On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [40]
As Kerouac reconciles his complex responses to Cassady in Visions of Cody, we see the sense of authenticity shift from the existential to the representational. Kerouac examines Cassady as a phenomenon, in a prose style that is an exploratory multifaceted expanse. He problematizes the idea of the authentic in Visions of Cody by giving Cody Pomeray broader dimensions and thus a fuller representation. This offers more to the reader, more Blakean “minute particulars,” than a symbolic significance would. One therefore feels that one’s experience of this treatment is much more authentic because it is more sensorial, more evocative, even though it is the representation of Cassady furthest from the truth and closest to mythology and divinization. Cody is made to speak in various and distinct ways that deviate from Kerouac’s consideration of the real-life Cassady and their unraveled personal relationship—ways which can thus be considered “inauthentic.” Here, Cody becomes more a vehicle through which Kerouac could illustrate his own particular impression of the world. Now, however, rather than distinguishing Cassady from this world, Kerouac merges him into this broader vision, “the way consciousness really digs everything that happens” as Ginsberg would later say of Kerouac’s “deep form.” Kerouac now presents Cassady in the same way his polyvalent and panoramic sensorium acknowledges the world. Only after Kerouac examines in every possible detail and from every possible aspect his vision of Cassady and the romanticized landscapes and idealized projections that he symbolizes and of which he is part does Kerouac’s statement that “Cody is the brother I lost” come to take on its full meaning. Kerouac understands that his romantic vision—of his own and America’s past, and of authenticity—is ultimately unrealizable when focused on one particular person, place, or period. Cody is the vision and ideal whose elusiveness and loss Kerouac now accepts. He has to move through and unravel his vision of Cassady in order to relinquish it, to separate it from Cassady himself. “Cody is not dead,” Kerouac writes. “He is made of the same flesh and bone as (of course) you and me.” The Cassady figure is just another human being among innumerable others, extraordinary because they are all extraordinary, as is the world for Kerouac, now reborn and unfolding, and unfolded by him. Toward the end of Visions of Cody Kerouac writes, “But Cody isn’t great because he is average…Cody can’t possibly be average because I’ve never seen him before. I’ve never seen any of you before. I myself am a stranger to this world.” To “accept loss forever,” as Kerouac prescribes in “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose,” is to get it all down now, and thus immortalize the world and the people in it, before they pass with the inevitable ephemerality of time and mortality. At the conclusion of his “vertical metaphysical” examination of Cassady in Visions of Cody, Kerouac writes, “I not only accept loss forever, I am made of loss—I am made of Cody too.”
Whether or not the Cassady in Kerouac’s prose corresponds with the way Cassady really was is of lesser significance than the subjective truth Kerouac found in the vision of authenticity he eventually separated from Cassady, and from a sense of an imposed objective reality. In light of the textual nuances and contrasts that the scroll manuscript provides, what remains most significant is the acceptance of the loss of a romantic vision and its personal significance. Commenting on his father’s death as fictionalized in The Town and the City Kerouac says, “George Martin is dead and gone. I don’t even remember if Leo Kerouac was really