On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [13]
Kerouac dramatically collapses the distinction between writer and narrated “I,” all the while utilizing established techniques of fiction writing, including double-perspective narration, to control the progress of the text. Headlong, intimate, discursive, wild, and “true,” with improvised notations—dots and dashes—to break sentences so that they pile upon themselves like waves.
There’s an exciting difference here to most everything you’ve read before; the unmatched intimacy of what Allen Ginsberg called Kerouac’s sincere and sweetly connecting “heart-felt speech.” Maybe you’re dazzled at first by Neal’s incandescent energy burning up everybody and everything around him, but you also understand that at the heart of the novel is Jack’s quest and that he’s asking the same questions that keep you awake at night and fill your days. What is life? What does it mean to be alive when death, the shrouded stranger, is gaining at your heels? Will God ever show his face? Can joy kick darkness? This quest is interior, but the lessons of the road, the apprehended magic of the American landscape described like a poem, are applied to illuminate and amplify the spiritual journey. Kerouac writes to be understood; the road is the path of life and life is a road.
Kerouac does not hide the cost of the road either to those who will head for it or to those for whom, in Carolyn Cassady’s words, a different kind of “responsibility mapped the course.” What is electrifying about the novel is the idea that God, self-realization, and a transforming freedom are out there, through the window where you sit confined at school or at work, maybe where the city ends or just over that next hill. This makes the heart thump and the blood beat in your ears. A religious seeker and a writer of dreams and visions, Kerouac is a source in that sense, if you are fixed on seeking answers, and once that kind of light goes on in your house it’s likely to stay on and you’ll always be looking. He had told Cassady that “I aim to employ all the styles and nevertheless I yearn to be non-literary.” In so consciously disrupting our understanding of what it is we are reading when we read the original scroll version of On the Road, Kerouac’s claim to Cassady that the book “marks complete departure from Town & City and in fact from previous American Lit” seems justified. On the Road is the nonfiction novel, ten years early.
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It would be more than six years before On the Road appeared, but remarkably nobody who was in a position to publish it ever read the scroll manuscript. Kerouac immediately began to revise the novel. As Kerouac biographer Paul Maher notes, “On the Road was now typed onto separate pages to make its appearance more conventional and thus more appealing to publishers…. Jack scribbled annotations on some pages, added typesetting instructions, crossed out passages, and proposed textual insertions…. His cuts to On the Road precede Malcolm Cowley’s suggestion that he shorten the manuscript, contrary to previous biographers’ assertions that Jack had insisted on maintaining the text as he originally wrote it in April 1951.” On May 22, 1951, Kerouac told Cassady that he had been “typing and revising” since he finished the scroll on April 22. “Thirty days on that.” He was, he told Cassady, “waiting to finish my book to write to you.” Kerouac writes that Robert Giroux