On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [41]
In the period before writing the scroll, as Kerouac was working toward a new prose style, what was key was the rejection of an objective factualism and a consequent receptiveness to a subjective impulsive truth that is immediate and, above all, true for the author himself: “People aren’t interested in facts,” writes Kerouac in a December 1949 journal entry, “but in ejaculations.” What would, in this sense, be deemed authentic is how true Kerouac was to his own responses and experiences, both interior and exterior. Kerouac’s writing out of his vision of the authentic was a way for him to find his own place within it—a vision now not projected only onto Cassady, but implicating him in it. This writing out illuminates a sense of authenticity in that actual process itself. What Kerouac saw in Cassady, as mutable as it was, is thus as authentic as what Kerouac saw in the world, and what he found in a more open and direct relationship with it.
Kerouac’s Road novels form an expansive and inclusive textual terrain, and we as readers are directed across it by Kerouac’s unfolding vision of Cassady. In such a movement we transgress the boundaries of what, in the modernist sense, would be considered a “true” or “classic” work of literature, one that is reductive and exclusive—self-contained, erudite, and impenetrable. This movement exemplifies what the literary critic Roland Barthes calls a “mutation” of the literary “work” into a discursive “text.” The scroll manuscript, Visions of Cody, and On the Road are thus all interrelated but distinct “fragments,” and it is our movement between them that, like the transgressive journey in search of an elusive authentic “IT,” generates the significance of the text. The “authentic” On the Road is the reflected light passing between mirrors. Whether you consider the scroll manuscript an artifact or part of a discursive postmodern text, the three are dialogically bound, reflecting and illuminating one another. Like the Chicago bop musicians who, in the wake of George Shearing, keep blowing, striving to find new phrases, new explorations reflected and deflected off one another, “Something would come of it yet. There’s always more, a little further—it never ends.”
“The Straight Line Will Take You Only to Death”
The Scroll Manuscript and Contemporary Literary Theory
Joshua Kupetz
A tenured colleague in the history department at the small liberal-arts college where I first taught once asked, “Why do students still want to read Kerouac?” It was the fall of 2004, and the United States was at war against terror, a more nebulous adversary than either fascism or communism. I resisted the urge to reply, “You’re the historian; you tell me,” not simply because it was glib, which it was, but because that answer would have affirmed all the assumptions about Kerouac I had been trying to dispel in my teaching, those assumptions being that he mattered first as a personality and that what makes his texts worth reading are the ways their content intersects with cultural histories.
Read in the context of American cultural history, the scroll manuscript and On the Road reveal much about American social discourse of the postwar era, yet these texts must be considered literary structures before they are considered historical documents. As narratives, they are integral parts of a continuum of American prose fiction, liminal structures that in retrospect bridge the modern and the postmodern. Although any description of such a continuum should be understood as contingent and subjective—for no one objectively decides which texts matter in a tradition and which do not—the act of locating a literary text in a particular historical context can reveal its structures, processes, and ideological conventions. While the primary function of American literary criticism at the time Kerouac wrote the scroll manuscript was to locate a text’s meaning, the application