
Nicosia, pp. 307, 521. See also Cook, p. 74. He quotes
Lucien Carr: '"I'd get up in the morning to the
sound of him at the typewriter, come in at night and
he'd still be at it"'.
James T. Jones, A Map of Mexico City Blues
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992),
p. 137. The term 'spontaneous bop prosody' is Ginsberg's,
in his review of The Dharma Bums in The
Village Voice, Nov. 2, 1958, p. 3.
Nicosia, p. 481; Hunt takes a harder line: 'Kerouac's
later claims that he did not revise are not accurate
reflections of his practice or even his theory', Kerouac's
Crooked Road, p. 2.
Kerouac offers writing, not typewriting, to
invert Truman Capote's glib put-down, though Capote
is correct insofar as this 'writing' was often (but
not always) carried out on a typewriter, and when
at his most 'absolutely' spontaneous Kerouac leaves
typing errors unaltered and even plays with the resulting
linguistic effects. Philip Whalen reports how Kerouac
would type 'incredibly fast' and 'make a mistake and
this would lead him off into ... a funny riff of some
kind'. But such 'spontaneous' moments are rarely sustained,
and are usually located in the very texts that most
concertedly confront the paradoxes inherent in writing
spontaneously and the impossibility of ever attaining
a revision-free writing process (see Visions of
Cody and Old Angel Midnight in particular).
Hunt's Kerouac's Crooked Road is a fine study
of Kerouac's careful processes of revision. Capote
is quoted in Janet Winn, 'Capote, Mailer and Miss
Parker', The New Republic, Feb. 9, 1959, p.
28; see also McNally, p. 267. Capote uttered his verdict
on David Susskind's TV show, Open End. See
also Cook, p. 107. Whalen is quoted in Coolidge, p.
47.
Jones, p. 140.
Kerouac's fundamental debt to Joyce's Ulysses
provides just one example. See Chapter eleven.
Bakhtin, pp. 50-51.
Inevitably, this means I do not have the space to
pursue fully other issues. In particular, I can only
briefly observe that Kerouac's fusion of a hereteroglossic
writing style and dialogic narrative structure derive
from his literary influences to create a particular
sort of modernism. His multi-leveled and highly self-conscious
writing styles and narrative structures link him to
one mainstream of the modernist tradition, late high
modernism. Its characteristic narratological accentuation
of the modernist thematics of 'alienation, anomie,
... solitude, fragmentation and isolation' are centrally
present in Kerouac's fiction, which consequently,
like that of so many modernists, was received as 'ugly,
dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive,
and generally "anti-social"' (Jameson, Postmodernism
or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, pp.
1-11). This linkage limits the extent to which Kerouac's
writing mode should be related to other modernist
modes - for example, surrealism, to which his insistence
on spontaneity and (sometimes) the 'automatic' connect
him. I have chosen mostly to abjure the phrase 'self-reflexivity'
in this study, but it is plain that Kerouac's writing
is highly self-reflexive. Like the term 'intertextuality'
(see note 47), I find its lack of transparency unhelpful.
I have decided, by and large, to avoid using the term
intertextuality in this study, though I believe a
convincing study of Kerouac could adopt this approach.
I am using it here in the sense offered by Julia Kristeva.
As well as observing, in line with Bakhtin and Foucault,
that all writing is inevitable linked, as a discourse,
to surrounding discourses - other 'texts' in the broadest
sense of this word - Kristeva wants to make the point
that one aspect of intertextuality is a conscious
and deliberate linking of one's writing to other,
precursor text(s): so James Joyce's Ulysses
is self-consciously, dialogically, linked to its forebears,
most patently, Homer. Jonathan Culler, in commenting
on Kristeva's theory, sees this as a problem - a confusion
between two rather different types of intertextuality;
one existing as a sine qua non of language
(rooted in its heteroglossic construction), the other
as a process of borrowing and/or allusion. I do not,
myself, see this: rather it seems to me a case of
the degree of self-conscious brought to the inevitable
process of intertextuality, and the way that a highly
self-conscious intertextuality may translate itself
in open borrowings or allusions, highlighting the
dialogue between the original text (The Odyssey)
and the new text (Ulysses). It is this last
dimension that I find in Kerouac. See Julia Kristeva,
La révolution du language poétique,
1974, rpt. as The Revolution in Poetic Language,
trans. Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984, passim, and Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit
of Signs, London: Routledge, 1981, pp. 100ff.
Coolidge makes the point that one inspiration for
Kerouac's intertextuality resides in bop improvisation:
'Kerouac', p. 45.
My argument may appear to force me to regard Kerouac
as some sort of proto-postmodernist. After all, self-reflexivity
and hybridity are often regarded as key characteristics
of postmodern writing. Think of the definition of
the characteristics of 'blank fiction' that emerged
in the nineteen-nineties, to describe the work of
'Generation X' (see Douglas Coupland, Generation
X, London: Abacus Books, 1992): an urban setting;
a focus on young characters; an exploration of narcotics
and their effects; an exploration (sexploration) of
sexuality and sexual experiment/ excess/ perversity;
and a frequent and dense intertextuality, drawing
particularly upon popular cultural elements. Kerouac
might be regarded as an avatar of this fictional mode.
To an extent I think he is (again, this is not an
argument I intend to develop), but in one key way
he remains very different. 'Blank fiction', perhaps
above all, possesses a 'blank' prose style: flat,
unimpassioned (see Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney,
Shopping in Space: Essays on American 'Blank Generation'
Fiction, New York: Serpent's Tale, 1992). This
relates blank fiction, unlikely though this may at
first seem, to the playfulness, the ludicism of some
other post-modernist writing, to the extent that both
blank fiction and ludic fiction, at least on the surface,
do not overtly offer intense critical engagement
with the socio-political and cultural. Kerouac, by
contrast, creates unreliable narrators agonizingly
engaged in the dilemmas thrown up by their position
as alienated, self-conscious, drug-using-and-abusing
youths. I suspect Kerouac's protagonists' characteristic
disaffiliated self-questioning helps account for his
popularity with younger readers. It seems to me Kerouac
is not a proto-postmodernist, but rather working quite
centrally (though not exclusively) in a tradition
one can trace back to Joyce, Proust and Céline
(though I recognize the proximity of the very broad
gray area that lies between late modernism and some
post-modernist undertakings - as defined, say, by
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism,
London: Routledge, 1988, Hutcheon, A Poetics of
Postmodernism, London: Routledge, 1989 and Jameson,
Postmodernism). Kerouac's writing sets up an
intertextual dialogue with these forebears. It is,
however, not just in terms of the structural features
of his narrative that Kerouac can be related to late
high modernism. Jameson's proposal that, in thematic
terms, the modernist subject's 'radical isolation,
solitude, anomie and private revolt' gives way in
post-modernism to the 'fragmentation' of subjectivity
does speak to my discussion of Kerouac's production
of broken-backed, unstable self-divided dialogic narrators.
Kerouac within this taxonomy could be represented
as bridging between the two (ibid., p. 14). But Jameson
also constantly peels away from representing the move
from modernism into post-modernism as an ontological
fracture, rather emphasizing that postmodernism incorporates
'the shreds of its old avatars-of realism, even, fully
as much as modernism' (ibid., p. xii). It is this
suggestion which provides me with one lever for prizing
Kerouac away from the grasp of postmodernism, whatever
merits Tim Hunt may recently feel resides in launching
out in this direction (Hunt, 'Preface to the New Edition',
Kerouac's Crooked Road, Berkeley; University
of California Press, 1996, p. xxvi). Kerouac can perhaps
be best regarded as a modernist whose syncretistic
practices point the direction down which later modernist
writers (some of these nominated by some critics as
postmodernist writers) would proceed. My contention
would be that modernism remains much more than what
Jameson describes as a 'residual' (even an ironic
residual) within post-modernist aesthetic practices
(ibid., p. xvi). To explore this arena (and the sometimes
dubious distinctions that have flowed from the taxonomy
that Jameson reluctantly both uses and disowns) could
well be the subject of another study, but it is not
the project I have to hand here. Nor is it to relate
Kerouac's writing to theories of hybridity found in
postcolonial criticism, though Chapter Ten in particular
explores this field to an extent. This would involve,
again, a whole new study. My use of the term hybridity
is there related to the concept of hybridity defined
by Homi Bhabha. See, for example, 'The Commitment
to Theory', New Formations, No. 5, 1988, pp.
5-23. See also the discussions in Peter Childs and
Patrick Williams, An Introduction to Post-Colonial
Theory, London: Prentice Hall, 1997.
Proust,
Remembrance of Things Past: 3, p. 890. This
uneasiness about pretending to establish a discrete
subject-position, in turn, informs the aesthetic of
the New Journalism that developed in the latter half
of the Twentieth Century, saturated as this is with
journalists undergoing crises of subjectivity. See,
for example, the discussions pursued successively
by: John Hollowell, Fact and Fiction; Mas'ud
Zavararzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality; John
Hellman, Fables of Fact.
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