Kerouac's Crooked Road: The Development of a Fiction

Chapter Three. The Redeeming Eye

Chapter Three The Redeeming Eye The discovery of sketching freed Kerouac from the need to translate his experience into fictional figures which then had to be manipulated like the markers in a board game. It freed him to concentrate on the interplay of perception and imagination , and the way this interplay assumed substance in language. It may seem that this should make Visions oj Cody simpler than On the Road, but Visions oj Cody is a difficult text, an elaborately literary text whatever its status as "fiction." Part of Visions oj Cody's difficulty comes from the way the sketching perspective encouraged Kerouac to treat language as a subject in and of itself. Part of the difficulty comes from the way sketching insists on the writer's continually discovering the terms of his interest in his material. And part of the difficulty comes from the fact that sketching is an approach to style. "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" says a great deal about how to write a passage but nothing about how to construct a book. And because of this, Visions oj Cody is not only about the discovery that happens from sketch to sketch, butalso about the discovery of how to 143 Kerouac's Crooked Road organize sketches and sketching into texts of "wild form." In this sense, Visions oj Cody turns out to be a book structured by the actual search for the book. Initially, the problems and possibilities of Spontaneous Prose as the basis for books of imaginative prose can be clarified by considering briefly two contemporary parallels to Spontaneous Prose, jazz and Action Painting. In the Action Painting of Jackson Pollock, there is no pretense of the artist's objectivity 01' distance, and the impression of the artist's involvement in his canvas is one aspect of the power of the finished painting, In a sense, the artist becomes a performer even though the viewer never sees the performance as it takes place, but sees instead the record of the performance , the record of a dance that took place in color and the texture of paint. Pollock does not represent objects or interpret them. His performance, the interplay of emotion, imagination, and an intense focus on the medium of the art itself, results in an object that has something of the same density, complexity, and even arbitrariness of natural objects, and the objectlike quality of the canvases can be seen in the importance of scale and texture to their effect. Ultimately, it seems that Pollock's genius has something to do with his sense of how to approach time through space, and motion through inanimate object. If a Pollock canvas is the record of a dance in color, Visions oj Cody is the record of a dance in language. There is the same intense focus on the medium of the art and the imagination, the same sense that texture and motion or the implication of motion is more important than overall architecture . There is the same presence of the personal, the performer . And both Pollock and Kerouac are more concerned with discovering new combinations in their material and selves through the risk of improvisation than with representing or interpreting the world. In Action Painting and Spontaneous Prose, the artist does not start out in possession of a reality to communicate. He must discover the world and record the process of his discovery. 144 The Redeeming Eye The improvisational nature of Action Painting and Spontaneous Prose is, of course, suggestive of jazz, and both On the Road and Visions oj Cody contain scenes where an improviser takes a phrase, explores it, and expands it into something new and vital. But jazz is also relevant to Spontaneous Prose and Visions oj Cody in other ways. In his Paris Review interview, Kerouac cites jazz as an influence on his sense of measure: Interviewer: What about jazz and bop as influences ...? Kerouac: Yes, jazz and bop in the sense of a, say, tenor man drawing a breath and blowing a phrase on his saxophone, till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his sentence, his statement's been made ... that's how I therefore separate my sentences, as breath separations of the mind . . . .1 Moreover, the sound of jazz is important. A jazz musician establishes his identity not only through his melodic inventiveness , but also by developing his own sound and tone. And Kerouac's descriptions of...