The chaos of war, the resulting materialistic society and the death of his brother and father had left Kerouac dislocated and with a great sense of loss. And so, when he wrote in his journal about an idea to write a book set on the road, it was ‘like a message from God giving sure direction’ (p. 7). He wanted to experience freedom, adventure and the joy of being alive. He wanted to express the wild side of himself before it was too late. And there was a need to escape. He felt he had burnt all his bridges. Following the arrest of his friends in a drugs raid at Ginsberg’s apartment, he feared he might be questioned too. And so he had reached a turning point in his life. Kerouac was also at a point where he wanted to investigate his identity and gain a better understanding of himself, both as an American and a French Canadian. He was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac of French-Canadian parents who had immigrated to New England. He grew up speaking joual, a French–Canadian working-class dialect. He did not speak English until he was six years old. Kerouac’s immigrant family history led him to question his identity and to believe that he was not a traditional middle-class American, nor was he a man of colour; he was a white outsider. He was also part of a continent filled with people of various ethnicities and backgrounds. Many of these individuals were migrating from place to place, as seasonal workers or as hobos, meeting others and having a multiplicity of encounters with them, including those of a sexual nature. On the Road, therefore, was written for a variety of reasons, but one of these reasons was an endeavour to define America in the face of a capitalist society fearful of threats from opposing ideologies and from people outside American borders. In addition, the novel was written in an attempt to explore Americans, in terms of class, ethnicity and sexuality, in particular those considered to be outside the mainstream. It was also imperative for Kerouac to find his own voice through his writing, one which expressed his identity and those for whom he felt empathy. He also wanted to experiment with literary styles, techniques and voices in an attempt to break free from the restrictions of the European literary tradition.
What did he want to achieve?
Kerouac wanted to surpass the limitations of conventional narrative. He was searching for a freedom of expression, a confessional writing style, like he was telling the story to a friend to share his adventures and to express a joy of pure being. It was his intention to turn his thinking into prose narrative, not a novel, to create a text in which he fused what he remembered with what he made up to explore the relationship between fiction and truth, incorporating images from his travels. It was not so much the actual words that he was concerned with, but more the rush of what was being said, the energy and passion and truth as he saw it. Although On the Road may be considered to be raw and lacking polish and craft, incoherent even, this was the reaction to his work he was seeking. It was this rawness that made the writing honest and evoked the melancholy music of the night and all the joy, pain, beauty, suffering and sadness of life.
And so, Kerouac set out to write a text that was against self-censorship, Cold War politics and materialism and to write one that was an outer and an inner journey, using instinct and immediacy, one in which the world might appear transformed.
What was his inspiration?
A main source of inspiration for Kerouac’s On the Road was his relationships with the Beats, but mostly it was Neal Cassady who came into the Beat scene in 1947. The Beats were captivated by this wild man who engaged in promiscuous sex and had a frenetic lifestyle. Indeed, Ginsberg had an affair with him and became his writing tutor. Kerouac identified with Cassady as someone who was also an outsider. And also, by Kerouac’s own admission, Cassady captured his interest in the same way that his brother Gerald had; they had fun together and both shared a Catholic upbringing.
It was significant that Kerouac met Cassady, four years his junior, someone who represented youth and a reaffirmation of vitality at a key point in his life, one that marked the death of his father, the annulment of his first marriage and the end of a period of hospitalization for thrombophlebitis:
I first met Neal not long after my father died … I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about except that it really had something to do with my father’s death and my awful feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Neal there really began for me that part of my life that you could call my life on the road … (p. 1)
And so, Kerouac’s life changed and the narrative began, with alter egos Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity’s taking road trips and having adventures across the United States and Mexico. This was living life to the full, seeking out experience, the lifestyle Kerouac craved, but by the end of the book, Moriarity abandons Paradise along the road, because he couldn’t stop and had to keep moving and because they are searching for something they do not really find.
In addition to his relationship with The Beats, On the Road was inspired by the network of interstate highways. It was possible to drive from New York to LA on six tanks of cheap fuel. The endless big-sky landscapes, therefore, were a metaphor for the limitless physical and interior journeys that form the basis for On the Road.
What was the writing style?
The style was said to be hugely influenced by Kerouac’s hero James Joyce, in particular his work Ulysses and also by Neal Cassady’s letters. Although Cassady didn’t write much prose, Kerouac was impressed with the free-flowing style of his letters; he cited these as an influence on his invention of the spontaneous prose, a literary style akin to the stream of consciousness that he used in his works. Kerouac’s philosophy was not to revise the work but to go with the flow of consciousness on the page, to write in a burst, writing that was emotional, spontaneous, stream of consciousness, fuelled by immediacy and improvisational techniques. In Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, Kerouac listed thirty essentials of writing spontaneous prose; some of these were Scribbled secret notebooks and wild typewritten pages for your own joy; Submissive to everything, open, listening; In trance fixation dreaming upon object before you; Something that you feel will find its own form; Telling the true story of the world in interior monologue; Write for the world to read and see your exact picture of it; Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea …
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Experiment with this: Learning to Write Spontaneous Prose
Take this essential for writing spontaneous prose and use it as a source of inspiration for a writing burst: Write for the world to read and see your exact picture of it. Ensure the writing is written with a sense of immediacy and use an emotional tone.
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How did jazz inspire Kerouac’s writing?
Alongside spontaneous prose, Kerouac also employed techniques from jazz playing, that is the use of the breath. In the sense of a musician drawing breath and blowing his saxophone until he had run out of breath and therefore his music, Kerouac used this same technique when writing. He wrote a burst of writing until he had said all that he wanted to express. Connected with the breath was the use of a long connecting dash, so that the phrases occurring between dashes might also resemble jazz licks, so that when spoken the words take on an unpremeditated rhythm. In addition, On the Road was written in a style that sounded like Kerouac was talking to himself. Sentences did not always come to fruition; there were interruptions, exaggerations, overloads of detail. The work had a tone of self-reminiscence and a surreal quality, an out-of-touch with reality feel, one that was mixed up and lacked a chronological order and precision, an innovative style built upon new techniques, a work very unlike that of the European novel.
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Experiment with this: Learning to Use a Rush Writing Style
Imagine you are a young American writer from the 1950s, one whose ideals reflect these themes: anti-materialism, anti-establishment, soul searching and rebellion. You are living a bohemian, nomadic lifestyle. Using an American voice, write the story of one day in your life as if you are telling it to a friend in a rush, imbue the language with energy and passion. Writ
e sentences that do not always come to fruition. Use interruptions, exaggerate and overload detail.
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Although it was claimed that Kerouac did not revise his work, it became apparent that there were several drafts of the novel. His Columbia mentor Mark Van Doren claimed that Jack had outlined much of the work in notebooks over a number of preceding years. Likewise, Joyce Johnson, former girlfriend of Jack Kerouac and author of In the Night Cafe, Come and Join the Dance, Bad Connections and Minor Characters (the widely acclaimed autobiographical account of her love affair with Kerouac), also claims that he spent years revising his work and carefully crafting each paragraph.
However, for some time, Kerouac had difficulty engaging a publisher for his work due to the experimental writing style and its sympathetic tone towards marginalized groups of America and for its graphic descriptions of homosexual behaviour and drug use. The text went through a number of changes, that is the removal of many of the more sexually explicit scenes, fearing libel suits before it was finally published in 1957.
What was the experimental writing technique used in On the Road?
Besides stream of consciousness and techniques borrowed from jazz, Kerouac employed a technique he referred to as sketching that changed the traditional narrative form. He first used this technique in his journals. Kerouac likened sketching to that of being an artist who observed everything he saw in the street and sketched it in his notebook. The writer was the same as an artist, except that the writer sketched what he saw, whilst the writer used words. Sketching was done rapidly, almost manically, in a kind of trance, but with intensity of feeling.
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Experiment with this: Learning to Use a Sketching Writing Style
Take a notepad for a walk. Find a bench in a street or park to sit on or go to a busy cafe. Drift into your own world. Like an artist sketching what they observe, you do the same; only use words instead of pencil lines. Sketch quickly what you see.
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How was On the Road written?
Apparently, high on Benzedrine, Kerouac typed rapidly, as fast as he could, in a rush, on a continuous one hundred and twenty foot scroll of paper to avoid breaking his chain of thoughts at the end of the sheets of paper, a scroll that he cut to size and taped together. The scroll, a 125,000-word version, was typed single-spaced, without margins or paragraphs, over a three-week period in an apartment in New York’s Chelsea, and when rolled out it looked like a road.
What was the form?
The scroll manuscript has been described as a ‘nonfictional hybrid, equal parts diary entry and autobiography’ (p. 95, in the Introduction to On The Road by Joshua Kupetz), also 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, ‘(s)he establishes a new goal from which (s)he will inevitably also be deflected’ (p. 89). And so, if a reader approaches Kerouac’s sprawling prose and allows the narrative to turn, 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’ (p. 91). Kerouac’s work then engaged the reader ‘in the process of meaning by encountering unfamiliar structures’ (p. 91). The sprawling poetic narrative undermined literary conventions; it was non-linear, discontinuous and did not uphold causal relationships between events, as is the case with the traditional linear plot.
What did the book capture?
With the publication of On the Road, the New York Times proclaimed that Kerouac was the voice of a new generation of American writers. And so by capturing the spirit and events of the time in an experimental innovative writing style, one that communicated directly, honestly and emotionally and collapsed the division between life and art, On the Road became defined as being the definitive text of the post-Second World War Beat Generation.
On the Road also captured Kerouac’s personal journey, his sense of alienation, of being adrift from middle-class America. He considered himself different and experienced a feeling of homelessness, of being adrift. ‘I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost’ (p. 58). He considered himself to be a white man who was disillusioned with the world. He secretly wished he was a Negro. He empathized with the oppressed minorities, thinking they had more joy and darkness from their music and their lives. As Sal and Dean drove to Mexico City, the ‘Fellahin Indians of the world’ stare at the ‘ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land’ (p. 59).
Following the success of On the Road, Kerouac became uncomfortable with his new celebrity status. His work was chosen by the Time magazine as one of the best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. Following the text’s success, publishers were keen for a sequel. In response, Kerouac fictionalized his adventures with Gary Snyder and other San Francisco poets, together with his experience of Buddhism, in Dharma Bums, published in 1958.
In the Cult of Unthink published in Horizon, 1958, Robert Brustein associated the Beats with the fans of JD and MB, saying that like the movie stars’ fans, they were violent at the least provocation. Kerouac replied to Brustein a week before publication saying that he was not depicting violence; On the Road was about tenderness among wild young hell raisers like the generation of Brustein’s grandfather. Kerouac was deeply hurt that anyone could consider that he exalted violence. And so began the torment of Kerouac’s success. He drank more and more heavily, as he felt that On the Road was being misinterpreted; it was being revered by some as capturing the lives of a hip generation and criticized by others who felt it captured the lives of sordid, immoral bohemians, neither truly acknowledging the genuine seriousness of his spiritual intent.
And yet On the Road is still read by many, especially college students, although its influence has been wide and far-reaching. The British writer Geoff Dyer says, ‘I actually find myself more vulnerable to its power as I get older. The yearning of the book, the way it burns with Kerouac’s desire to write a great novel and with the consciousness that he’s achieving it, is there on every page’. Singer-songwriter Tom Waits enthuses too, ‘I will always owe a debt to (him) for finally opening my eyes and making me feel like it’s alright to sleep ‘til four in the afternoon and go out all night and take a good hard look at the underbelly of the bowels of a major urban centre’. The actor Johnny Depp speaks of the novel as being ‘life changing’. Whilst photographer and artist Tom Hunter agrees, saying that when he read it, it ‘changed my life’, encouraging him to give up his job and go on the road, hitchhiking to France, meeting travellers. ‘I don’t think I could have done any of those things without reading On the Road, abandoning and rejecting everything and seeing for myself what freedom really means’. Beat biographer Bill Morgan concludes that Kerouac influenced many writers that came after him, writers who had previously been creating fiction with a beginning, middle and end began to experiment with their work. As Morgan says, people don’t read On the Road for the plot, they ‘read it for the beauty of the writing, not for the “whodunit” or the twist at the end’ (The Observer, Mark Ellen, Research: Gemma Kappala-Ramsamy and Kit Buchan, 7 October 2012).
In addition, On the Road inspired the work of a number of writers who were propelled to adopt a self-conscious, frenetic, playful and sometimes ironic voice to create texts that were satirical in tone, for example, author of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest Ken Kesey and the American writer and author of Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut, not forgetting the American writer Thomas Pynchon and his work Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), a postmodern fiction which blurs the boundaries between high and low culture and for which he shared the US National Book Award for Fiction with A Crown of Feathers & Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singel. The journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson was also influenced by On the Road. Thompson became internationally known with the publicati
on of The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1967) for which he spent a year living and riding with the Hells Angels. With the publication of The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved (1970), he became a counter-culture figure with his new brand of journalism, Gonzo, an experimental style, in which the reporters involve themselves in the action and become protagonists of their stories via a first-person narrative.
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Experiment with this: Learning to Experiment with Voice
Firstly, research the novels of the above writers. Make notes in response to these questions:
What language does the author use to create these voices?
Are certain phrases repeated?
What is the intonation of the voice?
Are there gaps in the text?
How is the text phrased?
How does each writer convey satire through the use of voice?
Is the text fragmented?
Now, imagine a character with a self-conscious, frenetic but playful voice. Using the theme of war or mental illness, write a short novel extract in which your character reflects upon your chosen theme.
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Experiment with this: Learning to Use Gonzo Journalism
Using a first-person point of view, create a reporter who tells the story of a bank robbery; the reporter becomes so involved in the action that they become a key player within the story.
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Experimental Fiction Page 9
