The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac's Quest for Spontaneous Prose

Epilogue

172 Epilogue Jerome McGann opens The Textual Condition by situating what he terms “the textual condition” in relation to the “symbolic exchanges” that constitute “human culture.” Both the practice and study of human culture comprise a network of symbolic exchanges. Because human beings are not angels, these exchanges always involve material negotiations. Even in their most complex and advanced forms—­ when the negotiations are carried out as textual events—­ the intercourse that is being human is materially executed: as spoken texts or scripted forms. To participate in these exchanges is to have entered what I wish to call here “the textual condition.”1 McGann uses this definition to initiate a critique of “the modern hermeneutical tradition,” in which, he suggests, “texts are largely imagined as scenes of reading rather than scenes of writing.” The critical practices within this tradition, thus, fail to engage writing’s materiality and how a text’s physical features encode (or at least reflect) the social and economic conditions of its production and circulation, which frame its reception and are thus elements in how it generates meaning and functions culturally. To ignore the materiality of texts and their social dimension is to misconstrue how texts participate in the “symbolic exchanges” that are “the practice . . . of human culture.”2 To ignore the textual condition is to erase the interplay between the scenes of writing and reading, which is like believing the half of a telephone conversation one overhears is the full exchange. In a sense, it goes without saying that textual objects both occasion and mediate textual events (i.e., textual events involve acts of writing that have Epilogue    173 been published, are distributed in some manner, and are then accessed by readers, who interact with the written work, both as the writing itself and as the object that stores and transmits the writing, through various institutional frames and conventions). But McGann’s decision to base the textual condition on textual events rather than textual objects signals, I suggest, two complementary features of his project: overtly, he is challenging those operating within the “modern hermeneutical tradition” to acknowledge the sociological (and historically variable) dynamics of how the works constructed in writing that we consider literature circulate. He is also signaling the inadequacy of views of textuality that treat the literary work as a static, ideal, perfectible construct independent of its histories as cultural action. For McGann, a work and its physical manifestation as a text are neither a static monument nor a freestanding jungle gym of words (a linguistic code) on which the reader twirls and hangs as if the free play of recess is the whole of the school day. They are, instead, complex negotiations that function as sites of engagement and resistance. The case study offered in the preceding chapters has, I hope, suggested the value of attending to the textual condition. In one sense, it is an attempt to replace the usual view of Kerouac’s scene of writing (where the April 1951 scroll is central, all but independent of what came before it, and the measure of all that came after it) with an alternative view (in which the scroll builds from earlier experiments, then in turn leads to sketching and Spontaneous Prose and to Visions of Cody). But in another sense, the preceding chapters have partly misconstrued or misapplied McGann’s position. This discussion of Kerouac should, arguably, have focused on the usual understanding of his scene of writing: the process by which he, over several drafts, reworked the April 1951 scroll of On the Road; the factors that led Viking Press initially to accept it, then after some delay, actually publish it; the factors that drove their adjustments to Kerouac’s copy; their marketing strategy and how the initial reviews positioned the book; and how the book’s violations of the codes of containment in play in the late 1950s became its rhetorical occasion (even though it was written in 1951, before those codes had crystalized and before the cultural and social apparatus had developed to support them). Such an examination of the scroll-­ derived On the Road and its reception would be highly productive. But this would cast Visions of Cody as a side dish, not an entrée, and Visions of Cody is too major an achievement, too crucial to Kerouac’s project as a writer (if not yet his reception), to be the after-­dinner Jell-­O to On the Road as a plate of pork [3.146...