The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac's Quest for Spontaneous Prose
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The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac's Quest for Spontaneous Prose
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472120321 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 03/25/2014 |
| Series: | Editorial Theory And Literary Criticism |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 218 |
| File size: | 414 KB |
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The Textuality of Soulwork
Jack Kerouac's Quest For Spontaneous Prose
By Tim Hunt
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2014 University of MichiganAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-12032-1
CHAPTER 1
"The Roar of Time"
I FIRST READ Kerouac in the spring of 1971. I was living in an old trailer off a rural road outside Ithaca, New York. (It had something to do with the draft and the way things were then, which I won't bother to talk about.) I had heard of Gary Snyder and picked up The Dharma Bums. I didn't rush out for a rucksack but did buy a copy of On the Road — the cheap paperback with the bright yellow cover. I liked it well enough in a casual way. Next came Dr. Sax. That was when it hit me that Kerouac was not just a chronicler of his friends. In Sax the language was rich, rhythmic, and deeply individual. The novel was complex and layered, yet emotionally immediate. This Kerouac required the same complete attention that late Henry James required, but Kerouac's prose exhilarated while James's (at least for me at the age of twenty-one) did not. One attended to James's intricate subtleties. With Kerouac, one participated in the writing's dynamic unfolding. Kerouac's reputation was then in almost total eclipse. I was vaguely aware of Truman Capote's seemingly decisive barb — "That's not writing, that's typewriting" — and had come to Kerouac assuming he mattered, literarily, only because of his Beat betters. But from the first page of Dr. Sax, through The Subterraneans, "October in the Railroad Earth," and Visions of Cody (which I read in proofs the summer before McGraw-Hill published it), I was convinced that the best of Kerouac was indeed "writing."
Forty years after my initial traversal of Bums and Road, I am still convinced that Kerouac's work matters — aesthetically as well as culturally. And I am convinced that we have yet to account adequately for his approach to writing. This failure has been driven partly by our tendency to fixate on his biography and partly by the way the story of Kerouac drafting On the Road in three weeks, typing the book onto a 120-foot roll of tracing paper, has supported the misperception implicit in Capote's quip that Kerouac's commitment to Spontaneous Prose meant trading craft, control, and depth for mere surface momentum. But the books are more than kicks and colorful prose, and our general lack of attention to Kerouac's writing as writing, rather than typing, is one reason why we still have so little understanding of either his aesthetic achievement or the implications of his approach to writing — as distinct from the significance of the cultural circulation of his image.
In one sense, this failure matters little. While many (most?) of Kerouac's more acclaimed contemporaries have been retired to the assisted living of the teaching anthologies or entombed in literary histories and critical monographs to be honored only by the most scholarly and theoretically astute among us, Kerouac continues to be actively — and widely — read. His primary books can be found on the shelves of any Barnes & Noble, and new titles published from his papers find a ready audience. Even though academe has largely ignored Kerouac, he remains a cultural presence. Yet our failure to understand the nature of his writing has a cost. Until we understand how his writing was indeed writing — that is, until we understand the actual logic and dynamic of his approach and how he conceptualized writing and its relationship to language — we will fail to understand not only his more radical projects (such as Visions of Cody) but even his less radical work (most notably On the Road). Moreover, we will fail to understand why he helped enable the more fully validated experiments of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. But perhaps most significantly, we will fail to understand how Kerouac's experimentalism bears on what was at stake in the broader shifts in literary practice in the United States in the decades following World War II.
In Kerouac's Crooked Road: The Development of a Fiction (first published in 1981), I tried to address these issues. Working from the materials then available, I argued that Kerouac made five primary attempts at On the Road, taking a different approach to narrating his road material in each. In what I took to be the three primary attempts (each abandoned) prior to the three-week typing marathon that generated the novel as we know it, Kerouac first used an omniscient third-person point of view, then shifted to a limited third-person point of view, and finally tried using a young African-American boy traveling with his older brother as a first person narrator (Kerouac later used this material for his final novel, Pic). In this scenario, On the Road (as derived from the three-week April 1951 scroll draft and published by Viking in 1957) figured as the fourth version. Like the Pic material, this fourth On the Road also used a first-person narrator — but an adult, whose background and experiences echo Kerouac's own. Where the function of the child narrator in Pic, who speaks in dialect, is almost certainly modeled on Huck in Huckleberry Finn, the adult narrator of the published On the Road, Sal, perhaps owes something to Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. Following the April 1951 version, Kerouac made yet another attempt at the novel, working on it throughout the fall of 1951 through the spring of 1952. Parts of this version — for a time titled On the Road, for a time Visions of Neal, and finally Visions of Cody — were published by New Directions in a limited edition as Excerpts from Visions of Cody in 1959, and the complete Visions of Cody was finally published, posthumously, in 1972. Each section of Cody utilizes a different approach to writing, each of them more radical and experimental than the Viking On the Road.
In Crooked Road I developed three related claims. I proposed that Kerouac's explorations of point of view as he progressed from the conventional, omniscient third-person strategy of the earliest attempts at On the Road to the experiments of Cody argued against the view that he was simply typing out unreflective accounts of colorful adventures with colorful friends. Second, I proposed that both Road and Cody demonstrate Kerouac's deep investment in the American literary tradition, especially such paradigmatic texts as Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn, and that his dialogue with the tradition informed his two quite different completed versions of his Road novel. Third, I proposed that On the Road as published by Viking was, in spite of being composed in the brief span of three weeks, a relatively conventional novel with clear parallels to The Great Gatsby. It was then my sense that On the Road should be understood as Kerouac's final apprentice novel and that the more fully experimental Visions of Cody marked his maturity as a writer. It was my hope that the readings offered in support of these claims would establish that Kerouac should be treated as a significant experimental writer, just as Burroughs and Ginsberg were then being treated.
These claims have aged with varying degrees of grace. I would still argue that Kerouac's dialogue with earlier American texts was crucial as he developed his Road novel and that his sense of the tradition was acute and nuanced. But I've come to question the claim that On the Road is a relatively conventional novel. My failure to recognize the extent of Kerouac's experimentation in Road was due, I think, to two things: One was the desire to emphasize the achievement of Visions of Cody and to validate it as the final version of On the Road. Whatever Visions of Cody might be, the writing in it was clearly and unmistakably more than typewriting, and Cody seemed then a more powerful basis for arguing for the need to reexamine Kerouac and study his most distinctive and accomplished work, which I still believe is Visions of Cody and the work that followed directly after it — in particular, Dr. Sax. The other factor in underestimating the extent to which On the Road itself was already a break with mid-century conventions for the novel was the emphasis I placed on Kerouac's shifts in point of view across the series of attempts at Road as I'd mapped them from the evidence then available.
I still see Kerouac's efforts to develop a mode for his Road novel as in part a search for a narrative point of view that he could use (as he put it in a crucial letter to John Clellon Holmes written July 14, 1951) to "come to know & tell the truth (all of it in every conceivable mask) & yet digress from that to my lyric-alto knowing of this land, this huge complicated inland sea they call America." But the account of Kerouac's search for a voice and form in Crooked Road, while perhaps right enough in its general arc, is overly schematic. While Kerouac's successive attempts at his Road novel did involve experimenting with point of view, the question is why point of view was such an issue for him. In labeling his mode of writing Spontaneous Prose, by allowing Ginsberg and others to celebrate — even mythologize — the drafting of On the Road in three weeks as a "scroll," and by terming his style "bop prosody" (thus linking it to the jazz innovations of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie), Kerouac pointed to one answer: that the road experience, especially as exemplified by Neal Cassady (the prototype for Dean in On the Road and Cody in Visions of Cody) required a mode of writing that could express the speed, discontinuities, and modulations that were features of the road as he'd experienced it. But his correspondence and work journals show that he did not develop Spontaneous Prose until October 1951 — half a year after the On the Road scroll — as he worked on what became Visions of Cody. To understand the presumed spontaneity of the Viking On the Road, we need to consider how it anticipates but also differs from the more radical approach to writing in Visions of Cody.
But even distinguishing Spontaneous Prose from the experiment of the On the Road scroll is not enough. Kerouac's approaches to point of view in his attempts at On the Road, his sense of bop prosody, and his formulation of Spontaneous Prose reflect a more fundamental issue that derives from the way he experienced language. Until we address this, we will continue to misconstrue the nature and significance of his experimental approach to writing and fail to understand the nature and extent of his achievement in Visions of Cody.
For the most part we shift so easily and unconsciously between speaking/ hearing and writing/reading that they simply seem two aspects of the same thing — language. Yet there are important differences. Speaking — the immediacy of voiced language — is intrinsically interactive and interpersonal; it is a behavior. Speaker and listener are physically present to each other, and the listener engages the speaker's linguistic acts directly. Writing, though, eliminates this behavioral immediacy. The transaction between writer and reader is displaced, deferred, and mediated through the written object. For a reader, the writer is necessarily absent. In writing — and reading — what is present is writing, not the writer (or as Barthes would have it, what is present is the written object he terms a "text"; what is absent is the "author," since the displacement inherent in writing causes the author's death in the sense that the "author" can be neither actually in the "text" nor present for the reader). And for the reader, the writer's composing is necessarily an absence. The reader can infer it has happened but not engage it directly.
Although language is present for both listener and reader, for the listener it is present as the embodied action of the physically actual speaker, while for the reader it is present as the visual materiality of the text — a written object that attests to its having been written but can neither disclose the dynamics of its writing, nor what it meant for the writer to write it. In speaking, language is like shaking hands; the action "means" largely through the transaction of the two people joined in the gesture. In writing, language is an object, which can be taken up and considered by any number of different readers at different times, in different places, under different conditions, for different purposes, and generating different responses. When I talk to you, I interact with you directly. When I write to you, I construct an object, which you, whomever you are and whenever and wherever you may be, could read if you chose to. Unlike the case with speaking/hearing where we, both I and you, are present to each other, in writing/reading I and you are rhetorical positions, each constructed (by the writer in the act of writing and preserved in the writing), and neither the actual I nor actual you are directly knowable to the other. With writing, the I and you are both linked and separated by writing. The act has become fully replaced (erased and overwritten) by the product of writing — that is, the piece of writing — and the way print multiplies the written object, while removing the personal traces of handwriting, intensifies this.
For the most part we adjust without thinking to differences in how writers conceptualize writing as a medium, which is in part a matter of how they conceptualize the relationship of speaking and writing. We read Whitman's songs of himself one way; we read e.e. cummings's typographical constructions a different way. We shift back and forth so "naturally" between language as the immediate, interactive behavior of speaking and language as the deferred, constructed object of writing that we become relatively blind (and deaf) to the differences between these two systems, and our failure to register the gap between them can even lead to conceptualizing speech and speaking as if they are a byproduct of writing and the written.
The differences between speaking and writing as modes of language should, it seems, matter little for writers of literature and their readers. Writers write to produce writing. Readers read what's been written. To paraphrase Tina Turner, what's speaking got to do with it? For one thing, the way a writer practices writing necessarily involves assumptions about how speaking and writing relate, align, diverge as practices of language. A writer might, for example, see writing as a mechanism, for storing speech in visual form; for this writer, speaking would be language and writing a means to represent and package speech as language for shipping it across time and space (much as one might convert a Word document into a PDF). Another writer might, though, understand speech as raw material that writing fulfills by freeing language from behavioral contingency. For this hypothetical writer, speech is subordinate to writing and only becomes fully language when smelted into writing. For this writer, speech is iron ore; ordinary writing pig iron; and literature stainless steel; or, to put it less metaphorically, speech would be language in contingent and partial form, while writing would be language fully realized. For this writer, writing is language, language is writing: "that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Such differences in how writers understand the relationship of speaking and writing to each other and how they understand them as aspects of language matter for how writers write and what they write. More specifically, for this study (if I view it as a presentation in writing) or discussion (if I view it as talking about these issues), the differences between language as speaking and writing and their interplay or divergence matter because they complicated Kerouac's efforts to draft On the Road, help clarify the nature and implications of Spontaneous Prose, and help explain why, in late 1951, he shifted from attempting to revise On the Road to focus instead on the experiments that became Visions of Cody.
For Kerouac, speaking and writing often seemed different, even conflicting, modes of language, rather than different channels of the same thing, and his successive attempts at On the Road leading to the April 1951 scroll can be seen as a search for an approach to point of view that would give writing the behavioral immediacy of speaking, each of them discarded, in spite of their merit as writing and fiction, because they failed to resolve the conflict Kerouac felt between literary writing (emphasizing compositional deliberation) and speaking for and to a listener. His experiments, beginning with the April 1951 scroll, moving on to sketching in the fall of 1951 and the varieties of wild form and Spontaneous Prose that followed can, in turn, be framed as a series of reimaginings of writing (and implicitly literature) in which he turned away from the established modes for fiction at mid-century and attempted to overcome — or at least lessen — the differences between speaking and writing.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Textuality of Soulwork by Tim Hunt. Copyright © 2014 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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