Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form (review)

Action Writing should appeal to scholars of postwar American and international literature and to those particularly interested in Kerouac’s style. The book is an unusual but effective study—part biography, part literary analysis, part cultural critique— encompassing a variety of literary, aesthetic, and cultural sources. Literary sources include Keroauc’s work, particularly his letters, On The Road, and Visions of Cody, as well as writers who influenced Kerouac (Wolfe, Miller, Celine) and whom Hrebeniak associates with Kerouac’s work due to analogous philosophical ideas (Charles Olson, Michael McClure). For aesthetic sources, Hrebeniak focuses on two nonverbal wellsprings of Kerouac’s inspiration: jazz (especially Charlie Parker) and modern painting (especially Jackson Pollock). These heterogeneous sources indicate both a conscious and direct as well subconscious or associative connection to Kerouac’s work. Given that Kerouac’s work “is born of a transdisciplinary poetics” (2), it makes sense that the sources in Action Writing are transdisciplinary as well.

Hrebeniak posits Kerouac’s “wild” form as “a prolongation of ecstasy to counteract the enervation of sanctioned narratives” (50). He views Kerouac’s subversive desire to topple convention—i.e., literary prescriptions and cultural oppression— as Dionysian. Action or “orgiastic” (49) writing is about the eradication of “disciplinary borders and cliques . . . in the push to access the widest range of experience possible” (234). Hrebeniak regards Neal Cassady as the ascendant Dionysian archetype or force in Kerouac’s fiction. His analysis of On The Road in particular achieves a fascinating blend of archetypal and cultural criticism. Hrebeniak sees jazz in the same essential Dionysian terms as it influenced Kerouac’s style: “A progressive quest for freedom marks every point of renewal in jazz, a crusade to increase the capacity for expression” (198). But the flip side is Dionysian excess, destruction, and loss or waste. Hrebeniak fittingly explores the negative side in the binary manifestation of Dionysius as both creator and destroyer: “Kerouac’s ambivalence [in On The Road] toward mythic America, a sequence of optimism and defeat that eventually settles on withdrawal” (125). Both the positive and the negative aspects of the Dionysian pattern are woven into not only Kerouac’s characterization and narratives but also into the author’s life and poetics as well.

Action Writing offers an engaging analysis and perspicacious exploration of Kerouac’s works, style, and literary art. Examinations of the historical context are generally informed, but occasionally Hrebeniak demonstrates a tendency to simplify in reductive terms. For example, when it comes to politics, he assumes that a government (or State) is a singular entity rather than a complex conglomeration of conflicting cultures, sub-cultures, and interests. In Gramscian discourse, a government or State is in reality not so much a collective unity as a competitive, contradictory battleground. But like Regina Weinrich’s pioneering Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics (1987), Hrebeniak’s book makes a compelling argument to rescue Kerouac from the margin, where he is often dismissed as merely a “popular” writer—or simply understood as a (perhaps the) seminal figure in the Beat movement—claiming instead that he should be regarded as a major writer of international stature.

Like its subject and hero, Action Writing is inconsistently profound, but it manages to beautifully capture and analyze the genius, madness, accomplishment, naivety, disillusionment, displacement, failure, bitterness, magnetism, and energy—“He’s got it, see?”—that is Kerouac. Action Writing examines the desire for Dionysian generation at the root of Kerouac’s fiction—of destroying or supplanting the tried and worn in order to explore new terra incognita. This same desire also lies at the root of Hrebeniak’s articulate and substantive study. Kerouac’s fiction proved to be trailblazing, and Hrebeniak’s study proves no less trailblazing for Kerouac scholarship.