Jack Kerouac - King of the Beats

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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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