In ‘Essentials of Spontaneous Prose’, Kerouac instructed the reader to ‘tap from yourself the song of yourself’. Just one of the many implications that Kerouac viewed the writer’s approach to prose and the approach to poetry as being the same. An idea that was reinforced in his ‘Belief & Technique for Modern Prose’, in which he stated that there is ‘no time for poetry but exactly what is’.
For Kerouac, labels of poetry or prose were unimportant.
Both modes of expression are vehicles in which to deliver images and ideas as faithful to the real thing as possible.
Kerouac may have titled his statements as being on prose, but with his instructions combining terminology from the world of music – jazz, in particular – and painting, blurring them both with those of language, it is clear that Kerouac saw methods of artistic composition as requiring insight from all art forms.
Check out the story ‘Big Trip to Europe’, in Lonesome Traveller (1960). It will become evident the importance which Kerouac placed on jazz technique informing his writing.
In ‘Essentials of Spontaneous Prose’, the procedure he outlines is significantly described as ‘blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image’.
In Lonesome Traveller, certain images are repeated, like a jazz motif, as an anchor he returns to in order to aid him in two ways.
- The repeated image allows him to punctuate long breaths.
- The image allows him a fraction of time in order to set up his next stream of imagery.
Like a jazz player who is riffing in a spontaneous fashion, without extensive premeditation as to what chords he is going to hit and in what order, he needs a central chord to rely on in order to give a sense of order to the spontaneity.
In one passage, the spontaneity is best characterised as a sea-journey, and Kerouac wishes to evoke all of the feelings and images that he associates with that particular journey. He begins by writing:
Gastank cities of America fading beyond the waves here we go across the Atlantic now on a run that takes twelve days to Tangier that sleepy Arabic port on the other side.
The image, or note, that Kerouac uses in this passage to return to amidst his spontaneous writing is the word ‘waves’.
He picks up speed writing and one can see the improvisational nature of his prose as one image or sound leads naturally into another image or sound, without needing sense to be governed by formalisation of writing style[1]:
and after the west waved land had receded beneath the cap lick, bang, we hit a bit of a tempest.
Image and structure here are indebted to sound.
How words sound, for Kerouac, lends as much meaning to the prose as what they represent.
However, soon after this riff, Kerouac returns to his anchor-word again, ‘waves’.
As the prose continues, it becomes more improvisational which can be seen by how far Kerouac allows sounds to dictate sense.
He writes about the ‘punchy whistling lines in that salt boorapoosh gale, blam’ and the idea of the ‘hopeless mess of mountainous seas’ reaches a high point of evocation in near-nonsensical sound as Kerouac represents it in the onomatopoeic phrase, ‘pow pow pow’.
Like a jazz player finding a note from the chaos that he enjoys and exploiting it.
Immediately after this, Kerouac reigns his spontaneous style in again, giving himself a pause for thought, and repeats his anchor-word, ‘waves’.
Kerouac continues to create further spontaneous verbalizations of specific thought, but this repetition is a valuable pause that does not detract from the effect.
Fiona Paton, in the essay ‘A New Style for American Culture’, said that Kerouac’s spontaneous prose
embodies the same unpredictability, excitement, and lyricism of [Charlie] Parker’s saxophone playing.
Kerouac’s use of repetition of a particular word emphasises his deviation from conventional structured prose, and creates that sense of ‘unpredictability’.
Kerouac achieves a similar effect in his poetry, written using the same, or at least similar, approach as the composition of his prose, in the 239thChorus of Mexico City Blues (1959).
This particular Chorus also makes Kerouac’s debt to jazz music more overt.
It’s subject is Charlie Parker.
Whilst in Lonesome Traveller Kerouac uses the image of the ‘waves’ as one to repeat and return to, here he uses the name ‘Charlie Parker’ in a similar way.
The poem begins:
Charlie Parker looked like Buddha | Charlie Parker, who recently died.
The initial repetition of the name is like a jazz musician focusing on a specific note so as to make his deviation from it more pronounced and also to have something definite and recognisable to return to and then deviate from again.
This instance also reinforces Kerouac’s idea, in ‘Essentials of Spontaneous Prose’, of having a ‘definite image-object’.
His instruction is to begin ‘from jewel center of interest in subject of image’ and to ‘write outwards’, ‘in accordance (as from center to periphery) with laws of orgasm’.
Kerouac’s method, in both prose and poetry, is to set before one’s eye, or the ‘eye within the eye’ as he calls the mind in ‘Belief & Technique for Modern Prose’, an image, which will then lend the compositional act a drive to explore images that arise from this central image.
George Dardess calls this ‘image-fitting’. Amiri Bakara calls this ‘trigger-inference’, and asserts that a central image leads to further expansion of imagery, resulting in ‘an untangling of the intellect’.
This is not dissimilar to ideas about writing that were expressed before Kerouac’s ‘Essentials of Spontaneous Prose’. The idea of ‘image-fitting’ can be seen in Ezra Pound’s imagistic poem, ‘In a Station of the Metro’, in which one image leads to another:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:Petals on a wet, black bough.
The idea of ‘an untangling of the intellect’, Kerouac’s idea of working from a central image out towards a periphery of subsequent images, can be seen in the oratory rhetorical technique of the exordium (meaning ‘to begin the warp of a web’).
In comparing the similarities between Kerouac’s prose and poetry, it is his idea of working from a central image outwards that provides the most enduring evidence that, for him, the boundary between the two modes is blurred.
In both prose and poetry, Kerouac writes in a fashion of circular expansion until he exhausts his subject.
Paton sees this circular nature of writing outwards as aligning Kerouac not only with jazz musicians like Parker, but also with painters like Jackson Pollock, writers like James Joyce, and the psychoanalytical theories of Carl Jung, with each of these figures’ art exploring ‘as directly as possible the nature of consciousness’.
In Lonesome Traveller, Kerouac displays this method of writing outwards as one of intense striving in order to reach a point of climax.
In one section, the narrative is filled with ideas of distress, with Kerouac repeating his state of crying, until the moment of exhaustion is reached, in which he is able to achieve a perfect image; for example, the image of
eyes of lucid liquid diamond understanding.
This image is a development in itself of one image and connotation to another, all working to prefigure the idea of the type of ‘understanding’ Kerouac wishes to represent.
Once he hits this image, a space is left for a new paragraph symbolising the end of one song and a pause for breath before he embarks on his next.
In the passage following this one, it is made clear that very often in Kerouac’s writing, he is not only moving from a definite image but towards another definite image as well.
His resolution, exhaustion, orgasm, or whatever word one wishes to use, is marked by a lilting syntax and progression towards a definite image used to punctuate the end of his spontaneous discourse.
In the majority of cases this is a noun. Bakara explains that
all legitimate spontaneous prose is full of nouns since these are the simplest and most uncomplex parts of speech […] It is a thing. The noun has not the necessary semantic dichotomy and complexity that is encountered in, say, adjectives, adverbs, etc .
In Lonesome Traveller, this progression towards a definite image can be seen on the micro-level of one sentence:
Nowhere in the world is a dismal as Sunday afternoon with the mistral wind blowing in the cobbled back streets of poor old Avignon.
This sentence shows Kerouac’s progression from image to image until he hits the image which has the most resonance and prominence for him.
Before this sentence, ‘Avignon’ is used as another anchored word that is returned to again and again:
At Avignon I got off to transfer to the Paris Express’; ‘And then out in the cobblestoned back-alley of Avignon (city of dust)’; ‘And the famous much-sung bridge of Avignon’; ‘What can you do in Avignon on a Sunday afternoon?’.
After this passage, Kerouac then begins his next discourse.
He begins his rumination on a new image from a fresh position, a position of collected strength, and here particularly he begins what could be called his ‘exordium’, with the image of a river almost literally carrying him outwards and allowing him to swim in a ‘sea of language’, as he phrases it in ‘Essentials of Spontaneous Prose’.
He begins:
Ah but in the morning, the suburbs of Paris, the dawn spreading over the moody Seine (like a little canal), the boats on the river, the outer industrial smokes of the city, then the Gare de Lyon and when I stepped out on Boulevard Diderot I thought seeing one glimpse of long boulevards leading every direction…
He is progressing from one image to another and then another, like a rolling camera.
This is what Kerouac is implying, in ‘Belief & Technique for Modern Prose’, when he writes:
bookmovie is the movie in words.
This is an idea that is very similar to Pound’s idea of phanopoeia: the projection of an image onto the mind in order to ‘charge language with meaning’.
It is a technique that can be seen strongly in Kerouac’s 211thChorus:
The wheel of the quivering meat conception | Turns in the void expelling human beings, | Pigs, turtles, frogs, insects, nits, | Mice, lice, lizards, rats, roan | Racinghorses, poxy bucolic pigtics.
One strong definite and fully-realized image is followed by another.
By the time Kerouac has finished his exordium in the Lonesome Traveller, after a couple of pages his exhaustion and his arrival from the jewel-center outwards is most fully realized.
The paragraph before his final breath is filled with ‘and…then’ constructions and finally he reaches his ultimate sentiment:
Paris, a stab in the heart finally.
The end being reached is connoted by the word ‘finally’ and the break for a new paragraph, both delivering suggestions of exhaustion, whilst the rich full imagery of ‘Paris’ and ‘a stab in the heart’ marks his achievement.
In On the Road, it is Dean Moriarty who educates the narrator, Sal Paradise, in how to look.
He teaches him to search for the image.
When he is with Dean, images unfold like a panorama or a camera that keeps rolling. Amongst the images, for example, of
figures of girls in white bandannas […] in the humming dark
are Dean’s intermittent insistences for Sal to ‘Look! Look!’.
When Sal looks he sees
a dozen boys […] shooting pool at three tables, all Mexicans.
Dean tells him to
dig, now, out of the corner of your eye
and to
Watch! Watch!
Without Dean’s insistence to focus on one particular image, many passages in the narrative conform to Kerouac’s idea of swimming away from the image, from the center outwards.
He starts from a small specific image and allows it to develop larger and larger.
This often takes several pages to observe, but this formula can occasionally be seen within just one or two sentences, such as in an instance within the opening to ‘Part Three’:
At dusk I walked. I felt like a speck on the surface of the sad red earth
This expansion from small image outwards can be seen too in Sal’s musing near the beginning of the narrative:
If you drop a rose in the Hudson River at its mysterious source in the Adirondacks, think of all the places it journeys by as it goes out to sea forever
Kerouac’s technique is like dropping a rose, which can be seen to symbolically represent any image, into a river, a ‘sea of language’, and allowing it to spread outwards.
This idea, which Kerouac sees as synonymous with the point of ‘orgasm’, can be seen emphatically in his early description of Dean and Carlo Marx:
the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’’
The energy of the prose mounts and mounts until a definite image is reached along with the point of exhaustion, which is marked by the exclamation, ‘Awww!’
This same technique, once again, can be observed in Kerouac’s poetry.
How he uses this technique in the passage from On the Road can be seen in ‘The Sounds of the Universe Coming Through My Window’.
The poem begins:
The mill-valley trees | the pines with green mint look | and there’s a tangled eucalyptus hulk | stick fallen through the late sunlight tangle of those needles | hanging from it like a livewire connecting it to the ground.
Kerouac begins with his image and explores it, here using the sounds of the words to assist the development of the image.
The image of a ‘tangled’ tree works on a metaphorical level to describe the process of delivering his subsequent imagery; he is working in ‘an untangling of the intellect’, to use Bakara’s phrase.
As the poem progresses, Kerouac muses:
motionless like cows on the grass | and so they must be aphids | percolating up the steam […] bottomless bellies | for all I know are bigger than the bellies of the universe beyond.
This is another instance in which the small has developed into the large.
Here it happens very quickly, with Kerouac using the image of the cows’ bellies to access the image of ‘the universe beyond’.
This is a miniature climax before the grand climax of the poem’s ending.
After this large image, he begins small again, focusing on the image of
the little tragic windy cottages.
New images are stacked on top of each other, getting further and furthe away from the original image:
hummingbird hums hello | bugs race and swoop | two ants hurry to catch up with lonely Joe | the tree above me is like a woman’s thigh.
In these four increasingly more disparate images, Kerouac is presenting a challenge.
The reader is left to wonder how these images can be connected.
Then he returns to the ‘eucaluptus’ image which unites the scene together, showing that he has not strayed too far from his original subject:
smooth eucalyptus bumps and muscle swells.
This swelling prepares the way for the climax of the ending.
The ‘eucalyptus’ is
all busting out | indicating the prune blossoms.
This fertile imagery corresponds to Kerouac’s method of working from the inside out, like a flower dispersing pollen.
From the image of the ‘mill-valley trees’, by the end of the poem Kerouac has arrived at the image of
zen magic monks | mopping each other | and one and all […] to prove the crystal void | Wow.
Kerouac from one micro image has wrestled the image of the ‘crystal void’ from his mind and so ends it by saying ‘Wow’ marking the climax.
The expression, ‘Wow’, here, works on the same level as the expression, ‘Awww!’, from On the Road, indicating Kerouac’s appreciation of what he has produced, and what he has produced, following his statements on prose method, transcends the boundary of prose and poetry, showing them to be, in Kerouac’s management, not too dissimilar from one another.
[1] An idea Kerouac was against, as can be seen in his instruction, in ‘Belief & Technique for Modern Prose’, to ‘remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition’, and in Dean Moriarty’s lament, in On the Road( 1957): ‘Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears…’