Kerouac

 

caption in Allen Ginsberg's handwriting: Portrait of Jack Kerouac, w/brakeman's manual in pocket; 1953 - Allan Ginsberg

In the realm of 20th-century artists, three immediately come to mind for their singularly unique voice.

One quality each of these three have in common is the unique singularity of their approach.  When you see/hear/read their work, you immediately know who it is.  To my way way of thinking, each one of them is so individualistic that any copying of their work is immediately apparent.

All three of these artists have made an impact on me.  Not a surprise in the case of Monk and Pollock.  There are other painters that have impacted my thinking and approach; being a musician that's influenced by a painter is pretty standard in my book.

However, there's fewer prose authors that have impacted me.  I could probably count them on one hand: Kerouac, Proust, and Joyce immediately come to mind.

For Kerouac, it feels different to me.  Of course, Proust and Joyce had their own unique voice and literary direction, but with Kerouac, you know it's him within a couple of sentences.  I know he had his influences; Thomas Wolfe, e.g.  However, I don't pick up on his influences, because Kerouac seemed to discard all known rules of writing and unabashedly revealed his own voice with nothing hidden or softened.  He seemed to create his own sense of form, sentence structure, punctuation, and even making up words.  Kerouac was not the first author to create new words; James Joyce explored this extensively in his novel Finnegan's Wake (1939).  Yet, Kerouac's creation of words was different than Joyce's.  

I don't consider him a novelist, as everything he wrote was based in fact.  Like Proust, Kerouac was essentially writing one long journal of his life.  The characters in his books were actual people.

The cadences in his voice, his paragraph structure, handling of topics; everything was just so Kerouac.  His creation of and usage of these tools wasn't just for novelty or shock effect; it was his voice and apparently a reflection of his thinking process.  He had referred to his style of writing as "spontaneous prose," and I think that came through in his writing voice, whether or not that was intended.

Furthermore, you can hear his writing voice in his reading voice.  In the examples of him reading his work, that voice comes across verbally.  Here's one example from 1959.

I'm not interested in sounding like Monk, Pollock, or Kerouac.  But the artists that immediately capture and hold my attention are those that have a completely unique voice in their work.  It's as if they're not only blazing a trail, but are making a trail through a previously undiscovered continent.

Kerouac's list of 30 beliefs could well apply to any branch of the arts, including music:

  1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
  2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
  3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
  4. Be in love with yr life
  5. Something that you feel will find its own form
  6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
  7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
  8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
  9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
  10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
  11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
  12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
  13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
  14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
  15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
  16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
  17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
  18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
  19. Accept loss forever
  20. Believe in the holy contour of life
  21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
  22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
  23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
  24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
  25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
  26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
  27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
  28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
  29. You’re a Genius all the time
  30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Some Kerouac quotes: 

"Genius doesn’t mean screwiness or eccentricity or excessive “talent.” It is derived from the Latin word gignere (to beget) and a genius is simply a person who originates something never known before. Nobody but Melville could have written Moby-Dick, not even Whitman or Shakespeare. Nobody but Whitman could have written Leaves of Grass; Whitman was born to write Leaves of Grass and Melville was born to write Moby-Dick."

"Some perfect virtuoso who can interpret Brahms on the violin is called a “genius,” but the genius, the originating force, really belongs to Brahms; the violin virtuoso is simply a talented interpreter — in other words, a “Talent.” Or you’ll hear people say that so-and-so is a “major writer” because of his “talent.” There can be no major writers without original genius. Artists of genius, like Jackson Pollock, have painted things that have never been seen before… Take the case of James Joyce: people say he “wasted” his “talent” on the stream-of-consciousness style, when in fact he was simply born to originate it."

"Some geniuses come with heavy feet and march solemnly forward… Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it’s that unescapable sorrowful depth that shines through — originality."

+++++
 
If you're interested in discovering his work, I'd recommend Visions of Cody as a starting point.  I think by the time he'd written this, he'd really become himself and was in full control of his voice and direction.  It was written in 1951-52, but published posthumously in 1972.  It's a great read.

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