On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [42]
The scroll manuscript and On the Road demonstrate Kerouac’s anticipation of new developments in American narratology. A year after Kerouac composed the scroll manuscript, Carl Solomon, an editor at the publishing firm of A. A. Wyn and dedicatee of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, rejected Kerouac’s newest draft of the novel, calling it “an incoherent mess.” (The particular version that Solomon rejected would later be published as Visions of Cody.) In response, Kerouac wrote, “[James Joyce’s] Ulysses which was considered difficult reading is now hailed as a classic and everyone understands it. […] [Theodore Dreiser’s] Sister Carrie sat for years in a publishing house because it was considered unprintable. By the same token, and in its time, I believe On the Road because its new vision roughs against the grain of established ideas is going to be considered unprintable for awhile to come.” Kerouac was correct: On the Road was published by Viking in 1957 only after the scroll manuscript underwent a series of conventionalizing revisions, Visions of Cody was published posthumously in 1972, and more than fifty years would pass before the earliest complete draft of the novel, the scroll manuscript, would be published.
Many readers would quickly dismiss Kerouac’s claim as hubris, yet the exchange between Solomon and Kerouac illustrates the growing schism that transformed American literary criticism in the twentieth century. In his rejection, Solomon does not contend that Kerouac’s writing is inartistic, but instead he objects to the novel for its supposed lack of coherence and intelligibility. Solomon’s opinion implies that a publishable novel should cohere, or demonstrate unity among its verbal structures, in order to communicate clearly its meaning. Kerouac rejects Solomon’s judgment, thereby refuting his definition of a novel, contending that “the masses catch up to incomprehensible; incoherent finds its way to an intelligently typewritten page.” Incomprehensibility, Kerouac suggests, is not a function of the text but of the reader’s limited perception. Innovative narratives, he acknowledges, become comprehensible after their unfamiliar structures have been conventionalized over time.
Carl Solomon’s position is consistent with New Critical discourse, the dominant school in American literary theory in the mid-twentieth century. Based upon interpretive strategies articulated in Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry (1938), New Criticism locates meaning in the internal qualities of literary works, specifically the unity of their multiple verbal structures. As much as it values unity and convergence, New Criticism eschews authorial intent and historical context as bases for interpretation, although it allows that they might supplement understanding. New Critical criteria, like Solomon’s argument, locate meaning inside a work that is interpreted by a reader who, like a prospector, extracts what is valuable from the unified structures and ignores the otherwise “meaningless” prose.
New Criticism was the forge within which Kerouac fashioned The Town and the City and the crucible from which he had to escape in order to write On the Road. As he struggled to clarify his ideas for On the Road, Kerouac understood that the post-World War II story he wanted to tell could not be fully realized through existing novelistic conventions. In response to this impediment, Kerouac writes in his Road-Log that he wants “a different structure as well as a different style in [On the Road], in contrast to T & C…Each chapter as a line of verse in the general epic poem, instead of each chapter as a broad-streamed prose statement in the general epic novel.” By actively avoiding conventional narrative, Kerouac claims that his project would not result in a “novel,” but in a new prose-narrative form that grafts two genres. To develop his poetics of prose narrative, he experimented with technique and plot, particularly in the scroll manuscript, surpassing the