A Map of Mexico City Blues: Jack Kerouac as Poet

7. The Tradition of Spontaneity

7 The Tradition of Spontaneity The supposedly single) independent and external world that each believes to be common to all is really an ever-new) uniquely occurring and nonrecurring experience in the existence ofeach. I In the "Passing Through New York" section ofDesolation _ Angels, Kerouac invents a fictional version of an actual meeting he had with the New Critic and poet Randall Jarrell in the presence of Gregory Corso. Varnum Random, the Jarrell character , asks Duluoz, the Kerouac character, "How can you get any refined or well gestated thoughts into a spontaneous flow as you call it? It can all end up gibberish" (280). Duluoz, who has just finished writing a series of poems "high on benny in the parlor," defends his "theory of absolute spontaneity" by replying: "If it's gibberish, it's gibberish. There's a certain amount of control going on like a man telling a StOlY in a bar without interruptions or even one pause." "Well it'll probably become a popular ginll11ick but I prefer to look upon my poetry as craft," Random says. 136 The Tradition of Spontaneity "Craft is craft." "Yes? Meaning?" "Meaning crafty. How can you confess your crafty soul in craft?" (280) As this passage amply illustrates, Kerouac's notion of spontaneity , despite the adjective, is neither absolute nor strictly poetic. It admits a measure of control, and its purpose secms partly artistic , partly religious, and partly personal. While no facet of literary aesthetics has been more thoroughly ignored, the theory and practice of spontaneity form the foundation for most of Kerouac's novels (with the possible exception of The Town and the City) and command special prominence in the composition and content of his poetry. Because spontaneity often misleadingly implies the most radical originality-often the illusion of creation out of thin air-I choose to view it in terms of its various sources in Kerouac 's life and work. That he worked self-consciously within a tradition makes his spontaneous poetics all the more impressive and important. Tradition, after all, distinguishes literature from the rest of imaginative writing, and in no way does working within a tradition of spontaneity diminish Kerouac's originality or authority . The most productive way to treat Kerouac's poetics is to view him as a great innovator in a long line of eminent writers. Besides the indefinable boundary between poetry and prose, tl1e most ancient distinction in literature is between tl1e epic poem and tl1e lyric poem, the poem that tells the hero's story as opposed to the poem that is, as Wallace Stevens put it, "the cry of its occasion ." These fundamental genres can be recognized by length, stmcture, and conventions, of course, but they can also be said to employ different approaches to spontaneity. In the epic poem, the story comes almost ready-made from the resources of the culture; it is mythic and almost prerational in nature. The hero and the other characters in the story are well-known to the listeners. Even many of the details of plot and setting are dictated by convention. Yet an element of spontaneity remains. We know that in oral literatures the singer of the epic uses the elaborate stmcture of the poem as a foundation for freedom of style. Because the content of the poem is.restricted, the singer focuses his imaginative energy 137 A Map ofMexico City Blues on his presentation. He gathers his rhetorical strength in the intensity of his singing, and the impulse to imlOvate comes out in the most minute embellishments that are hardly even noticeable to the casual listener but sensed on a deeper level by their effectiveness in conveying the emotional dimension of the story. This kind of epic spontaneity is present in Mexico City Blues most clearly in the subtle variations on the chorus form in the poem. What looks fairly restricted-a single page in a tiny notebook-becomes a source of endless variation so tllat no two chomses are exactly the same in form. Clearly, however, Kerouac's poetry more closely resembles the cry of the lyric, with its emphasis on music and emotion ratller than on detail and plot. Instead of a hero, the lyric poem gives us a disembodied voice, usually of unspecified race, class, or gender. Taken individually, the chomses ofMexico City Blues can be read as lyrics in this traditional sense. Many of them stand well on...