The original scroll was published just recently. Visions of cody was published in 1972, posthumously. I should include Doctor Sax, because the three of them were all written at the same time from 1950 - 1952. They were all part of the same what you might call gesture, or project. I prefer gesture because it has more movement in it and less death archival finality of project, although project can be ongoing too, so it might be a bit unfair to say death final like archive. But I haven’t read Doctor Sax yet, although it’s there and in the queue. I won’t wait to say something about these two though, and then maybe I will say something about Dr Sax and about the three of them together making any sort of sense as being part of the same gesture. More perhaps they are iterations of the same I don’t know what exactly, urge, spirit, feeling, gesture with variable inflections, different nuance, tilt the prism angles for a new array of light refracted with a new effect affect each time? But then again, Dr Sax does not have Neal, Cody, Dean in it I don’t think I don’t believe, so it is in its reflection of a time much earlier precursor psychology of nascent formulations of the matter in the soul of Kerouac. So later for that.
Meantime, there are these two things. All of it was Visions of Neal at one point. And there were the many tries to get it published have it be accepted at the time it was impossible it seems. The final version published On the Road 1958 or so was different and even that was 6 - 8 years later, and still it was a thing that seemed mostly different and new. If they had seen these things in 52 it would have blown their mind like Joyce’s Ulysses and Stein’s Making of Americans and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. It would be then as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow was in the 70s. Because it was everything everything all at once coming at you real but completely rendered through poetic mind and speech-like writing though poetic crazy filled with common place vernacular and everything from the sublime to the ridiculous pop culture, 3 Stooges, movie stars, bop jazz stars, other writer stars, and ordinary people, everyone from pimps and whores and drug addicted genius fools and criminals to broken poor struggling hoboes new girl becoming slowly more free urbane woman attitude hipsters and the city playing like a character as well -- star cities and places like new york and san francisco and denver and new orleans and mexico all part of the whole thing. Lots of drugs, lots of sex, lots of hanging out and reaching for something to have to hold to understand to feel and trying to get it out, to blow like saxophones, and make it beautiful even though it feels its tragedy all way through: “I write because we’re all going to die...”
It was doing all of what came to be a new thing lots of other people did much later (like tape transcription by Warhol for e.g.), but also showing that it is inspired by what has blown its mind - Joyce Finnagins Wake neologisms and word sound play - Faulkner strange oblique sketches of reality with captured regional dialect - Miller sex talk graphic detail from subjective point of view - Parker bop phrasing - Wolfe (the first one) poetry of sad reality - W.C. Fields drunken irony intellectual slapstickism - 3 Stooges goofiness made more sublime through Dostoevsky reading of the fool the idiot “the holy goof” - Joyce’s Ulysses style parade and mix and mess it up -- structure sections like play with characters that speak internal thinking dialogue already more like poetry, surreal. Marijuana and peyote and morphine and benzedrine and alcohol like all as though they were the holy host. Name drops of artists, musicians, writers. A buddy story like no other one before it, even it if it drew on tom sawyer and huck finn, and showed in that way how thus the cultural products also do produce a cultural sensibility - they are not just out there and over there, they are in here as well.
Here are some reflections drawn more from when I was reading the visions book (because I read it second after the original scroll but the two are similar but visions more experimental going out to the limits of his writing, trying everything, lots of different ways).
It took me from July to October to get through it. There are lots of reasons why. But there it is. Even ginsberg in his afterward analysis took his time with separate entries made in separate cities over months. Well, it is a difficult text, and rewardingly so.
July
There are long fluid lines syncopated -- that’s to say dynamic. This is not (just) bebop short fast dense melodious bursts (parker, miles, gillespie, shearing, powell). This is modal (coltrane, evans, adderly, later miles -- but before he even heard them, before they even did it) long searching strings, forming matter from as many angles and as much pouring out of soul to find the soul of living in the world, as much as it can in long fluid strings. This is long breath music. Ahead of its time.
It predates precipitates Bob Dylan, Tom Wolfe (the electric kool-aid acid test one not the one that precedes him Of time and the river), Thomas Pynchon, Hunter S Thompson, and John Coltrane and in a way in a sense the french nouveau vague and italian long poem film meditation antonioni style and japan kurosawa style. This is a fierce explosion contemplative beauty. Unfurling the character from the inside and situating him from the outside perceptions relations and attitudes.
October
Here is a book that is many things at once and being something new and doing very much a thing that was the heart of when it was its time -- though many may have felt it beating yearning loving hating gushing in this way within themselves, only very few were understanding its desire and its way, which is how it goes each time that is a time meaning epoch period moment, for the most part, anyway.
Being in its time, it is very much ahead of it, in the way that anybody sees it, usually, when it might first appear. It is there in some respect and with some regard to Joyce and Faulkner and Henry Miller and Gertrude Stein and Tom Wolfe and Dostoevsky and of course Neal Cassady, its living, breathing, moving muse companion. And it is also there because it’s everywhere around taking it all in, all of it, from then to its moment of writing it. The music, the players named, and comic books, and movie stars and movie genre stars from matinees still resonant from childhood, just like us like modern writers do a lot, but this was nearly 60 years ago!
Everything everything flowing through it. The 3 Stooges, Charlie Parker, Joan Crawford, and every type of person, sex and drugs and jazz, described announced celebrated situated in the flow of things... “because we’re all going to die.”
And self-consciously (that is self-reflectively, self-referential before post-anything trend cultural criticism naming ... Contemporaneous with existentialism after all, but not quite that, even if feeling a bit nauseous like it was ... So less like Sartre’s Nietzsche with a sick stomach, although a bit upset I guess, not entirely but maybe perhaps a bit more like Barthe’s gentler melancholy, but before him too) aware that it is writing it is literature and it is redefining it while making its allusions to itself for itself of itself. Marc Twain Tom Sawyer Huck Finn figures thrown onto a real life them, those two Neal and Jack, though made into a fiction anyway because how could it be otherwise?
The last forty pages a dense shorter version of the original scroll. And all the way through other iterations of the same journey.
What matters is the way it makes you feel -- the way it spurs you on -- the way it makes you walk -- opens up your gait.
I read it like I must get through it. I’m in a hurry to get through all of it, to eat it up -- to get it all real fast like time’s a wasting so let’s go let’s go, c’mon let’s go.
Often when I’m reading it, I’m thinking wow, he wrote that then?! He wrote like that, then?! Misinterpretations of him do abound, suffering from being famous more for being cultural figure than renowned writer as he would have better liked perhaps.
I think maybe this is just as much significant a mark in literature (if that even really means anything to anyone other than to anyone who is trying to control some assessment of writing like it runs along a course trajectory of evolution needing to be measured and be qualified for what for who I am not really really sure but having more I think to do with power control and economy, a colonialist project in a sense therefore more than art as moving anyone, turning someone on) as any other novel treated now normally and usually accepted as great literature -- so who cares what they all say when they’re always late it seems in any case to say it anyway.
Surprising combinations blurring what is prose, what is poetry, confounding grammar punctuation syntax rules. Doing what it was that Burroughs later did mechanically but Kerouac is doing it just doing it with how his mind unfolds the literary writing saying it. Making up new words or new declensions to ensure it all keeps going go now move.
Sometimes it isn’t pretty -- it is awkward actually sometimes. But that is part of its charm.
One of the greatest works of literary splendour sublime American of 20th century.
And my departure reflection of it of America now in the context of everything the way it is and how I feel about it after everything that’s happened happening and after reading these great books is this:
America’s a chimera. And America is still “what is America, and disagree always” -- but now it’s more like I would say ”America, here it is, and don’t you know that it is this, and no of course you don’t, and don’t let anybody know you don’t, because no one sees it now the way it is, but hold on still to how you think it was, ‘cause that’s the way it ought to be, even though you do not know, and nor does anybody else, know it really, what it was, or is, or what it’s going to be.
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