The Acceptance of Loss, Part II
Read Part I here.
In the Writings of Jack Kerouac
To believe in, and search for, mystery was not for Kerouac to be balanced upon the ledge of the existential abyss of Kierkegaard, but was simply to continue inspecting those base parts of himself not even his ultimate belief in God could shine a light on. Those critics accusing Kerouac’s style of being no more than prattle need to close their own eyes and listen to the unnameable cosmic drone of their own minds, for Kerouac fed on prattle, babble, even the facial gestures between words, if only to be momentarily unborn again, while still alive in the interval between what we think existence is and what it really is, i.e., nothingness; thus, his search for a true language was a search by default, by what he could learn about the world while unable to speak about it. Simply, Kerouac avoided his own assumptions to enrich the absence of his own life, and to lure out the accidental counterpart to the “author” in him: the Kerouac who touted falsehood in drink, who disparaged no one if sober, everyone when drunk, while explicitly aware that to break tout court from all other literary methods around him, to break with every other use of language being practised on his own planet, was the supreme sacrifice to be made, so much so that he groomed himself into becoming a pariah, an overture of failure, limiting himself as he did only to what, from literature, he craved: to leave behind its great terrains of fakery and sculpt his own sentences into its etymological strata. In view of this, then, it seems impossible to think of a man who has ever loved words more than Jack Kerouac. Words were his only true companions, his solace, the keys to the no-door that connects our sensible world to the void. For Kerouac, by believing in no certainty, banked his whole existence on them, so that if his fits of faillissement seem now to us somewhat self-effacing, if not inauthentic acts of lassitude, then he himself was only truly a lapsed pelvis unable to ever be resurrected or taken up into the “heaven” of his own mind:
Poor! I wish I was free
Of that slaving meat wheel
And safe in heaven dead.
(From Mexico City Blues)
That Kerouac will continue to test the patience of his readers is an axiom bordering on a mind-denying insult, yes, but only in the same way that God might test our patience if we were forced to listen to a tape-recording of his only known monologue to himself muttering: “I AM WHO I AM” for all eternity! To read Kerouac, especially his poetry, is to listen to an already posthumous message sent from himself to himself in the void after the end of speech, when geography has deemed our planet not worth speaking about; that said, Kerouac, by caring too much about the world, while being not of this world, disguised himself from it in language, and by constantly adjusting his own mask of invisibility upon the faces of his characters. So that what he saw and did not write about is not worth mentioning; for, as fraudulent a notion as imagelessness is, solidity is worse — for no sense of vulnerability can be evaded upon any of its various ontological terrains. In view of Kerouac’s obsession with nothingness, and the paradoxical non-self of suffering in the Samyutta Nikaya Buddhist scripture, which was, strangely and agonizingly, considered the full life, it is not surprising that in his writing there is not one moment in which we feel as if he is ever going to find deliverance, i.e., deliverance from this world; thus, it would be otiose to suggest that he believed in anything other than suffering, for such did Kerouac “play” an almost actor-dramatist version of himself lost inside his own head that it is not hard also to feel that maybe he might just as well have sold sand to a Bedouin, or defaced the faces of fake gods from the icons of apostates rather than waste his time trying to write his way free of his own “one” mortal identity; after all, despite his role as “king of the Beats” he could not have been more remote from the role of public author than if he had been sealed-off in one of those glass-kiosks which form part of the twelve Stations of the Cross in The Grotto, in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts.
Walker Evans, Bethlehem Graveyard, Pennsylvania, 1935. Library of Congress.
Walker Evans, Street Debris, New York City, 1968. Aperture
It seems, then, both superfluous and vital to mention that Kerouac was born in a small American town, and/or that he was of French-Canadian descent; likewise, it feels utterly unimportant to say his agony and joy in the world were endured as an American, for in the purity of his heart, in that no-world realm of his soul where evil can never be felt, you suspect the only identity that mattered to him was the one before he was born, before his childhood and the loss of his older brother Gerard, the loss of his father to stomach cancer when Jack was only 25, and, later on, the sudden death of his sister; in fact, such was his almost supernatural need for loss to be the remedy for all that he reminds us of it, testifies to it repetitively, both in his poetry and prose, for such is his affinity with nothingness, and the world that might exist outside our experience, that we might be inclined to regard his “fictional” characters only as essential or superfluous as we, the readers, make them; especially since, in our minds, his own presence is never gone. Thus, to pass judgement upon him only as a “literary” figure is to miss the point, for he was much more and much less than a mere “author”; like a man suffering from permanent amnesia, Kerouac looked, especially in photographs in the late 1960s, like one who had forgotten he had a body, or who had only ever met himself once or twice in the mirror. The sense of epochal complacency when being described by critics as some kind of “instigator,” or worse, “leader” of an entire generation was rather like calling a statue the originator of the blank stare. In interviews, on both radio and TV, we listen or look on helplessly as Kerouac fumbles in vain for an explanation of what it means to be “Beat”; hence the obscurity of the terms often used: “sympathetic,” “beaten down,” “pity,” “beatitude” and so on and so forth; consequently, as far as “literary” generations go, Kerouac knew in his heart that the essence of what made him “Beat” shed more light on what most Americans didn’t want America to become, rather than what they did:
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’
(From On the Road)
By the time a lot of these “mad ones” had died, been jailed or shot, or ended up in prison, Kerouac was already seeking what, in truth, he had always been seeking: the opportunity to be free of being, especially if that sense of being continued to be regulated by an America uninterested in Oswald Spengler’s prophecy of “Second Religiousness”: a new holier people arriving to usurp each civilization forged by its history (in this case, the “Western” American one); but while Kerouac never advocated the “Beats” as some kind of new sect, he did, like Burroughs and Ginsberg, continually betray a deep hostility to anyone who would not even contemplate the need for the Beat generation to be a possible spiritual compensation for Caesarism; that said, by writing about the power of America’s military might, powerlessly, and by writing about the tragedy of the bomb, peacefully, the “Beats,” and Kerouac in particular, never allowed themselves to give an account of what anything didn’t feel like, and thus held off from ever overly politicizing by always managing to make their words coincide with what internally they felt needed to be said about the world. Hence Kerouac’s “blind” need to see the world by using “meaning” itself like braille and, let us be ruthless about it, as if he was the only expert in the final eschatological days of all humans who, without his writing, would not escape total hell. That said, a man like Kerouac played for high stakes, by adopting a language which only his soul spoke, which is one of the reasons for which he got so pilloried and crucified; yet if the critic was true, and Kerouac possessed not a trace of intellectuality, no overall method of working or, more damaging, no belief in formal sentence structure, what else would he be left with? Well, hiscritic’s personalities! Which, in the main, consisted of mostly an admonishing frenzy, or worse, the hysteria of abjection. Amid his ontic disillusionment with existing, Kerouac (much to the chagrin and ignorance of his critics) became all thought, so much so that he entered an almost hypostatized realm where disproportion (of his own life when set against a “literary” one) and inadequacy came together to create an apotheosis of purity, an agony of self-expression no longer equalling his perspicacity of what, before he began writing, he thought might idolize his spirit into believing that he could exist outside literature and, at the same time, remain a spokesman for God. In Visions of Cody, he tells us that when in Mexico, at Actopan, he reached the “biblical plateau”: he of course meant that he felt as if he had almost returned to the only other place of similar exaltation: the womb, there, or “heaven,” or both; thus, the crisis of Kerouac, both in his writing and in his life, is that he could never return to where, before birth, no earthbound anxiety could exist. So strong is his need to return to it that at times you get the feeling he’d be just as happy to (hastily) construct a collapsible canvas shelter in a desert to replace the womb and hide out there until the world passed.
For his biggest critics, Kerouac remained paralysed by obstinacy, by bad taste, by empty verbiage; in reality, he was paralysed only by his rejection of traditional literary criticism, not because he believed it to be necessarily false but because he considered it omnipotent and lacking what, in his soul, should be the only conceivable non-law for a writer: be yourself! Or, as he said in the two essays published in 1958 and 1959, respectively, in the magazine Evergreen Review, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and “Belief & Techniques for Modern Prose,” “Be in love with your life,” and (what to most poetry critics of his age was deemed to be simply breath-taking naivety) be “submissive to everything, open, listening” and (for critics) even worse, “Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition.” Yet, in his work and his quest for the eternal loss of everything, even inhibition was but a sand dune effaced by God’s cosmic breath. One thing, then, seems obvious: Jack Kerouac can only be understood if, like him, we allow ourselves to ignore the type of criticism which, in the end, amounted (and still amounts) to no more than a demagogic debauchery of reason, an odious disqualification of “fair minded” viewpoints, which seek only to poetically bankrupt a reputation. A fusion of saintliness and homemade rhetoric, his “attributes,” so blatantly and piously his, brought death to objectivity by emptying his consciousness until no objects could be found outside it, until all that was left was his own permanently subjective thirst for the absolute. As a result, his typewriter (for the critic, only a Trojan Horse hiding even more failed Kerouacs) came to feel as if it were the only reassuring piece of technology left in the world. In those rare periods when Kerouac felt aware of the effrontery of his hubris, we, as readers, can identify his prophecies either with sophistry (his own when trying to explain them), or with his own admission of impotence in his every aborted attempt to organize his literary “career.” In light, then, of such abortive attempts to define it, or attribute a response to the historical achievement of the Beat generation around the time of the mid-fifties, even a “generation” as derided as this one was, for Kerouac, to subscribe more or less explicitly to what could not be ascertained about it. For his thought, already established as being inconstant, scarcely allowed itself to tolerate what it was, or what “literary” position it had, by the most inexpugnable of his critics, been afforded. After all, dangerous individualism requires a dangerous talent and/or temperament, that or a disciple too holy to be considered, in a conventional sense, religious; and Kerouac fitted the bill.
Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac’s hometown. Library of Congress.
In the most experimental of Kerouac’s work, the “author,” a ham-actor, is relegated to a subsidiary role, one whose solitude is just an empty study, and his talent, a deeply unreligious eucharist side-stepping the tongue; for Kerouac, by writing about the (sometimes) faintest mind-speck realities, about the kind of details that devour themselves before memory can resurrect them, became both ascetic and scavenger: a repetitious Prometheus consuming himself down to his last semantical entrails. Such remorseless acts of self-cannibalism forced Kerouac to feed on even the slightest scraps of reality to sustain his art, which, for the critic, seemed tantamount to heresy. Yet to write like a writer is one thing, to write as if one were a god is quite another, hence Kerouac’s lack of retaliation against critics, for even when he did feel compelled to speak out, you feel as if he were only doing so in order to redirect a reader back towards his own, more honourable temperament, a temperament that, once fully developed, once fully “acting” as a conduit for pure “spontaneous” prose, allowed Kerouac to denounce all other “literary” styles by style — his. After all, to write like Kerouac amounted to writing as a master of antithesis, resulting often, it’s true, in the loss of the equilibrium of what we thought literature was supposed to be. If, then, it seems more fruitful to describe Kerouac as an anti-intellectual, anti-modern writer, or worse, an anti-literary one, then this would only subject his “role” as an author to that of a mystic, for whom the soul, a theological irritant, is seen simply as something to be got rid of: an incongruous element of a personality that knows (because it will vanish into God) that, at birth, its quest had already been settled. Certainly, it’s almost impossible to think of any other twentieth century writer who took as big a risk as Kerouac, for he was deaf, but listened; he was blind, but saw. In short, he contradicted his own biographical and linear appearances in the world by refusing to be the voice of sanity, a man who, by never comprising what he felt, had simply no idea of how to live a lie; for unlike the opportunist of despair, who by lying calls that despair his religion, Kerouac prevailed over his typewriter like a priest before his altar: an inconsolable saint ravaged by the least admissible spectacle of sin known to man, i.e., the “religious” kind. Kerouac lived for true affliction, measured as his own talent was by the absence of it inside his heart and by what, in his writing, corresponded not to his own generation, but to the lostness of the purity of the void there, where, beyond our human cognitive faculties to see him, God resides:
I just lay on the mountain meadow side in the moonlight, head to grass, and heard the silent recognition of my temporary woes. —Yes, so to try to attain to Nirvana when you’re already there, to attain to the top of a mountain when you’re already there and only have to stay —thus, to stay in the Nirvana Bliss, is all I have to do, you have to do, no effort, no path really, no discipline but just to know that all is empty and awake, a Vision and a Movie in God’s Universal Mind (Alaya-Vijnana) and to stay more or less wisely in that.
From Alone on a Mountaintop
Perhaps America never needed Kerouac as much as it needed the America that he himself still dreamed of finding; either way, I, for one, have no doubt that Kerouac’s America is the least objectionable one, for if readers of his books today agree on anything, it will be simply this: America today is but a retrogressive distortion of Kerouac’s version of it. Thus, it seems obvious that to admire Kerouac is not to admire America, or even the America he wrote about; for dispossessing Americans of what he deemed the most inherently “American” thing about them, Kerouac in his novels encouraged each American reader to be stripped of all constitutional privileges, reducing as he did even the Bill of Rights to a legislative anomaly on the blank page of one of his small spiral notebooks that he carried in his shirt pocket; in short, Kerouac’s writing allowed America to open itself up to becoming a renewable version of itself again, a possibility that, if taken up today, could still help America free itself of itself, to become what Kerouac believed it once to have been (after reading Thomas Wolfe’s Look Howard, Angel): a “poem.” That said, no one would imitate Kerouac’s life, for to regard his life as a template, the very incarnation of talent, would be to indulge only in misguided aberrations. More than the freedom of Jean-Paul Sartre, which demanded action above all else, only Kerouac’s sense of freedom could be compared and denounced as rigorously as Sartre’s unliveable proposition; especially so in light of Kerouac’s solitary (mostly obdurate) oeuvre in which the idea of retraction in art or, as he called it, a “honing down” of one’s own beliefs, was (always) considered by him to represent “stagnation,” a “death,” and worse, a surrendering to the merely “literary” life; for only his own autonomous model of consciousness (negating the shallow distinction of intellectual and lived experiences) would come to seem for him the least objectionable consummation of his sanguinolent, saintly life. Kerouac is ideal reading for a saint, for at no point in the writing of his books did Kerouac once replace God with the ego of the “author,” and this is, in fact, his somewhat bizarre connection between religion and the world at large, for everything that ever occurred in his mind was but a perishable off-shoot of the futility in believing in anything mortal; that said, Kerouac was not just another Blaise Pascal with a more joyful or “ill-mannered” vision of man’s wretchedness; for Kerouac, writing was simply his way of depriving himself of deriding his own pleasure in writing in the first place, which is why his writing is incapable of disappointing his devotees, and this is because of the way in which it never attempted to promulgate itself as a countertruth to “real” literary novels, let alone as anything other than what it was: a glorification of the bliss of being lost:
…a dream I had about a strange Arabian figure that was
pursuing me across the desert; that I tried to avoid; that finally overtook me just before I reached the Protective City. ‘who is this?’ said Carlo. We pondered it. I proposed it was myself, wearing a shroud. That wasn’t it. Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb…From On the Road
Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Sleeping Dogs Bark, 1966. Princeton Art Museum.
Manuel Álvarez Bravo, The Great Penitent, 1954. Time.
A Cézanne with a notebook and pencil, Kerouac sketched himself free of his own morbid dispositions in justifying God’s architectural designs by tracing over the palimpsest of his soul: the railroad yards, alleyways, and sidewalks of San Francisco, New York, and Denver, until his nostalgia for heaven became some kind of undercurrent of man’s mnemonic (eternal?) sympathy for what’s already lost. Hence Kerouac’s ability to understand loss and every unforeseen pang of nostalgia in the same way that a foetus, pre-birth, might have flashbacks of the memory of its mother’s life. For, like Proust, Kerouac, “The Great Rememberer” as Ginsberg called him, knew that the man who forgets is the man who, having missed even one crucial detail of his life, has already died. “Dead,” that is, to time, to be left (while still alive) to merely oscillate for the rest of his days between despair and a life lived devoid of opportunism. Thus, Kerouac saw life and death as simply two ends of the same unjustifiable plain, or unfathomable stop-off points on the vast distances of nothingness that stretch across the universe, the beginning of the “past,” then, for this novelist, was not any kind of an “end” for time-future but what, in the best Bergsonian sense, was already seeping into the no-time of our soon-to-be-arrived-at deaths. For this reason, the literary characters of his novels seem more cosmogonic errors than factual physical signposts in linear time; for by referring always to a time when he wasn’t born, Kerouac existed as an unborn “adult” but also as an unable-to-be bodied phantom. That said, like Martin Heidegger, he knew that death does not exist, or at least not for us who can never experience our death. Even so, we should never mistake his obsession with death for morbidity, or gloominess, no, but rather only as a complement to the truth that we are screened-off from reality as if trapped behind the display-case of mere “appearance,” while being simply dressed up like shopfront mannequins in temporary flesh for the short duration of a life lived in full public view of everybody else; for Kerouac was lost not just to himself but to the underlying prolixity of what, due to the contingency of our lives, we cannot say about it. After all, anything that happens to us is already not happening in the minds of those who never knew we existed; thus Kerouac understood that we are a subtraction, the missing “sum” in the mathematical chance of us existing in the first place; hence the heart-lacerating awareness, in every line he wrote, that we, as humans, merely cancel part of ourselves every time we breath — that, and we fail to add-on our own lives to the ontological redundancy of not existing on the epistemological land-mass of the collective human thought.
Once Kerouac realized he was lost, he began to live: a fictional dust-storm invading the glass-sphere of his every atom, which if looked up closely would reveal not necessarily a man but merely the ghost of an author seeing his own stories play out in the imaginary snow globe of his own mortal tears. In failing to be the greatest novelist in America, Kerouac ended up being merely the greatest novelist of his own life: a thaumaturgist at converting his own blood into ink, so that in 1958, in the Partisan Review, when his most savage critic Norman Podhoretz labelled the novelist king a “Know-Nothing Bohemian,” he couldn’t have been, in Buddhist terms, more right; for he was only echoing what Kerouac had been telling us all along: we know nothing, and worse (for Podhoretz) he, I, you ARE nothing. To exist in an uninterested universe, to be trapped by the never-to-be-escaped cobweb of our own galaxy and wait for the arrival of a god-spider, is a fate worse than death, and only what, for an atheist, might possibly constitute calling this life entertainment; but for Kerouac, in every moment of every day, in order to avert the still-to-be certified “memory” of his own death, he birthed and re-birthed only those characters in his life which, in the time zones of fiction, he deemed eternal enough to outlive their biographical details in his mind:
And finally, if on some snowy dusk, with the sun’s sloping light on the flank of a hill, with the sun flaming back from factory windows, you see a little child of six, a boy called Mickey Martin, standing motionless in the middle of the road with his sled behind him, stunned by the sudden discovery that he does not know who he is, where he came from, what he is doing here, remember that all children are first shocked out of the womb of a mother’s world before they can know that loneliness is their heritage and their only means of rediscovering men and women. This is the Martin family, the elders and the young ones, even the little ones, the flitting ghost-ends of a brood who will grow and come to attain size and seasons and huge presence like the others, and burn savagely across days and nights of living, and give brooding rare articulation to the poor things of life, and the rich, dark things too.
(From The Town and the City)
Being a novelist, Kerouac understood that, to live his life, he would have to live it through other lives also, to speak his own mind in the past tense, to live, in fact, a posthumous existence. If he doesn’t have the voice of a conventional novelist, it is only because what he writes, and the way he writes it, is written in the expectation that we have already imagined the soul of each “character” snuffed out like a candle in God’s mind. To survive the eradication of himself as an author in the passing lives of those he wrote about was simply to admit before writing that even one acute moment of (literary?) lucidity was but an illusion collapsing into and out of the antiquity of time already gone. Thus, Kerouac squandered his own existence on nothing other than the fiction of lives not his, making all packed-into-a-sentence existence obsolete. Even James Joyce, packing one day of an entire city into one book, by comparison to Kerouac, seems profligate. Because everything that happens to us has to be filtered through the subjective and cognitive apparatus of our minds, nothing that we experience through it can be wasted and, with this in mind, nothing is lost to time by Kerouac; for he remembers everything, clamps down his mind on anything, so much so that you imagine that, even if lobotomized, he would, on waking, remember the hair colour, size, and weight of the surgeon who had just performed the procedure! Like Herodotus, by not wanting to escape one event Kerouac unmasked the fiction of his own face long enough for him to remember what time had been unable to diminish about each character; thus his only temporal salvation from time was what freed him of the slavery of being only himself. His “memory” was his own earthly heaven, the only place in which suffering could be kept in retreat; for, by possessing no memory of himself before birth, Kerouac placed all of his hopes on being returned there by words alone. Yet, if language was not his sole principle of survival, it almost certainly was the only way that he could, outside language, propound a mnemonic alternative to whatever he was in the process of forgetting. The idea that his work was only the moribund melodrama, played out in the childish head of a man unable to grow old, was an insult, not least because of the fact that, for Kerouac (who never wanted to be born), his torture was, by purely arbitrary and contingent means, that, one day, he hadbeen. Thus, the desideratum of Kerouac since childhood, to write, ultimately proved to be the apotheosis of the writing itself; so much so that it was his one stylistic thrust of production and, more than that, his only moment of familiarity with a never-to-be repristinated world.
Despite the fact that the lure of disillusion proved always too enticing, the period that prefigured his complete breakdown (savagely and explicitly self-explained in his 1960 novel Big Sur) began to occur on top of a mountain, in the north cascades of Washington, as a firewatcher, in view of Mt Hozomeen, a period documented in both Lonesome Traveller (1960) and Desolation Angels (1965); for it was here that fiction itself began to collapse, when even the far-reaching horizon seemed but a metaphysical impasse, and where the void felt like a vault opening up inside his soul to engulf him. It was an experience that he could only attempt to escape by turning to God, but what is a man to do upon not seeing him? Turn inward? Yes; thus, night after night, sometimes ecstatic, mostly desolate, Kerouac, isolated as a statue holding the Moon’s mirror, saw reflected only his own sad face, not God’s. In truth, what man could withstand such solitude? Who, so truth-stricken as if abandoned by meaning itself, could still survive the world? For while critics could reproach Kerouac for not writing the novels that they believed a major novelist should be writing, surely not one of them could remain insensitive to a man who could only explain his sorrow away like this: “Avoid the world, it’s just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end”; or “All of life is a foreign country”; for these are the words of a sick man, an expert in perdition and self-pity, but also a man who lived the sadness of his life sadly, the beauty of it beautifully. For, when he spoke, he espoused no one else’s experience but his own, and if he did provide American fiction with an alternative way of viewing things, all of the intrinsic eccentricities were his, and his alone. His crisis was only that his disgruntlement at the world was always directed towards himself, even when he was looking directly into the eye of another; thus, perhaps it is better to imagine him still up there on that mountain, having died, yes, but not from his love of God, or Buddha, or Nirvana itself but from his longing to taste the perfect word, the perfect sentence in his mouth that would explain, once and for all: “all this coming and going in the void.”
Kerouac sheds a light on that part of us which we do not desire to share with the rest of the world, the inner-experience of ourselves that seems to transcend religion, philosophy, science, yes, and even the contingency of being born; that unknowable part of us that philosophers call the noumenon which, both literally and impossibly, seems to best describe who we really are: the heaven-opening insight which stops us exchanging identities mid-dream with Kerouac’s “shrouded stranger” of death who, when lifting up his hood, reveals only the mask of the face we had before we were born, before the womb intervened and reality began to liberate us from the facility of eternal sleep and the soon-to-be-arrived-at fiction of our “life” here on Earth. Thus, divorced from reality, Kerouac learnt, book by book, to die, and in that way keep the universe alive; he became his own subject and nothing but it, especially when, in his later work, he began to identify not with the subject of the books themselves but only with what in them he couldn’t allow to coincide with anyone else. That said, his irreverence, his (apparent) rejection of plot, and the overwhelmingly free licence that he gave to himself from himself allowed him, in the attenuated form of a prayer, to enter into that most troubling and hazardous of all intellectual ventures: radicalism, that seemingly ignorant self-denying, self-vegetating journey of shame that, to the outward eye, seems as if the author has “created” his or her works with absolutely no mental reservation or restrictions whatsoever, while admitting no hypocrisy and, even more troubling for the critic, no sense of regret. Since Kerouac’s death, amid the reams of endless articles, essays, and books written about him, very few have admitted that by refusing to critically defend himself, or even discourage the onslaught (being a pacifist), he found no forgiveness, no repentance, except in the manner of the attacks on him that seemed less severe, less corrosive because of his inability to sidestep them; as if he knew the dark night of his soul was his destiny, and that because of such eternal compliance to his fate he was happy to swallow the neuroses of his critics for them:
…I’d better go around and tell everybody, or let others convince me, that I’m the great white father and intellectual forebear who spawned a deluge of alienated radicals, war protectors, dropouts, hippies and even ‘beats’, and thereby I can make some money maybe and a ‘new Now-image’ for myself (and God forbid I dare call myself the intellectual forebear of modern spontaneous prose), but I’ve got to figure out first how I could possibly spawn Jerry Rubin, Mitchell Goodman, Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg and other warm human beings from the ghettos who say they suffered no less than the Puerto Ricans in their barrios and the blacks in their Big and Little Harlems, and all because I wrote a matter-of-fact account of a true adventure on the road (hardly an agitational propaganda account).
(From After Me, The Deluge)
Had the likes of On the Road or Doctor Sax been written by an amateur on a creative writing course, by a “student” of literature, then their mixture of pretended fiction-truths, spiritual and magical circumspection,and semi-tragic daring would have, no doubt, seemed delightful, charming in their innocence, even; but, because they were books written by (supposedly) one of America’s “major” novelists of the second half of the twentieth century, such bare-faced effrontery, irresponsibility, would simply not be forgiven! For such soul-abrading testimonies which Kerouac practised are not meant to be lauded, let alone acknowledged as significant contributions to the American “canon.” Yet his writing (for some) is major, but why? Because of the way that, contrary to the writer who indulges in a tête-à-tête with himself and/or his characters, Kerouac indulged in it for us all; thus his writing — incautious, yes, and judiciously naïve — succeeds by explaining away the compromise between poetry and prose, holiness and darkness, even “between” risk and sticking to the rules; but whose rules? The literary world’s? For what “rules” matter if they want only to stymie the contradictions between nonconformity and conformity, between an almost puritanical (Catholic) abnegation of love and open respect for blessed piety? The answer is quite obviously “none,” likewise for the kind of “literary” or obscurantist constraint that might stop someone admitting to feeling openly pious in the first place; After all, aren’t contradictions that which individualism and radicalism are built on? For, as Jean-Paul Sartre so accurately put it when writing about André Gide, “observance of the rules coexists with a quest for spontaneity”; that said, Kerouac was a child, but only in the way that we might consider him to be an eternally young prodigy of the electrifying candour of Walt Whitman’s famous dictum “I contradict myself….”
Walker Evans, The Mangrove Coast, Florida, 1941. Smithsonian American Art Museum
Lee Friedlander, California, 1965. MoMA
At the end, Kerouac’s task was not to demean himself or to weigh and counterweigh the pros and cons of every sentence; like Nietzsche, it consisted in saying “Yes” to a life lived free of intellectual introspection and inspection of every cognitive decision made in the course of writing. In his own way, Kerouac reminds us that anything and everything can be said in literature, with the alternative being only to remain eternally cautious, cautious as a clerk or document writer who, in theory, seems eager only to fulfil his or her role as a municipal form-filler. To read Kerouac, on the other hand, is to live through his tortured spiritual impulses, in a style so unimpeded by its own originality that it defines the death of all literary forms that don’t share its daring, its high-wire theatrics above the syntactical abyss; for, as an act of willed definition, it is also a burial of his critics lowered into his grave; for, unable to follow his path, such critics mourn the death not of themselves but of a “literature” they cherish more than life itself. And thus, inevitably, the about-turn, the volte-face that they hoped for, never arrived. For, too uninterested in other people’s opinions on how he should write, Kerouac knew that the only unbeliever in his work that mattered to him was God and God alone; indeed, despite the fact that he was, in all his books, as much disillusioned as ecstatic, he knew also that no amount of criticism could defeat loss, or even hypostatize it long enough for God to consider renaming it “joy”; no, for surely it is improbable, even impossible to imagine the “type” of writer who might change his methods of writing because of the arguments against it by a critic. Kerouac understood, better than most, that the problems of literature are really only those of the soul, and that no earthly solution can be applied to it unless the writing itself is affected with the attitude of God, he who (surely?) does not want to correct the shoulder-blades of any man who in his writing already flies, soars, and ultimately expresses himself by burning up like Icarus in the sun-blaze of his every full-stop. Thus, we might say that Kerouac’s most precious gift that he gave to the world was his involuntary triumph in reliving the agony of Christ in his own mortification of the flesh; for, unlike the majority of writers in the 1950s and 1960s, Kerouac didn’t choose between plot and experiment, God or Buddhism, but simply (for our sakes?) fell into the crevasse between words, especially if those words did not discredit the inadequacy of the reader’s response to them as “literature.”
At its best, the writing of Kerouac is extraordinarily comforting, diminishing as it does each reader’s expectations of it while impoverishing that part of you the language feels incapable of providing liberation for; yet, if there are some sections in all his books that almost expect you to turn the next page, then it is only the précis of what, as a reader, we cannot help but take issue with due to our knowledge of what we thought great literature was supposed to be like; but to measure our own expectations of what we’d like from literature with what we demand from it is, in the case of Kerouac’s writing, merely an already effaced effort to produce something similar to it. By the time he had finished Vanity of Duluoz in 1968, America was the complete antipode of what he still thought about it, thus his outbursts and bile directed towards his nation were simply his final botched, verbose, and impotent attempts to postpone its history in his soul. Therefore, his indignation feels to us today more morbid impulse than inspiration, more inordinate dishonour (his own) than any kind of literary pleasure left inside him to be truthful for; the excitement he still offers us consists precisely in that imbalance between the inadequacy of his thoughts and the extent to which they propelled his own mind forward. Hence his ability, when drunk, to shift from Catholicism to Buddhism to Joyce in a single sentence, in the same way that energy shifts from one object to the next in the universe. Kerouac’s failure to unify all of the chronological details of his life from boyhood to his last despairing days is not the fault of his unsuitable “literary” approach, in as much as it was the fault of literature not to adequately provide him with something in place of it; for, by consenting to everything he deemed authentic and then daring to call it “holy,” Kerouac created a private and hyper-religious reality which, when aggravated by his words, inevitably failed to depopulate heaven in any one human head that failed to imagine it in the same way as he did. Thus, his great project to write “one vast book,” as a historical document, makes no sense, for not one single event in Kerouac’s universe remains as sufficiently loyal to his failure to both explore and exploit “history” as history does in exploiting him. Thus, to pass judgement on him seems beside the point. That and the fact that, to survive the crisis of his literary career and to write over twenty books of prose and poetry, Kerouac simply had to be himself, and to set himself his only life task: “to become, and pray to be, an earthly prophet.”
You’ll come to when you lean your face over the nose will fall with it — that is known as death. You’ll come to angular rages and lonely homages among the Beast of Day in hot glary circumstances made grit by the hour of the clock, that is known as civilization. You’ll roll your feet together in the tense befuddles of ten thousand evenings in company in the parlour, in the pad — that is known as, ah, socializing. You’ll grow numb all over from inner paralytic thoughts, and bad chairs, that is known as solitude. You’ll inch along the ground on the day of your death and be pursued by the Editorial Cartoon Russian Bear with a knife, and in his bear hug he will poignard you in the reddy blood back to gleam in the pale Siberian sun — that is known as nightmares. You’ll look at a wall of blank flesh and fritter to explain yourself, that is known as love. The flesh of your head will recede from the bone, leaving the bulldog Determination pointing thru the pique jaw tremulo jaw bone point — in other words, you’ll slobber over your morning egg cup, that is known as old age, for which they have benefits. Bye and bye you’ll rise to the sun and propel your mean bones hard and sure to huge labors and great steaming dinners, and spit your pits out, aching cocklove nights in cobweb moon, the mist of tired dust at evening, the coin, the silk, the moon, the rail — that is known as Maturity — but you’ll never be as happy as you are now in your quilted innocent book-devouring boyhood immortal night.
(From Doctor Sax)
It is unsurprising, then, that sympathy for Kerouac, and his plight in wanting to become a “prophet,” is not always forthcoming. But why, exactly? Well, because his fits of episodic brilliance seem more accidental than inspired, more subterfuge of his own weaknesses as a novelist than evidence of an expert writer; for, quite simply, his weaknesses, when all is said and done, are what draws us back to him. The crisis for Kerouac was that he was a writer, not a mystic, both of which would lead him by alternative routes into the abyss of complete disillusion. That said, he was enough of a mystic to modify that “disillusion” with his visions for a new literary method for prose, before the temporary religious respite of Buddhism, and the final alcoholic guilt at existing at all. And thus it was that, after receiving attack after pitiless attack in the late 1960s, Kerouac went back to Florida to die, having (almost inevitably) lost interest in the world. In his last years, it seemed as if Kerouac no longer aspired to anything but choosing which particular version of America to forget. After all, it is all too easy to regard his journeys in automobiles, freight-trains, on foot, or at the typewriter as heroic ones of world-discovery. But one should be aware that the journey was taken within, where all true journeys begin, and that the deranged flights of his mind were nothing more than the miscarriages of a soul which had to be first reversed, by him, through language into the (apparently) spontaneous births and rebirths of his own sentences before they could be called “journeys” at all. Thus Kerouac can be cited as a rare, modern, and near Kierkegaardian exemplar of how to be yourself because, in the face of all opinions to the contrary, and by deciding to testify both for and against his own slow maturation into “imagelessness,” he became the ghost of an author, an exile in his own body, and in that way, in that way only, he defied the odds of his age.
Kerouac in a 1968 interview with William Buckley. Allen Ginsberg Project
