(Jack Kerouac)
The
Beat Generation literary movement announced its arrival in the 50s and due to
the highly scandalous character of its work and behavior became notoriously
famous at once. There is not any other literary phenomenon in the literary
history of the
Jack
Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg and William Seward Burroughs, three close friends and
creative personalities, initiated that social revolt and literary movement.
They began with individualistic disagreement with the way of life their parents
and contemporaries had, but in the course of time it stirred the memorable
youth and students’ movements of the 60s and 70s, encouraged the hippie culture
and detonated the black movement for their rights.
Jack Kerouac (Jean Louis Lebris De Kerouac) is regarded as the authentic voice of
the beat generation and sometimes is referred to as “the King of the Beats”. He
was born to French-Canadian parents in Lowell (
Jack
did not feel himself a freshman in that company of these intellectuals, vise
versa, his status among them was high, firstly due to his versatile life
experience by that time and secondly due to his faith to literary work. His
maniacal hard labor at the typewriter gained him respect.
Jack’s
first novel The Town and the City was
published in 1950. It was based on his
Later,
after On the Road had been published
at last in 1957, Kerouac created this legend about having written the novel in
three weeks under inspiration. But letters and journals give evidence that the
book was started in 1948. The narrative is highly autobiographical,
all the characters are all his friends and Kerouac himself. On the Road begins with Kerouac’s
meeting the legendary Neal Cassady, called ‘Dean
Moriarty’ in the narrative, who took Kerouac (‘Sal Paradise’) on the road
between 1947 and 1950, hitchhiking and riding buses and cars across the United
States on a search of joyful adventure. In this book Ginsberg is ‘Carlo Marx’
and Burroughs as ‘Old Bull Lee’. Neal Cassady was a
strong personal and literary influence on Kerouac. The events that are
meticulously described in the novel, cover the span between 1947and 1951.
Kerouac had written a lot of variants which were ruthlessly destroyed as he
thought them to be inadequate. And only in the spring of 1951 Kerouac did
realize that he had found the style he had been searching for so painfully.
The
book did not find way to publication easily and it depressed Kerouac a lot. He
knew that his novel was innovative both in content and form and it was
difficult for him to put up with the situation. His friends’ literary success
made the stress for him even worse: W.Burroughs
published his first novel Junkie:
Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict in 1953, Allen Ginsberg’s famous
poem Howl in 1956. Both books were a
scandalous success and critics announced the emergence of the Beat Generation
and the effect the beats had produced on the society is often compared to a revolution which lead to the changes in the society.
Firstly,
they reacted to the period of McCarthyism which had established itself in the
The
young generation would not adjust themselves to such standards of social behaviour. They insisted upon their right to stick to their
own lifestyle and to raise their own clearly distinguishable voice.
The
situation in the society of the 50s-60s can also be described in terms of the
“fathers-and-sons” conflict. In a foreword to J.Cl.Holmes’
novel Go James Atlas marked: “Thus in
our literary chronicles the Lost Generation – a title bestowed on Ernest Hemingway
and company by Gertrude Stein – was succeeded by the generation that came of
age during the Depression (one that has so far been denied a name, though it
possesses a distinct identity); and they were succeeded by the Beat Generation.
In such a scheme, contemporary history figures as the force that disrupts the
lives of writers in their impressionable youth, sends them off to war or
disillusions them, and convinces them of their essential alienation from
society” [Holmes 1980: xi].
Critics
have not paid enough tribute to the investigation of “the generation that came
of age during the Depression” yet. It is usually recalled as the silent
generation, first dumbfounded by the Great Depression, then WW II and finally
by the cold war politics. On the one hand they managed to survive and to endure
all the hardships, but on the other hand, on the psychological level, they were
deprived of their identity due to the lack of stability, the loss of their
welfare and the failure to realize themselves in jobs because of the mass
unemployment.
Actually most of the young writers of the late 50s and
the 60s, including J.Updike, K.Vonnegut
and the Beatniks, commented upon this marginality of their parents. Young men
would not accept such values like civil obedience, fright and resignation. Thus
their revolt against “fathers’” way of life acquired social meaning.
Another
crucial issue the Beats objected to was the mania of
consumerism and national addiction to mass-culture that pervaded
Kerouac
found himself in an awkward position – it was he who encouraged his friends to
take to writing. Both Burroughs and Ginsberg admitted that Kerouac’s advice was
always of use to them. It was Kerouac who invented the titles to their most
famous books – The Naked Lunch and Howl.
The
term itself – the Beat Generation - was also created by Kerouac who first
applied it to crowds of hipsters in Times-Square in N.Y. Then the term was used
by Gilbert Millstein in his article This
is the Beat Generation (Times Magazine, 16 Nov. 1952). Kerouac approved of
the term “the Beat Generation” but disliked the word “beatnik” that soon was
molded by some newspaper reporter. He realized the negative connotation of it
and used to repeat – “I’m the King of the Beat, but I’m not a beatnik”.
K.
suggested different etymology of the Beat. He derived it from the words beatific, beatitude (блаженный,
заповеди
блаженства),
stressing upon some mystic sense concealed in it.
Beatniks
roused the society. Opinions of them were polar – from
resolute condemnation to total approval. This public focusing on them was of
primary importance to them, and Kerouac could not help but feeling that his
pride was hurt as he understood that his main book, so innovative both in form
and content, was wasting its novelty with time remaining still unpublished.
Nevertheless he continued arduously working. Among the books written in that
period are The Subterraneans
(1958), The Dharma Bums (1958)
considered his best ones.
His
books were published one by one only at the end of the 50s – the beginning of
the 60s. The principle of nakedness proclaimed by Kerouac as the basic one of
literary theory, shocked the public, and they were mostly treated as a
scandalous phenomenon – accentuated eroticism of some scenes, anarchistic
revelations, drugs and other indecencies overshadowed the writer’s true
originality and talent. This misunderstanding depressed and irritated him. He
felt out of place in
* * *
The
characters of Kerouac’s most well-known book On the Road are on the constant move. They move westwards, across
the continent performing a symbolic conquest of this land again. The notion of
the West is identified with that of
the frontier. The history of the
frontier that had existed for nearly 300 years is in Americans’ blood. These
notions have produced strong impact on American culture and literature. Every
kid knows legends and stories about heroes of the West, such as Daniel Boon,
Kit Carson, Davie Crockett. Even nowadays it is easier
for a political leader to win the elections if he proves himself to be a
descendant of some trapper or squatter.
Still
frontier has always been a dubious symbol. On the one hand, it was a source of
freedom, fantastic adventures and dangers, heroic deeds and titanic
personalities, on the other hand – the place of violent crimes and arbitrary
rule. This both romantic and cruel world of frontier inhabited by frontiersmen,
pioneers, gold-diggers, gamblers, robbers and prostitutes was reflected in the
works of Fr. Bret Harte, J. London and Mark Twain. A
hobo, an outcast, seeking his fortune acquired romantic image and becomes a
favourite character of American literature.
Not only Kerouac pays
tribute to this national literary tradition when depicting such hobos in his
novel. It was his way of expressing disagreement with the social standards of
the period and a form of protest against them. In their wanderings about the
country Sal and his friends meet hordes of homeless people making their way
nowhere. There are crowds of them moving aimlessly about the country. Kerouac
gives his interpretation of the phenomenon – in the period of McCarthy’s
hysteria, when all the forms of protest were banned,
the only possibility for an individual to preserve his identity was to quit
that society. The writer introduces two planes – on the surface his characters
do not withstand the complexity of life and escape. But as we proceed with the
reading we come to the understanding that their running away is not escape at
all, but it is search for the spiritual truth, search for the divine sense on
the road that becomes a metaphor for life.
Dean
Moriarty, the protagonist of the novel, is remarkably picturesque. He is an
archetypal hobo and beatnik. His literary portrait was so compelling that he
became a worshipped idol for the generations of youngsters to come. As I have
already told, Neal Cassady was his prototype. That man produced rather dangerous charm on
those who met him. Being of a dare-devil character Neal wasted his life in
restless trips never settling down for long. Gary Snyder, another participant
of the Beat movement, spoke of him as a “frontier type” – “Cassady
was like so many Americans who had inherited that taste for the limitless, for
no limits, which was a unique American experience. You can get hooked on that
if you don’t know how to translate it into other regions, since when the sheer
physical space disappears you go crazy. <…> What
got Kerouac and Ginsberg about Cassady was the energy
of the archetypal west, the energy of the frontier, still coming down. Cassady is the cowboy crashing. The whole thing is of that
order…” [Charters, 290].
In the second half the 20th century there
was neither wilderness nor unpopulated areas left in the Plains. Everything had
been discovered and conquered. What was left for Dean was to drive at full
speed, “faster and faster with less and less space to move in”. It was the act
of transmitting space into speed, a simulation of the West conquest. A new
symbol of
In some
way On the Road can be interpreted as
an extension of chronicles depicting the characters’ pilgrimage. Sal and Dean
are on the road, holy road, that is easily deciphered
as a symbol of life. They are rushing along it trying to reach some sanctuary.
But from the very beginning there is a premonition that their goal is
unachievable. Only biblical names of some places they are passing by
-–Testament,
Sal has a
dream: “It had to do somewhat with the Shrouded Traveler. Carlo Max and I once
sat down together, knee to knee, in two chairs, facing, and I told him 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
Every
new trip that Sal undertakes makes him more and more restless, makes him feel
more and more “beaten”. He is haunted by visions of the long vanished and lost homeless, whose dark figures wander lonely God knows where.
And the final description of Dean in his moth-eaten overcoat in the end of the
novel is a crescendo of this sad theme.
Though
the book accumulated most pressing problems of the young of the 50s, it still
gets response from new generations and is widely read on students’ campuses.
Another citation from Gary Snyder renders most adequately the essence of the
Beat movement: “In a way the Beat Generation is a gathering together of all the
available models and myths of freedom in
Jack
Kerouac
Chronology
1922 – Jean Louis Lebris de
Kerouac (Jack) born on 12 March in
1926 – Jack’s brother Gerard dies.
1939 – graduates from
1939-1940 – spends a prep year at
1940 – enters
1941 – is expelled from
1942 – ships to
1943 – enlists in the navy,
discharged six montha later on psychiatric grounds. Shops to
1944 – meets William
Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg. Marries and separates from Edie Parker.
1945 – marriage annulled.
1946 – Leo Kerouac dies. Meets Neal Cassady.
1947-1950 – on the road with Cassady and others.
1950 – first novel, The Town and the City, is published. Marries Joan Haverty.
1951 – develops his theory of
“spontaneous prose”. Finishes On the Road. Leaves the second wife.
1951-1957 – writes twelve books, publishes none.
1952 – works as a brakeman on
Southern Pacific Railway while living with the Cassadys
in
1954 – rereads H.D.Thoreau, begins to read Buddhist philosophy.
1955 – Sued by Joan Haverty
Kerouac for the child support. On the Road accepted for publication by the
Viking Press. Attends the Landmark reading by six poets
(Ginsberg and Gary Snyder among them) at the Six Gallery in
1957 – visits W.S. Burroughs
in Tangiers. On the Road appears in
September, attracts wide notice.
1958 – publication of The Subterranians, The Dharma Bums.
1959 – Doctor
Sax, Maggie Cassidy,
1960 – Tristessa, Lonesome Traveler published.
1961 – publication of Book of Dreams.
1962 –
1963 – Visions
of Gerard published.
1965 – Desolation
Angels published. Travels to
1966 – Satori in Paris
published. Marries Stella Sampas, and settles in
1968 – Vanity of
Duluoz published. Neal Cassady
dies in
1969 – dies of abdominal
hemorrhaging on 21 October in
1971 – Pic published.
1973 – Visions
of Cody published.
Charters A. Beats and Company: A portrait of a
literary generation. – Garden City, 1986.
Charters
A. Kerouac: A biography. –
Charters
A. Jack Kerouac // Dictionary of Literary
Biography.Vol.2. –
Feied F. No Pie in the Sky: The
hobo as American cultural hero in the works of Jack London, John Dos Passos and Jack Kerouac. – N.Y.: Citadel Press, 1964
Feldman
G., Gartenberg M. The
Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men. – N.Y.: The Citadel Press,
1958.
Gifford
B., Lee L. Jack’s Book: An oral biography of Jack Kerouac. – N.Y.: St.Martin’s Press, 1994
Ginsberg A. As ever: The collected correspondence
of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady/ Forew. By Carolyn Cassady; ed. With an introd.
By Barry Gifford; afterw. By A.Ginsberg. – Berkeley (
Ginsberg
A. Journals: Early fifties, early sixties/ Ed. By Gordon Bull. – N.Y.: Grove press, 1977.
Holmes
J.C. Go: A novel. –
Kerouac
J. On the Road: Text and Criticism/ Ed. By Sc.Donaldson. – Westford (
Kramer
J. Allen Ginsberg in
Merrill
T.F. Allen Ginsberg: Life and work. – N.Y.:Twayne, 1969.
Noferi M. Jazz and the Beat
Generation: The Musical model in literature. –
http://www.dla.utexas.edu/depts/ams/Jazz/Jazz3/Noferi.htm
Tytell J. Naked Angels: The lives and literature of the beat
generation: W.S.Burroughs, A.Ginsberg,
J.Kerouac. – N.J.:
McGraw-Hill, 1976.
Алякринский
О. Сага о
Дине Мориарте//
Керуак
Дж. Избранное.
Т.1 – Киев, 1995
Зверев
А.М.
Модернизм в
литературе
США. – М., 1984
Морозова
Т.Л. Образ
молодого
американца в
литературе США
(битники,
Сэлинджер,
Беллоу,
Апдайк). – М., 1969
Морозова
Т.Л. Спор о человеке
в
американской
литературе:
История и
современность.
– М., 1990
(Workshop was based on the questions on the part of the participants concerning J.Kerouac’s literary innovations).
Kerouac’s idea of spontaneous prose is
rooted in literary experimentation of purely American trend (Walt Whitman and
Thomas Wolfe), on the one hand, and of the European modernist search (Marcel Proust and James Joice) on the
other. This close to ‘steam-of-consciousness’ technique was most appropriate as
a means of expression of the specific atmosphere of their beat community. The
principle of “nakedness”, proclaimed by Ginsberg, Cassady,
Kerouac and Burroughs, is the clue to the understanding of what spontaneous
prose is. Confessional many-hours-talks,
the extreme degree of openness were most appreciated by them, and Kerouac
tended to fix this supreme unification of their minds in texts. Flow and
continuity of real time is given by Kerouac in a stream of texts. Paragraphs in
On the Road are few, sentences are very
extended and may take half of a page, presenting different associations,
describing events from different angles, broken occasionally by dialogues.
Many parts of the book are written in
rhythmic prose, reminding Whitman’s free verse technique. This proximity of
Kerouac prose to verse can be illustrated by the graphic transformation of the
next dynamic description of the jazz concert:
“And Shearing began to rock;
a smile broke over his ecstatic face; he began to rock in the piano seat, back
and forth, slowly at first, then the beat went up, and he began rocking fast,
his left foot jumped with every beat, his neck began to rock crookedly, he
brought his face down to the keys, he pushed his hair back, his combed hair
dissolved, he began to sweat. The music picked up. The bass-player hunched over
and socked it in, faster and faster, it seemed faster and faster, that’s all.
Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of his piano in great rich
showers; you’d think the man wouldn’t have time to line them up. They rolled
and rolled like the sea. Folks yelled for him to “Go”. Dean was sweating, the
sweat poured down his collar. “There he is! That’s him! Old God! Old God
Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!” And Shearing was conscious of the madman behind him,
he could hear every one of Dean’s gasps and imprecations, he could sense it
though he couldn’t see. “That’s right!” Dean said. “Yes!” Shearing smiled; he rocked ” [Kerouac
1979: 128].
The same extract transformed into the free-verse form:
And Shearing began to rock;
A smile broke over his
ecstatic face;
He began to rock in the
piano seat,
Back and forth, slowly at
first,
Then the beat went up, and
he began rocking fast,
His left foot jumped with
every beat, his neck began to rock crookedly,
He brought his face down to
the keys,
He pushed his hair back, his
combed hair dissolved,
He began to sweat.
The music picked up.
The bass-player hunched over
and socked it in,
Faster and faster, it seemed
faster and faster, that’s all.
Shearing began to play his
chords;
They rolled out of his piano
in great rich showers;
You’d think the man wouldn’t
have time to line them up.
They rolled and rolled like
the sea.
Folks yelled for him to
“Go”.
Dean was sweating, the sweat
poured down his collar.
“There he is! That’s him!
Old God! Old God Shearing!
Yes! Yes! Yes!”
And Shearing was conscious
of the madman behind him,
He could hear every one of
Dean’s gasps and imprecations,
He could sense it though
He couldn’t see.
“That’s right!” Dean said.
“Yes!”
Shearing smiled; he rocked.
This
impressionistic sketch renders the ecstatic state of Sal’s mind at the concert,
the minute nuances of his emotions at the given moment. Kerouac’s obsession was
to preserve emotional experience: “And be sure of this, I spent my entire youth
writing slowly with revisions and endless re-hashing speculation and deleting
and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING.
Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of
feelings” [Kerouac 1979: 541].
Kerouac
associative technique was an attempt to simulate jazz melodies in words. Ann
Charters writes: “Kerouac compared himself to a jazz musician improvising on a
musical theme: ” sketching language is undisturbed
flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz
musician) on subject of image”. <…> “Never afterthink to improve or defray impressions… tap from
yourself the song of yourself, blow! – now! –
your way is your only way – good – bad – always honest” [Charters 1978: 259].