On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [43]
Wolfgang Iser contends that artistic innovators always risk marginalization by readers who judge artists’ works against an aesthetic standard that “art has in fact abandoned,” and Kerouac’s experiments are, in general, critically maligned. His willful disregard of convention, however, is not without precedent. For example, 150 years before Kerouac drafted On the Road, William Wordsworth acknowledged this critical anachronism in the preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth, who now represents the literary canon at its most conventional, admits, “an Author makes a formal engagement that he [or she] will gratify certain known habits of association.” In defense of his nonconventional poetics, Wordsworth claims:
at least [the reader] be spared any unpleasant feeling of disappointment, and that I myself may be protected from the most dishonorable accusation which can be brought against an Author, namely, that of an indolence which prevents him from endeavoring to ascertain what is his duty, and when his duty is ascertained, prevents him from performing it.
Wordsworth evokes this “duty” not to uphold it, but to excuse himself from it. While Kerouac does not include an apologetic preface with either the scroll manuscript or On the Road (he will write one, however, for Visions of Cody), his correspondence and work-journal entries establish a cogent argument for the changes he introduced into his prose narrative.
Kerouac abandoned the conventional techniques he had used when writing The Town and the City so that he might be “free as Joyce” when composing On the Road. While he continued to value form—“writing is good. Also careful about structures, and the Structure”—his concept of it was changing dramatically. Ultimately, his concept of form in the scroll manuscript loosely anticipates the tenets of structuralism, the first new theoretical school of the 1960s to decenter New Criticism. Kerouac writes that he was “not interested in The Novel” and that he wanted to be “free to wander from the laws of the ‘novel’ as laid down by [Jane] Austens & [Henry] Fieldings.” Here, Kerouac suggests that the novel is an articulation of recognizable conventions, “laws,” that will not help him tell the story that he wants to tell. By rejecting Austen, Fielding, and their imitators, Kerouac denies the “European form” of the novel and affirms what he calls a new American prose form.
Kerouac was an avid reader of Whitman and his claims for a “modern prose [narrative] in America” echo Whitman’s prophecy of an “infant genius of American poetic expression.” Whitman’s genius “lies sleeping far away, happily unrecognized and uninjur’d by the coteries, the art-writers, the talkers and critics of the saloons, or the lecturers in the colleges.” According to Whitman, this new writer would use dialects native to the United States that originate in places Whitman describes as “Rude and course nursing-beds,” although he concedes that “only from such beginnings and stocks, indigenous here, may haply arrive, be grafted, and sprout, in time, flowers of genuine American aroma, and fruits truly and fully our own.” Kerouac adopts these dialects in the scroll manuscript and fully exploits them in his characterization of Dean Moriarty in On the Road, but his innovation required much more than the adoption of dialects. In his attempt to access “an area of greater spiritual pith,” a metaphorical space inaccessible to him through conventional prose, Kerouac claimed he must use the “technical device” of epic poetry.
Kerouac’s combination of poetic and prosaic elements invigorated his prose and made possible the most radical transformations of his narrative. In his Road-Log, Kerouac writes, “It appears I must have been learning in the past 8 months of work on…poetry. My prose is different, richer in texture.” This textural richness, Kerouac claims, is necessary if On the Road is to be “a novel like poetry, or rather, a narrative poem, an epos in mosaic.” Kerouac’s use of “epos