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Kerouac Revisited

© Shaun Michael Jex

On streets dotted with neon lights, with the smoke of cigarettes and human breath against the cold air, I think of Jack Kerouac. Jack was the writer who first awoke in me the desperate need for literature and was the bodhisattva of my education. His prose oozed with life and brought restlessness into my heart, not merely to travel, but to create. I am not alone in this. Literature has not been the same since On The Road exploded onto the literary scene. His mark has even been felt in the music and film world, stretching out over popular and intellectual culture for half a century. What is it about his writing, despite the constant 'academia' criticism of it, that makes him such a far-reaching influence? It is because his literature screams with the jazz soloists glee and sorrow for life, because like Whitman and Twain, he crafted out and created a uniquely American voice.

The literary theory that he used to craft this voice was one largely original that he dubbed spontaneous prose. Many critics have likened it to stream of consciousness writing or automatic writing, but it differs greatly from both in method and ideology. The pioneers of stream of consciousness, I am specifically thinking of Joyce, did not improvise their writing, nor did they leave anything up to chance. These particular writers shaped and chose every word with tedious care. On the other end of the spectrum, the automatic writers were the extreme end of the avant garde, abandoning story plot or any continuity in order to show the joyous creation that chaos and chance could bring about, like a painter who splashes his canvas with oils in every and any direction. Kerouac's problem with the first of these was that he believed that by being so meticulous as not to leave anything up to chance, that these writers were robbing literature and the world of the spontaneous prophecies and songs of the mind. Jack was also a storyteller, and so his differences with the automatic writers came into play in that he wanted to express his life, in terms that people could read and be edified by. The methodology of spontaneous prose was a middle ground somewhere between these two.

In his essay 'Essentials of Spontaneous Prose' (which can be located in the Viking Portable Beat Reader, editor Ann Charters) he attempted to outline the method and benefits of this particular style and theory.

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