Kerouac at 100, Re-examining the holy “On the Road” Scroll

William Carlos Williams, in 1923, a year after Kerouac was born, published "To Elise," with its opening lines, 

The pure products of America

go crazy -    …

devil-may-care men who have taken

to railroading

out of sheer lust of adventure—

lines which remarkably presaged Kerouac, who was as pure a product of America as has ever been. Kerouac loved America with the intensity St. John of the Cross had in his love of the Lord. He was saintly in his empathy and power to see divinity in all the very alive American people he met on the road. There is a mythical Buddhist figure called Never Disparaging Buddha, who in his practice as a compassionate bodhisattva told everyone he saw that they were a Buddha. In return, he was reviled, laughed at, attacked with sticks, had to dodge stones thrown his way.

Kerouac has been revered by his readers, who see a deeply spiritual nature manifest in him. Kerouac captures in prose the poetic divinity of the everyday, in a yahooing cowboy, Charlie Parker's sax, in vast landscapes zooming by as the car roars over the highway, in the manic actions, words and thoughts of Neal Cassidy, the master practitioner of living in the moment, (containing aspects both good and bad) in the sadness all around us, in the pulse, the movement of the everpresent, careening Now. 

That's all there in his gigantic - in every sense - American book, “On the Road”. It demands that you recognize it. Not agree with it, accept it, or even like it, but recognize its power. Truman Capote's now famous sneer, "That's not writing, that's typing," is a bon mot for a New York literary party, but one that shrivels up in the presence of the sheer force of Kerouac's at times spellbinding prose. 

At times. And there's the rub. Kerouac devised, after several years of trying to write “On the Road”, after a number of tentative goes at it, a method of writing that took as its main practice spontaneity of thought. Joyce's stream of consciousness prose was meticulously constructed to sound like it was spontaneous thought. Kerouac's writing was spontaneous thought, put on paper under strictly controlled conditions. He taped together the long scroll so he could write without feeding sheets into the typewriter. He was a terrifically fast typist, upwards of 100 words a minute, and when he sat down for those legendary 22 days in April 1951, with notes around him, he'd already framed the story solidly in his mind and began to write directly from his prodigious memory – ‘Memory Babe’ the nickname given him. He wrote an average of 6000 words a day, and on some days, an astounding 12,000, or 40 typewritten pages. Some versions of the myth have him pumped on benzedrine, and the manic flow of the prose might attest to that. Other versions have him drinking cup after cup of strong, black coffee.

The final result is a force of nature – it is simply itself and is unlike any other American book. First off, it's not fiction. It's autobiographical prose made slightly like fiction mainly due to legal issues regarding publishing, changing living people's names that were to be used in the book. The real names are used in the original scroll. The only other book close to it in style and approach that I can think of is Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." That book began, ostensibly, as a journalistic piece, but quickly morphed into something else. It resembles “On the Road” in some ways - the narrator using actual experience for the basic material, the reckless, crazy actions of the lead characters, the standing apart from conventional society – but in construction, the two books are really nothing alike. Thompson is constantly making sharp commentary about the state of life in America, scathing asides, and Kerouac is mainly joyous, his disapproval of society scant and mostly concerned with complacency in the face of endless possibilities.

Here's an example of a notable difference in approach in the two books. A scene in “Fear and Loathing” has Roald Duke's (Thompson's) attorney, blasted dangerously out of his mind by an arsenal of drugs he's taken, soaking in the bathtub, pleading with Duke to throw the electric radio into the water as the song ‘White Rabbit’ peaks at the end with the words ‘Feed your head,’ thereby electrocuting him in that moment. The Thompson character, Duke, is analyzing what's going on in his lawyer's mind, determining the massive hangover he'll be feeling tomorrow, dissecting his lawyer’s insane thinking while the drama is going on - in other words, Duke, who is also on a number of different drugs himself, is, hilariously, the voice of reason in the room. Instead of killing his friend, Duke unplugs the radio then throws it in the tub. 

This is how fiction is written. There's plot here, a dramatic scene, character development, resolution, and the knowledge that the plot will continue. 

The first thing fiction writers are told in writing classes is this very thing – every sentence must either advance plot or show character development. Kerouac frequently does neither. Which is why he drives writers absolutely crazy, and why all those writers/reviewers have said so many negative things. The real issue is, though, Kerouac re-wrote the rules. He didn't write fiction – what he's written is something else, and something undeniable. 

Looked at from a writing standpoint, here's what I think he did. 

“On the Road” is full of scenes that suddenly occur – the narrator, Kerouac, is picked up for a great hitchhiking ride; he goes to a series of wild parties in one night; he drives with Cassady and they talk for hours and hours; he meets a Mexican girl, spends a few weeks with her, falls half in love and leaves; he goes to Allen Ginsberg’s apartment with Cassidy and Louanne, Cassidy’s wife, they take over and ignore Ginsberg, who we know is desperately in love with Cassidy, but there’s nothing written about that.

The consistent thing about all of these scenes is they appear, play out, and go on to the next thing. Though Kerouac writes at times, in the midst of these scenes, deeply poetic passages, there’s no time for real life reflection, there’s no internal change in the characters because of the actions that they take, they remain as they are, as far as what we see in the text, it’s all just people and things in motion. The fantastic thing about this is, Kerouac is a chronicler of the Now of his life at that time. And life is generally, for everyone, even those leading much more sedate or ordinary, in terms of society, lives, like this. That is, we move, we get up and have coffee, we go to work or do whatever it is that takes up our purpose and time, we buy groceries, we see our friends, we schedule play dates for the kids, we interact with the world and in the midst of it, as it’s happening, there’s usually not a lot of time to reflect. That comes later. In fiction though, characters are constantly acting, moving, going through a plot that is determining their fates, and the narrator of the book, whether first person or omniscient, is constantly reflecting on these characters and their every movement.

Advance plot, show character development - good writing.

In “On the Road”, though Kerouac occasionally, briefly, goes back to Cassidy’s childhood or another character’s background and habits, it’s but a glance, and usually accompanied by a bit of dime-store psychology. Because Kerouac doesn’t care much about that. It’s the past - the onward rush of the Now, of what’s next, is what interests him. That’s the essence of what Kerouac did, with “On the Road” and his other writing, he presented, sketched, drew moving pictures of the onward flow of the Now. His music descriptions, accounts of seeing Bird or other musicians, are some of the best music writing ever done, for this very reason. There’s Kerouac’s immersion in the sound and the presence of the musician and physical descriptions of music happening in real time, capturing the experience of listening to music in an incredibly realistic way. Lester Bangs picked up on this, and his music writing is a child of Kerouac’s.

Here’s how I’d explain it, and how I now read the scroll version of “On the Road,” reexamining it after all this time – this book that isn’t fiction, that’s made its indelible imprint on literature. Say you were creating a Netflix series of “On the Road.” There’s a group of ten or twenty writers/directors, there’ll be five seasons of ten episodes each. Though each episode follows the events of the book in a chronological order, there is no attempt to follow a definite linear thread and definitely not a stylistic thread, from any one to any of the others. Each exist as their own separate entities. They are whatever each director sees in them – realistic, impressionistic, surreal, using techniques like flip-book photo style, blurry drunken parties, tete-a-tete talking heads philosophizing, narration from the book over beautiful landscape scenes or still photos of the principle characters, that is, music videos using words instead, filmed in color, black and white, neon, whatever visual tricks and effects the directors can imagine, each episode as intense and charged as each event in the book, one layered on top of another with no attempt to really tell this story except the story that is movement, the story is that is action, the story is Kerouac’s marvelous statements throughout, the words that inspire on the deepest level, like these.

          “I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted.”

Whatever his writing is called, it doesn’t matter. It’s Kerouac, man, is what it is.