Jack Kerouac: The King of the Beats
INTRODUCTION
Jack Kerouac was responsible for spawning the literary movement that became
known as the Beat Generation, a movement not only significant to literature,
but one which incorporated music and visual art to chart a personal progression.
Kerouac "was the leader of a literary movement and a way of life he thought
was a passing fad."
The basic characteristics of "Beat" are defined in Kerouac's 1957 novel On
the Road, a text which was to become a virtual gospel for the Beat Generation.
As the author of this commandment, Kerouac became known as the "King of the
Beats." His reaction to this title is documented in an article printed in
Playboy, "The Origins of the Beat Generation" ("Journal of Beat Poet Holmes
recalls friendship, death of Jack Kerouac").
The term "beat" has a range of meanings, affording critics of "Beat" writing
a rich array of ambiguities for their textual analyses. As an adjective, it
was most famously defined by Allen Ginsberg, a member of Kerouac's close knit
group, as "exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out, sleepless,
wide-eyed, perceptive, rejected by society, on your own, streetwise," while
the word beat was originally used as a musical term by post-World War II musicians
in reference to an individual or tune that was exhausted or downbeat.
At the time, America herself was "beat"- the country had emerged from the
1930s disaster of economic depression only to find itself entangled in World
War II, and having to deal with threats from the "reds" and the ominous propositions
of McCarthyism. In one striking blow to Kerouac and other Bohemians, a definite
link between smoking and lung cancer was confirmed in 1953. Kerouac's audience
was a disenchanted, self righteous population, an unguided generation with
no clear direction or idea of what they wanted form life and too powerless
and world-weary to go out in search of the meaning of their existence. Such
readers found refreshment and salvation in Kerouac's self-declared confusion,
embodied most apparently in his definitive novel- On the Road.
Kerouac's style, like all of the Beat writers, is defined simply and very
easy to recognize. The Beat Generation "saw themselves on a quest for beauty
and truth, allying themselves with mysticism. The works themselves were to
be streams of consciousness written down spontaneously and not to be altered
or edited" Kerouac himself simply stated, "if you change it. the gig is shot."
Poets and novelists of the Beat Generation labelled Kerouac the embodiment
of Beat and hailed him as leader of the movement, the "King" term is perhaps
more carefully chosen than it appears, patriarchally loaded as it is. Other
well-known authors of the Beat Generation include Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, William S. Burroughs, and Ken Kesey.
Kerouac's "Spontaneity" and the Beats.
While the title implies supreme spontaneity, Kerouac was never quite as deliberately
spontaneous as his legend has insisted. His plan was to create a "giant epic
in the tradition of Balzac and Proust", but he never managed to determine
a literary technique capable of welding the separate books of his Duluoz chronology
into a coherent whole, "even if he tried". Ann Charters is the voice behind
much of the critical discussion of Kerouac's overwhelming legend-making aspiration,
"He couldn't come up with any literary technique to help him fit all the volumes
of the Duluoz Legend into one continuous tale. All he could think of was to
change the names in the various books back to their original forms, hoping
that this single stroke would give sufficient unity to the disparate books,
magically making them fit more smoothly into their larger context as the Duluoz
(Kerouac the Louse) Legend.[H]e wanted the books reissued in a uniform edition
to make the larger design unmistakeable."
To claim that each individual novel is insufficient without integration into
the larger context of the legend assumes a very conventional definition of
legend. Not only is it linear and coherently chronological, it is also bound
by the rules of time that govern reality. Of course there is no real reason
why this should be so. Kerouac's "beats" create permanent and timeless impressions,
and unending rhythms like Nature herself- the beat will go on if it is not
bound by temporality or rationality, but, like a true legend, circulates and
permeates the universal consciousness all the time, for all time. A legend
can, after all, be many things: an unauthenticated story from ancient times;
an allegorical tale of obvious exaggeration or fallacy; simple fame; an explanation
accompanying an image or map- and, in music, a composition capable of relating
a story- even without words.
Charters' criticisms fall away rapidly. Kerouac's work easily adheres to each
of these versions of the term "legend", as if he is unconsciously sensitive
to the subtle multiplicity of the word, and feels obliged to fulfil the word's
promise. His work is carefully designed, indeed, he was preoccupied by the
notion of design- the pre-styling of the free-styling- and perhaps not, then,
the carefree and careless King of Beats.
The assumption of wild abandon seems to arise from misunderstandings of the
term "free prose." The "free" to which Kerouac refers does not, in any way,
signify a relinquishing of control. It is, however, rather like Wordsworth's
"spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling," which creates an impression of
experimentation but really represents a highly contrived artifice to contain
the exuberance of "natural" speech. Associating Kerouac's particular diction
with what he has called, "the unfulfilled linguistic intentions of the British
Lake poets," Tytell asserts that Kerouac sought a diction compatible with
the natural and irrepressible flow of any "uncontrollable involuntary thoughts"
that he had to release.
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