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33 Chapter 2 “A Book Always Has a Voice” Much has been made of Jack Kerouac drafting On the Road in three weeks in April 1951 by writing/typing it as a single 120-­ foot paragraph on a roll of tracing paper.1 Writing so “spontaneously” supposedly enabled Kerouac to capture the freedom of his road experiences, express his commitment to the moment, reject the stifling social orthodoxy of 1950s containment culture, revolt against the academy’s frigid formalism, and generate a quintessential American novel. There’s some right to this but also some wrong. For one, as already noted, Kerouac did not regard the scroll (as this manuscript is commonly dubbed) as Spontaneous Prose, which he first used as a method mid-­ October 1951 for material later incorporated into Visions of Cody.2 But, a more fundamental problem with this view is the way Kerouac’s presumed lack of reflection—­or, as some would have it, his intensity and honesty—­ encourages a focus on what Kerouac presents in On the Road rather than a consideration of how he actually wrote the novel and what this might tell us about how he understood writing as a medium at this point in his development. The focus on content (its “truth” and its “reality ” seemingly secured by the naiveté of the composing process) is a way to validate the book’s importance as a catalyst for the Beat Generation. But the measure of Huck Finn is not only how many boys took to rafts after reading it, and the measure of On the Road is more than how many might-­ have-­ been Cold War warriors opted instead for a fast car out of town. While our attention to the actions portrayed in On the Road has helped us appreciate its representation of America in the late 1940s and how readers in the late 1950s used those representations, it has contributed to a tendency to underestimate, misperceive, or simply ignore how deeply radical his conception of writing as a medium (as distinct from writing as a pro- 34    the textuality of soulwork cess) actually was. Kerouac was not just using dashes and participles to evoke a fast car on the road with Cowboy Neal at the wheel; he was, more fundamentally, reconceptualizing writing as a medium by reimagining its relationship to speech, thus problematizing writing’s relationship to language . To understand this, we need to consider not only On the Road as drafted in April 1951, the scroll Road, but also what led him to that experiment and why he pushed beyond it with the experiments that evolved into Visions of Cody. That is, we need to understand that the scroll version was not the breakthrough in Kerouac’s development but a breakthrough, preceded and followed by others, and to do this we need to consider three things: First, what was Kerouac rejecting in opting for this approach? His letters to Neal Cassady in late 1950 and early 1951 are particularly important in this regard. Second, why was he initially dissatisfied with the April 1951 version of On the Road—­ his sense that the scroll experiment had not actually resolved his dilemmas as a writer. Third, is the question of how the even more radical experiments across the fall of 1951 and into 1952—­ the work Kerouac shaped into Visions of Cody—­ recast these dilemmas and push beyond them. To understand Kerouac’s approach to writing (both as medium and method), we need to stop thinking of the scroll as some kind of ex nihilo immaculate conception and to consider its gestation, birth, and subsequent development. When Ann Charters was preparing her bibliography of Kerouac, he told her that The Town and the City (his first novel) was “written according to what they told me at Columbia University.” It was, he noted, “Fiction,” then added, “But I told you the novel’s dead.”3 The implicit dichotomy here—­ The Town and the City as conventional and therefore to be discounted and On the Road as radical and therefore to be validated—­ aligns neatly with the usual narrative of Kerouac’s development, where The Town and the City is the promising but conventional apprenticeship and On the Road the breakthrough to originality and the paradigm for the work that followed. But the characterization Kerouac offered Charters is misleading. He did not, when he was drafting The Town and the City, view it as being written according to the norms of Columbia University. Moreover, he...

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