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59 ( ÆI]ZIdd=j\ZLdgaYÇ/K^h^dchd[;dgb I need more than one string for a fabric. I am trying to get a bracket for one kind of ideas, I mean that will hold a whole set of ideas and keep them apart from another set. —Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur A multiphasic experience sought a multiphasic form . . . cultivating the metaphysical ground in life. —Robert Duncan, “Ideas of the Meaning of Form” Ihe language and title of On the Road—written at the time he was devising his theory of poetics—indicate a significant shift in Kerouac’s career to an examination of potential form. As he suggestsin BlackMountainReview, “Modernbizarrestructures . . . arise from language being dead, ‘different’ themes give illusion of ‘new’ life” (GB ). From this, Kerouac’s great serial vision of America broaches core motifs of the nation’s construction. In On the Road he writes of excitedly planning his trip, “poring over maps of the United States” for months, and “even reading books about the pioneers and savoring names like Platte and Cimarron and so on” (). However, having set out in  to forge “a huge study of the face of America itself” within “the ruling thought in the American temperament . . . a purposeful energetic search after useful knowledge,” Kerouac finds that the deployment of a linear model serves only to frustrate the possibilities of individual heroism and trailblazing vitality—“the ‘livelihood of man’ in America instead of the vague and prosy ‘brotherhood of man’ of Europe” (SL, I )—that vibrated for Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman. “the too huge world” 60 In mass America, the Sublime cannot be realized geographically through the solitary transversal of vast, savage space by speed. “I saw that it was an arbitrary conception to say ‘infinite’—even to say ‘space’—that it was sizeless & distanceless,” Kerouac writes in Some of the Dharma. “You could travel forever in the arbitrary conception of ‘distance’ of the universe before you’d learn it was just a void” (). As Olson proposes in Call Me Ishmael, time itself must be changed into space through an alchemical act, one that in Michael McClure’s words may allow man to “move in it and step outside of the disaster that we have wreaked upon the environment and upon our phylogenetic selves” (Scratching ). Kerouac’s “subject of America” in all its physical grandeur and geomantic complexity demands a new mode of personal disaffiliation, an act of mind to release the visionary experience beneath the flux of observational detail in a rebirth of language. As Regina Weinreich contends, the paradigm of “IT” presents a possible metanarrational solution for the problem of design in On the Road, a built-in distinction between classical plot progression (horizontal themes in unified time) and a series of nodal points (vertical moments of excitement) that intersect within a field (–). Causality breaks up into smaller cells open to analysis as tropes of “exhaustion and building,” or tension and release, evident in Sal’s oddly melancholic response to Fidelio (“What gloom”), the breakdown of his relationship with Terry, the prolonged drunkenness and sexual frustration surrounding Dean’s theft of a car in Denver, and the “be-hatted tenorman’s” juxtaposition of crashing “[u]proars of music” with a ballad from “this sad brown world” (OTR ). These shifts from the numinous to the temporal world are carried by the choral refrain “Everything was collapsing,” as if to convey the corrective limitations of extreme psychological and spiritual states—a major Beat concern, according to Michael Davidson—and interiorized within a “sharp-necessitating ‘ending,’” where “language shortens in race to wire of time-race of work, following laws of Deep Form, to conclusion, last words, last trickle—” (GB ). However, empirically this stops short of fulfillment. “All carefully planned out yet falling far from what is dearly meant,” Kerouac writes on the dedicatory screed to Robert Giroux. Constrained by the demands of publishers and his own lack of confidence, the various drafts of On the Road stand as preparatory works from his “middle style () between Town & City and Doctor Sax,” “soften[ing] the public for the real business in hand” (SL, II , ), and in the case of the final version, a postlude for the great fictional experiment yet to appear in print. In a  letter to John Clellon Holmes, dispatched in the midst of writing Doctor Sax, Kerouac asserts that he has begun “the too huge world” 61 to discover now . . . something beyond the novel and beyond the...

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