by Jack Kerouac
Kerouac’s Road novels form an expansive and inclusive textual terrain, and we as readers are directed across it by Kerouac’s unfolding vision of Cassady. In such a movement we transgress the boundaries of what, in the modernist sense, would be considered a “true” or “classic” work of literature, one that is reductive and exclusive—self-contained, erudite, and impenetrable. This movement exemplifies what the literary critic Roland Barthes calls a “mutation” of the literary “work” into a discursive “text.” The scroll manuscript, Visions of Cody, and On the Road are thus all interrelated but distinct “fragments,” and it is our movement between them that, like the transgressive journey in search of an elusive authentic “IT,” generates the significance of the text. The “authentic” On the Road is the reflected light passing between mirrors. Whether you consider the scroll manuscript an artifact or part of a discursive postmodern text, the three are dialogically bound, reflecting and illuminating one another. Like the Chicago bop musicians who, in the wake of George Shearing, keep blowing, striving to find new phrases, new explorations reflected and deflected off one another, “Something would come of it yet. There’s always more, a little further—it never ends.”
“The Straight Line Will Take You Only to Death”
The Scroll Manuscript and Contemporary Literary Theory
Joshua Kupetz
A tenured colleague in the history department at the small liberal-arts college where I first taught once asked, “Why do students still want to read Kerouac?” It was the fall of 2004, and the United States was at war against terror, a more nebulous adversary than either fascism or communism. I resisted the urge to reply, “You’re the historian; you tell me,” not simply because it was glib, which it was, but because that answer would have affirmed all the assumptions about Kerouac I had been trying to dispel in my teaching, those assumptions being that he mattered first as a personality and that what makes his texts worth reading are the ways their content intersects with cultural histories.
Read in the context of American cultural history, the scroll manuscript and On the Road reveal much about American social discourse of the postwar era, yet these texts must be considered literary structures before they are considered historical documents. As narratives, they are integral parts of a continuum of American prose fiction, liminal structures that in retrospect bridge the modern and the postmodern. Although any description of such a continuum should be understood as contingent and subjective—for no one objectively decides which texts matter in a tradition and which do not—the act of locating a literary text in a particular historical context can reveal its structures, processes, and ideological conventions. While the primary function of American literary criticism at the time Kerouac wrote the scroll manuscript was to locate a text’s meaning, the application of contemporary theory more often attempts to understand how, not what, the text means.
The scroll manuscript and On the Road demonstrate Kerouac’s anticipation of new developments in American narratology. A year after Kerouac composed the scroll manuscript, Carl Solomon, an editor at the publishing firm of A. A. Wyn and dedicatee of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, rejected Kerouac’s newest draft of the novel, calling it “an incoherent mess.” (The particular version that Solomon rejected would later be published as Visions of Cody.) In response, Kerouac wrote, “[James Joyce’s] Ulysses which was considered difficult reading is now hailed as a classic and everyone understands it. […] [Theodore Dreiser’s] Sister Carrie sat for years in a publishing house because it was considered unprintable. By the same token, and in its time, I believe On the Road because its new vision roughs against the grain of established ideas is going to be considered unprintable for awhile to come.” Kerouac was correct: On the Road was published by Viking in 1957 only after the scroll manuscript underwent a series of conventionalizing revisions, Visions of Cody was published posthumously in 1972, and more than fifty years would pass before the earliest complete draft of the novel, the scroll manuscript, would be published.
Many readers would quickly dismiss Kerouac’s claim as hubris, yet the exchange between Solomon and Kerouac illustrates the growing schism that transformed American literary criticism in the twentieth century. In his rejection, Solomon does not contend that Kerouac’s writing is inartistic, but instead he objects to the novel for its supposed lack of coherence and intelligibility. Solomon’s opinion implies that a publishable novel should cohere, or demonstrate unity among its verbal structures, in order to communicate clearly its meaning. Kerouac rejects Solomon’s judgment, thereby refuting his definition of a novel, contending that “the masses catch up to incomprehensible; incoherent finds its way to an intelligently typewritten page.” Incomprehensibility, Kerouac suggests, is not a function of the text but of the reader’s limited perception. Innovative narratives, he acknowledges, become comprehensible after their unfamiliar structures have been conventionalized over time.
Carl Solomon’s position is consistent with New Critical discourse, the dominant school in American literary theory in the mid-twentieth century. Based upon interpretive strategies articulated in Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry (1938), New Criticism locates meaning in the internal qualities of literary works, specifically the unity of their multiple verbal structures. As much as it values unity and convergence, New Criticism eschews authorial intent and historical context as bases for interpretation, although it allows that they might supplement understanding. New Critical criteria, like Solomon’s argument, locate meaning inside a work that is interpreted by a reader who, like a prospector, extracts what is valuable from the unified structures and ignores the otherwise “meaningless” prose.
New Criticism was the forge within which Kerouac fashioned The Town and the City and the crucible from which he had to escape in order to write On the Road. As he struggled to clarify his ideas for On the Road, Kerouac understood that the post-World War II story he wanted to tell could not be fully realized through existing novelistic conventions. In response to this impediment, Kerouac writes in his Road-Log that he wants “a different structure as well as a different style in [On the Road], in contrast to T & C…Each chapter as a line of verse in the general epic poem, instead of each chapter as a broad-streamed prose statement in the general epic novel.” By actively avoiding conventional narrative, Kerouac claims that his project would not result in a “novel,” but in a new prose-narrative form that grafts two genres. To develop his poetics of prose narrative, he experimented with technique and plot, particularly in the scroll manuscript, surpassing the limitations of conventional narrative even as he helped define them.
Wolfgang Iser contends that artistic innovators always risk marginalization by readers who judge artists’ works against an aesthetic standard that “art has in fact abandoned,” and Kerouac’s experiments are, in general, critically maligned. His willful disregard of convention, however, is not without precedent. For example, 150 years before Kerouac drafted On the Road, William Wordsworth acknowledged this critical anachronism in the preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth, who now represents the literary canon at its most conventional, admits, “an Author makes a formal engagement that he [or she] will gratify certain known habits of association.” In defense of his nonconventional poetics, Wordsworth claims:
at least [the reader] be spared any unpleasant feeling of disappointment, and that I myself may be protected from the most dishonorable accusation which can be brought against an Author, namely, that of an indolence which prevents him from endeavoring to ascertain what is his duty, and when his duty is ascertained, prevents him from performing it.
Wordsworth evokes this “duty” not to uphold it, but to excuse himself from it. While Kerouac does not include an apologetic preface with either the scroll manuscript or On the Road (he will write one, however, for Visions of Cody), his correspondence and work-journal entries establish a cogent argument for the changes he introduced into his prose narrative.
Kerouac abandoned
the conventional techniques he had used when writing The Town and the City so that he might be “free as Joyce” when composing On the Road. While he continued to value form—“writing is good. Also careful about structures, and the Structure”—his concept of it was changing dramatically. Ultimately, his concept of form in the scroll manuscript loosely anticipates the tenets of structuralism, the first new theoretical school of the 1960s to decenter New Criticism. Kerouac writes that he was “not interested in The Novel” and that he wanted to be “free to wander from the laws of the ‘novel’ as laid down by [Jane] Austens & [Henry] Fieldings.” Here, Kerouac suggests that the novel is an articulation of recognizable conventions, “laws,” that will not help him tell the story that he wants to tell. By rejecting Austen, Fielding, and their imitators, Kerouac denies the “European form” of the novel and affirms what he calls a new American prose form.
Kerouac was an avid reader of Whitman and his claims for a “modern prose [narrative] in America” echo Whitman’s prophecy of an “infant genius of American poetic expression.” Whitman’s genius “lies sleeping far away, happily unrecognized and uninjur’d by the coteries, the art-writers, the talkers and critics of the saloons, or the lecturers in the colleges.” According to Whitman, this new writer would use dialects native to the United States that originate in places Whitman describes as “Rude and course nursing-beds,” although he concedes that “only from such beginnings and stocks, indigenous here, may haply arrive, be grafted, and sprout, in time, flowers of genuine American aroma, and fruits truly and fully our own.” Kerouac adopts these dialects in the scroll manuscript and fully exploits them in his characterization of Dean Moriarty in On the Road, but his innovation required much more than the adoption of dialects. In his attempt to access “an area of greater spiritual pith,” a metaphorical space inaccessible to him through conventional prose, Kerouac claimed he must use the “technical device” of epic poetry.
Kerouac’s combination of poetic and prosaic elements invigorated his prose and made possible the most radical transformations of his narrative. In his Road-Log, Kerouac writes, “It appears I must have been learning in the past 8 months of work on…poetry. My prose is different, richer in texture.” This textural richness, Kerouac claims, is necessary if On the Road is to be “a novel like poetry, or rather, a narrative poem, an epos in mosaic.” Kerouac’s use of “epos” is telling, for the term describes any unwritten narrative poem that falls outside the definition of the epic. In a journal entry from October 1949, Kerouac describes his own narrative project as a kind of epos: “I want […] to bust out from the European narrative into the Mood Chapters of an American poetic ‘sprawl’—if you can call careful chapters and careful prose a sprawl.” While his narrative will “sprawl,” Kerouac emphasizes the structural control he plans to exercise. As he explains in his letter to Solomon, his newly conceived narrative technique will engender new conventional elements, a “grammar” that will be comprehensible to future readers once it has been described.
The many false starts Kerouac made in the late 1940s and in 1950, coupled with the corresponding journal entries lamenting his difficulties, suggest that Kerouac struggled putting theory into practice when writing the early drafts of On the Road. Much like en plein air painters relied upon tubed paints and the French box easel to fully realize the potential of impressionism, Kerouac had to discover a new compositional technique in order to compose the structured sprawl that would become On the Road. The scroll allowed Kerouac to push his text beyond the parameters of conventional prose narrative by redefining the most basic limit of writing, the medium. During the earliest stages of drafting the narrative, Kerouac was an artist to whom the medium mattered. In the opening pages of his 1949 Road-Log, a spiral-bound financial ledger, Kerouac writes, “Something’s wrong with my soul that I refuse to feel and grieve in this monetary notebook.” Even seated at his writing desk with his typewriter before him, Kerouac still struggled to realize the voice for On the Road. Only when Kerouac had a medium that accommodated his vision could he exercise his new technique and unlock the sprawling, poetic narrative his story required.
In addition to working with technique, Kerouac experimented equally with concepts of plot. By foregrounding marginalized cultures and practices in America, Kerouac knew On the Road would likely be critically castigated. Kerouac’s populist poetics, his belief that “an art which is not manifest to ‘everybody,’ is a dead art,” was and remains unpopular among the literati. In this spirit he wrote, “How is a miserable hitch-hiking boy going to mean anything…to Howard Mumford Jones who wants everybody to be like him (middleclass, intellectual, ‘responsible’) before he will accept them.” A writer, critic, and professor at Harvard University, Jones represented to Kerouac both the antithesis of his intended audience and the critical opinion he hoped to win. Early in the drafting process, Kerouac chose a hitchhiker as protagonist not to reflect his own experiences of the road—which at the time were few—but for aesthetic purposes. In his journal, Kerouac wonders, “Could Dostoevsky make his lumpenproletariat Raskolniks figure for such a guy [as Jones] today?—for such a literary class?—as anything but a bum.” In this context, Kerouac’s choice of subject in On the Road becomes a figure that signifies the “spiritual pith” he wants to evoke in the text.
In addition to his choice of subject, Kerouac reimagines the function of plot and bases his narrative on this new function. While conventional plots are episodic, unified, and suggestive of causal relationships between events, Kerouac’s plot structure in the scroll manuscript is contingent and appropriates his concept of a “circle of despair.” According to Kerouac, the circle of despair represents a belief that “the experience of life is a regular series of deflections” from one’s goals. As one is deflected from a goal, Kerouac explains, he or she establishes a new goal from which he or she will inevitably also be deflected. To Kerouac, this series of deflections does not assume the pattern of a ship’s tacking into the wind, always moving forward; instead, Kerouac illustrates these deflections as a series of right-hand turns that continue until one makes a complete circle that circumscribes an unknowable “thing” that is “central to…existence.” Attempts to avoid the circle of despair will end in failure, Kerouac contends, for “the straight line will take you only to death.”
Traces of the circle of despair appear throughout the scroll manuscript and On the Road. The protagonists’ travels dominate much of the narrative of the scroll manuscript, and their attempt to find purpose in their perpetual movements and thwarted plans illustrates the circle of despair as a design element in the plot. Despite their frustrations, Kerouac and Cassady continue to encounter “IT,” an ill-defined state of awareness that gives purpose to their divergent experiences. Before he experiences IT, Kerouac asks Cassady for a definition. Cassady replies, “‘Now you’re asking me im-pon-de-rables.’” Indefinable, IT exists paradoxically as a state of being inconceivable through thought or language, but knowable through experience.
The circle of despair also operates in seemingly marginal scenes in the scroll manuscript, its prevalence suggesting a pattern or “grammar” by which the contingent plot might be understood. When Kerouac plans his first trip west, he decides to hitchhike across the United States on Route 6, “one long red line…that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely Nevada and there dipped down to Los Angeles.” Drenched below an ominous Bear Mountain, a stranded Kerouac encounters a driver who tells him “there’s no traffic passes through” Route 6 and suggests an alternate route. Kerouac reflects on this, narrating, “I knew he was right. It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.” Kerouac’s existential goal or unknown center, the eventual “pearl,” remains the same, but he learns that his passage will be marked by divergences and that he will be frustrated in his efforts.
Kerouac’s narratological advances in technique and plot com
bine to create texts that function as focal points for many of the problems that contemporary theory addresses. In addition to demonstrating Kerouac’s (the author’s) discontinuous, nonlinear plot, Kerouac’s (the narrator’s) moments of frustration at Bear Mountain can be read as a metaphor of the changes in late-twentieth century American literary theory. Just as New Criticism’s clearly defined method of excavating meaning was displaced by structuralist and poststructuralist investigations into readers and reading and the disputation of “common sense” knowledge, among other questions, Kerouac’s dilemma involves his shifting expectations of the road. One must remember the “stupid hearthside idea” that strands Kerouac comes from his straightforward interpretation of texts. In the scroll manuscript, Kerouac claims he has “been poring over maps of the U.S. in Ozone Park for months, even reading books about the pioneers and savouring names like Platte and Cimarron and so on,” prior to choosing his route west. Kerouac is drawn to the linearity represented by Route 6 on the map and is seduced by the “wonderful” prospect of a direct passage to his destination. He expects these maps and dimestore novels to provide their meanings for him, so he bases his route on his superficial readings of them.