On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [44]
The many false starts Kerouac made in the late 1940s and in 1950, coupled with the corresponding journal entries lamenting his difficulties, suggest that Kerouac struggled putting theory into practice when writing the early drafts of On the Road. Much like en plein air painters relied upon tubed paints and the French box easel to fully realize the potential of impressionism, Kerouac had to discover a new compositional technique in order to compose the structured sprawl that would become On the Road. The scroll allowed Kerouac to push his text beyond the parameters of conventional prose narrative by redefining the most basic limit of writing, the medium. During the earliest stages of drafting the narrative, Kerouac was an artist to whom the medium mattered. In the opening pages of his 1949 Road-Log, a spiral-bound financial ledger, Kerouac writes, “Something’s wrong with my soul that I refuse to feel and grieve in this monetary notebook.” Even seated at his writing desk with his typewriter before him, Kerouac still struggled to realize the voice for On the Road. Only when Kerouac had a medium that accommodated his vision could he exercise his new technique and unlock the sprawling, poetic narrative his story required.
In addition to working with technique, Kerouac experimented equally with concepts of plot. By foregrounding marginalized cultures and practices in America, Kerouac knew On the Road would likely be critically castigated. Kerouac’s populist poetics, his belief that “an art which is not manifest to ‘everybody,’ is a dead art,” was and remains unpopular among the literati. In this spirit he wrote, “How is a miserable hitch-hiking boy going to mean anything…to Howard Mumford Jones who wants everybody to be like him (middleclass, intellectual, ‘responsible’) before he will accept them.” A writer, critic, and professor at Harvard University, Jones represented to Kerouac both the antithesis of his intended audience and the critical opinion he hoped to win. Early in the drafting process, Kerouac chose a hitchhiker as protagonist not to reflect his own experiences of the road—which at the time were few—but for aesthetic purposes. In his journal, Kerouac wonders, “Could Dostoevsky make his lumpenproletariat Raskolniks figure for such a guy [as Jones] today?—for such a literary class?—as anything but a bum.” In this context, Kerouac’s choice of subject in On the Road becomes a figure that signifies the “spiritual pith” he wants to evoke in the text.
In addition to his choice of subject, Kerouac reimagines the function of plot and bases his narrative on this new function. While conventional plots are episodic, unified, and suggestive of causal relationships between events, Kerouac’s plot structure in the scroll manuscript is contingent and appropriates his concept of a “circle of despair.” According to Kerouac, the circle of despair represents a belief that “the experience of life is a regular series of deflections” from one’s goals. As one is deflected from a goal, Kerouac explains, he or she establishes a new goal from which he or she will inevitably also be deflected. To Kerouac, this series of deflections does not assume the pattern of a ship’s tacking into the wind, always moving forward; instead, Kerouac illustrates these deflections as a series of right-hand turns that continue until one makes a complete circle that circumscribes an unknowable