by Jack Kerouac
Kerouac’s reading strategies fail him almost immediately, as do the conventional reader’s. Kerouac is forced to discover a new, discursive mode of interpretation in order to move forward. As “thunderclaps…put the fear of God” in him below the storm-shrouded peaks, Kerouac represents the failure inherent in anticipating linearity and unity; the straight line of Route 6 threatens to “lead him only to death.” Eager to proceed but deflected from his goal, Kerouac comes to understand that the method of his passage must be contingent, that progress is achievable only by “trying various roads and routes” instead of proceeding with predetermined expectations. Kerouac’s readers find themselves equally stranded if they approach his mountain of unbroken text anticipating that it will offer an inherent meaning, if their expectations and interpretive strategies are based upon linearity and predetermined by novelistic conventions. However, if a reader approaches Kerouac’s sprawling prose and allows the narrative to turn, to reverse, to be set back upon itself in a series of deflections, and accepts that the shifting horizon of signification is part of the experience of meaning, the reader can proceed and be “headed there at last.”
As a series of deflections, Kerouac’s prose narratives anticipate reader-oriented theories that establish the reader, not the text, as the site of meaning. However, contemporary theory cannot prove that meaning definitely occurs inside the reader, either, so a text’s meaning is often considered an effect of the interaction between text and reader. Instead of functioning as works with meanings trapped inside hermetically sealed structures, Kerouac’s narratives involve the reader in the process of discovering meaning by encountering unfamiliar structures.
Jorge Luis Borges wrote that a novel is an “axis of innumerable relationships,” and the narrative developments in technique and plot in both the scroll manuscript and On the Road support this claim. As this new American prose narrative undermines conventions, the scroll manuscript and On the Road are subjects for the varied lenses of contemporary American literary analysis. A comprehensive survey of possible readings would fill volumes, if not shelves. However, a brief example of the ways deconstruction, a theoretical discourse that grew out of structuralism and that shares methods with many other poststructuralist schools (such as feminist theory and minority discourse, to name but a few), illuminates the scroll can demonstrate the range of possible readings that were marginalized by previous discourses.
At its most simple, deconstruction seeks to destabilize seemingly natural or inherent hierarchies or oppositions in a literary text. A deconstructive reading identifies oppositions within written discourse not to discredit the argument or prove logical invalidity, but to reinscribe the meaning of the opposition by disrupting what was formerly considered “given” knowledge. Deconstruction is an especially useful tool when analyzing the scroll manuscript or On the Road for both texts contain apparently contradictory claims that have been seen as inconsistent writing instead of opportunities for analysis.
When Sal first arrives at Old Bull Lee’s home in On the Road, for example, his inability to perceive the fire Jane Lee sees is often read as an example of his naïveté or unreliability. By examining the passage in the scroll manuscript, which is reproduced nearly verbatim in the novel, the reader encounters a series of shifting oppositions that simultaneously undermine and support one another. When Kerouac says, “‘I don’t see anything,’” Joan replies, “‘Same old Kerouac.’” Joan’s condemnation of Kerouac for his inability to observe suggests that he is incapable of seeing empirical reality, that he does not comprehend the material world before him. However, Joan relies upon her sense of hearing to perceive the scene, saying, “I heard sirens that way,” thereby undermining her critique of Kerouac’s visual perception. Moreover, Joan herself is hallucinating—Kerouac continues, “She was still looking for her fire; in those days she ate three tubes of benzedrine paper a day.” By using the possessive “her,” Kerouac suggests that perception of the fire is possible only to Joan, that it in some way “belongs” to her. By coordinating that clause with the next which affirms her drug use, Kerouac suggests a correlation between “her fire” and her Benzedrine consumption, implying that her “fire” is a figment of her Benzedrine-fueled imagination. Therefore, in this scene, the initial critique of perception is reversed and unadulterated, rational perception is privileged over altered, irrational perception. However, this binary opposition is soon reversed, and the text argues that perception is not only rational but also intuitive.
When Kerouac attends the horse races in Graetna with Burroughs, Kerouac intuits the winner, a development that privileges nonliteral, subjective perception over literal, objective perception. Kerouac looks at the racing form, a report that encapsulates empirical data relevant to handicapping horse races, and is entranced by a name, not a statistic, that reminds him of his father: Big Pop. While Burroughs bets on Ebony Corsair, Big Pop wins and pays 50 to 1. Burroughs, who bets based upon an evaluation of racing-form data, exclaims, “You had a vision, boy, a VISION. Only damn fools pay no attention to visions,” thus validating Kerouac’s intuitive perception. By juxtaposing these scenes, Kerouac’s reinscription of the normative, privileged opposition of the rational over the irrational is revealed: Rationality and irrationality become coequal modes, parts of the whole that is perception entire.
In the scroll manuscript, Kerouac establishes another argument dependent upon both sides of its presumptive opposition when he foregrounds the protagonists’ attempt to overcome the constrictions of time. Cassady’s techniques for operating outside of time, however, rely upon his strict adherence to it. In representing Cassady’s timetables and ubiquitous schedules, Kerouac illustrates what Michel Foucault calls the “exhaustive use” of time, a technique that subjugates the actor to time while promising emancipation from it. The exhaustive use of time requires its meticulous subdivision, promising a “theoretically ever-growing use of time” by “extracting, from time, ever more available moments,” effectively stopping it. Throughout the novel Cassady arranges appointments with precise beginning and ending times, compelling his friends and lovers to subjugate themselves to his timetable while attempting to subdivide his own time in order to make more time available, to use effectively all the time he has.
Although Allen Ginsberg frames Cassady’s frantic scheduling in Denver as a device to hide his infidelity from both Louanne and Carolyn, Cassady’s regimentation is a technique by which he attempts to do “everything at the same time.” Kerouac’s arrival in Denver adds another variable to Cassady’s timetable, and in order for Cassady to make room for Kerouac in his own schedule, Cassady subdivides time further. Within minutes of seeing Kerouac, Cassady tells Carolyn:
“It is now” (looking at his watch) “exactly one-fourteen---I shall be back at exactly THREE fourteen, for our hour of reverie together…so now in this exact minute I must dress, put on my pants, go back to life…that is to outside life, streets and whatnot, as we agreed, it is now one-FIFTEEN and time’s running, running.”
As his timetables suggest, Cassady’s freedom from time is dependent upon his strict submission to it. Thus, by deconstructing the protagonists’ flight from time and examining their techniques, time’s inescapability and pervasiveness are revealed, thereby turning Neal’s gift of his wristwatch to the Mexican girl on the roadside—presumably an act that signifies Cassady’s defeat of time—into an act of colonization and subjugation by time.
Despite its relevance to issues raised by contemporary literary theory, the publication of the scroll manuscript reveals an immanent danger in the text. As it alters the discourse surrounding On the Road, ostensibly to set the record straight about the novel as a “serious” text and Kerouac as a “serious” author, the scroll manuscript’s presumed closer fidelity to Kerouac’s own lived experiences may reinforce many assumptions that when articulated have made On the Road a famous novel, not a literary one, and Kerouac an infamous author, not a serious one. The possibility of such a seemingly opposite o
utcome does not, however, render the publication of the scroll manuscript a critical error in judgment.
The publication of the scroll manuscript creates a necessary paradox that problematizes the very notion of meaning in a text and undermines a reader’s ability to confidently differentiate between fact and fiction. As the scroll manuscript is interpreted, correctly or incorrectly, as a more authentic version of On the Road, the novel’s fictionality and Kerouac’s function as author become more apparent through comparative reading. Moreover, as the scroll manuscript destabilizes the presumed veracity of On the Road—a novel long read as a nonfictional hybrid, equal parts diary entry and autobiography—that instability of interpretation is transferred self-reflexively to the scroll manuscript itself. The scroll discredits its own veracity, establishing itself as a fictional prose narrative.
While Kerouac reorganizes social conventions in the text, giving prominence to cultures and practices marginalized elsewhere in the popular fiction of his day, he also restructures literary conventions and allusions in a way that has not yet been entirely co-opted by contemporary narrative. Thus, On the Road and especially the scroll manuscript continue to read like avant-garde texts a half century after their composition. The publication of the scroll manuscript opens new possibilities of interpretation for both texts. Those new possibilities foreground Kerouac’s narratological advances as they highlight the literary craft in On the Road, rendering finally On the Road as a novel, albeit a hybrid form that bridges the “typical ‘novel’ arrangement of experience” and the “‘fibrous’…world, with its hint of organic unity” of postmodernism, and the scroll manuscript as “the first or one of the first modern prose books in America.”
Fifty years after the publication of On the Road, readers of the scroll manuscript might experience a disruption of the dominant hierarchy and view the mythical Kerouac as subordinate to the writer Kerouac, who in early 1951 developed a new form of American prose narrative and wrote, “A lot of people say I don’t know what I’m doing, but of course, I do. Burroughs & Allen said I didn’t know what I was doing in the years of Town & City; now they know I did.” Now, so do we.
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
Beaulieu, Victor-Lévy. Jack Kerouac: A Chicken Essay. Stella Fischman, Toronto: The Coach House Press, 1975.
Belgrad, Daniel. The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Burroughs, William S., “Remembering Jack Kerouac,” in The Adding Machine: Collected Essays. London: John Calder, 1985.
Cassady, Carolyn. Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg. London: Black Spring Press, 1990.
Cassady, Neal. Collected Letters, 1944-1967. Dave Moore, ed. New York: Penguin, 2004.
———.The First Third & Other Writings. San Francisco: City Lights, 1971; 1981.
———and Allen Ginsberg. As Ever: The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Barry Gifford, ed. Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Co., 1977.
Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973, 1987.
Clark, Tom. Jack Kerouac: A Biography. New York: Paragon House, 1990.
Coolidge, Clark, “Kerouac,” in Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School, Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling, eds.
———. Now It’s Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & the Sounds. Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1999.
Douglas, Ann, “Telepathic Shock and Meaning Excitement; Kerouac’s Poetics of Intimacy,” in The Beat Generation: Critical Essays, Kostas Myrsiades, ed.
Giamo, Ben. Kerouac, the Word and the Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.
Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1978, 1994.
Ginsberg, Allen, “The Great Rememberer,” “Kerouac’s Ethic,” in Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. Bill Morgan, ed. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
Gussow, Adam, “Bohemia Revisited: Malcolm Cowley, Jack Kerouac, and On the Road,” Georgia Review, Summer, 1984, vol. XXXVIII, no. 2.
Holmes, John Clellon. Go. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1952, 1988.
———, “The Great Rememberer,” “Perpetual Visitor,” “Gone in October,” in Representative Men: The Biographical Essays. Fayetteville, AK: University of Arkansas Press, 1988.
Hunt, Tim. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981, 1996.
Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1983.
Johnson, Ronna C., “‘You’re Putting Me On’: Jack Kerouac and the Postmodern Emergence,” in The Beat Generation: Critical Essays, Kostas Myrsiades, ed.
Kerouac, Jack. Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings. Paul Marion, ed. New York: Viking, 1999.
———. Good Blonde & Others. Donald Allen, ed. San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1993.
———. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1957.
———. Pic. New York: Grove Press, 1971.
———. The Portable Jack Kerouac. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Viking, 1995.
———. Selected Letters 2 vols. Ann Charters, ed. New York: Viking, 1995, 1999.
———. The Town and the City. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950.
———. Visions of Cody. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.
———. Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954. Douglas Brinkley, ed. New York: Viking, 2004, 2006.
Lardas, John. The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
Maher, Paul, ed. Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005.
Maher, Paul. Kerouac: The Definitive Biography. Lanham: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2004.
Myrsiades, Kostas, ed., The Beat Generation: Critical Essays. New York: Peter Lang, 2002.
Skerl, Jennie, ed., Reconstructing the Beats. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Turner, Steve. Angelheaded Hipster: A Life of Jack Kerouac. London: Bloomsbury, 1996.
Waldman, Anne, and Andrew Schelling, eds., Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.
Weinreich, Regina. The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and largest thanks go to John Sampas for inviting us to undertake this project and for his steadfast faith and support. We would also like to thank Joyce Johnson, Ronna C. Johnson, Sterling Lord, David Orr, Dawn Ward, and John Shen-Sampas for their help and kindness. Special thanks go to our editor, Paul Slovak, for his enthusiasm for the project, for his clear-sighted wisdom, and for having all the answers. Many thanks also to Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, for his graciousness and insight, and to his colleagues Stephen Crook, Declan Kiely, and Philip Milito. For their many kindnesses we would also like to thank David Amram and Audrey Sprenger. Thanks to Hilary Holladay, director of the Jack and Stella Kerouac School of American Studies at UMass Lowell, and to Melissa Pennell, chair of the English Department at UMass Lowell.
Howard Cunnell would like to acknowledge the assistance of the British Association for American Studies for granting me a Founders’ Award to travel to New York in the spring of 2006. Thanks to Alan Stepney, Matthew Loukes, Jim MacAirt, and everyone at Karma Divers for putting the light on in my house. Thanks to Jackie and Donald and to my family: my mum Gillian, my brother Mark, still on the road after twenty years, and my inspirational and beautiful daughters Jesse, Lily, and Daisy. Special thanks go to Jeremy Cole and Frank and Rosemary Andoh for keeping me off the construction site this winter. Most important, I’d like to thank my wife, Adjoa. Like everything else, this is for her.
Penny
Vlagopoulos would like to thank Ann Douglas for her expert advice and eminent Beat wisdom. Special thanks to Rachel Adams, Robert O’Meally, and Maura Spiegel for their invaluable teaching and inspiration, and to Baz Dreisinger, Mike Johnson, and Nicole Rizzuto for their assistance and encouragement. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my parents, Marika and Triphon, and my brother Pete for their endless support.
George Mouratidis would like to thank Kris Hemensley at Collected Works Bookshop for his expertise and passion, Gemma Blackwood for her Minervan presence throughout this project, and Garry Kinnane and Peter Otto for their illumination and encouragement. I would also like to thank my parents, Chris and Georgina, my brother John, Chris Ioannou, and Lucy Van for their constant support and understanding. Above all, a special thanks to my colleagues and friends Howard Cunnell, Joshua Kupetz, and Penny Vlagopoulos for their invaluable support, assistance, and inspiration.