Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination, and: Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form (review)

Was Jack Kerouac the most overrated American writer of the Cold War Era? Or has his work been falsely relegated to a literary historical underground, comprised—as we are led to believe—of aging hipsters and bleary-eyed undergraduates? Making use of newly published texts, journals, and letters, two recent critical studies strive to rescue Kerouac’s work from the category of “minor literature” to which, rightly or wrongly, it has been assigned. Both Michael Hrebeniak, in Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form, and Nancy M. Grace, in Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination, situate Kerouac within a broad field of experimental literature rather than viewing him simply as the public face of the Beat “generation” or as the voice of a literary movement whose other adherents—William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Amiri Baraka, Gary Snyder, and Dianne Di Prima among them—have since eclipsed his appeal for literary scholars.

In their reevaluation of Kerouac’s place in literary history, both studies champion the beat writer’s remarkable powers of synthesis. Kerouac envisioned his semiautobiographical fiction and poetry alike as part of a vast cumulative project he called the Duluoz Legend, a synthesis not only of the writer’s own career but of its very relationship to modern literature. “My work,” as he explains in Big Sur (1961), “comprises one vast book like Proust’s except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed” (qtd. in Hrebeniak 22). What, we might ask, are the stakes of this monumental ambition?

For Hrebeniak, whose book heeds the epic scale of Kerouac’s literary project, the Duluoz legend emerges through the author’s self-consciousness about form. “As with Miller, Nin, Proust, Céline, and Wolfe,” Hrebeniak writes, citing the authors upon whose work Kerouac explicitly modeled his own, “the subject of Kerouac’s books is the author’s own life in retrospect, and yet the concentration on the phenomenology of writing confers an independence upon the texts, something that consistently eludes his biographers” (80). Hrebeniak’s study of the development of Kerouac’s “wild form” strives to situate the author’s work within what Hrebeniak calls a “modernist wave” rather than within the biographical contours of his road trips, odd jobs, and catastrophic rise to fame. This survey of Kerouac’s “concentration on the phenomenology of writing” begins by examining his self-regulated practice of imitating modernist writers in his journals and letters, and continues through a detailed discussion of his celebrated experiments with the modalities of bebop and oral storytelling, through which Kerouac accorded his literary voice to a “legislation by breath as opposed to inherited metrics” (132).

Hrebeniak’s argument in Action Writing is twofold. On the one hand, his study aims to clarify Kenneth Rexroth’s 1957 assessment of Beat literature as an art of disengagement. Whereas Jean-Paul Sartre had championed engaged literature as writing that confronted the demands of its historical conditions, Rexroth instead advocated the Beats’ disaffiliation from the Cold War United States with its “convergence of interest—the business community, military imperialism, political reaction, the hysterical, tear and mud drenched guilt of the ex-Stalinist, ex-Trotskyite American intellectuals” (qtd. in Hrebeniak 9). Yet if Kerouac’s writing signaled a retreat from historical engagement in this sense—an ideologically motivated untimeliness—it was all the more fiercely immersed in the literary history of experimental prose and poetry, as Hrebeniak compellingly maintains. The notion that Kerouac’s work participated in a “community of ideas” that opens up into a “national, and eventually international matrix” (12) returns through the book as a series of ecstatic chains of association. As Hrebeniak writes:

Kerouac parallels Charles Olson’s concern with sustaining expansive forms over time to contribute to an American tradition of the serial work that stems from Whitman...