Jack Kerouac is most commonly remembered for publishing his seminal account of the ‘Beat’ Generation in On the Road. However, while exposing the world to a downtrodden, nuclear holocaust fearing generation, Kerouac was changing the world of modern prose. His steady ‘stream of consciousness’ prose, referred to by fellow Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, as ‘Jazz Prososity,’ challenged the American literati mainstream. Kerouac shrugged off the conventions of the confining modern punctuation and structure and delved into the innermost reaches of his consciousness and wrote exactly as he felt at the time. He despised the comma and semi-colon and considered them simply hindrances to the actual rhythm and rhyme of the modern English language. Kerouac’s writing was labeled as pedantic, rambling, and lacking in art by the East Coast literati establishment; however, in his letters and personal journals, Kerouac took extreme pride with his ‘craft.’
Listing James Joyce and William Saroyan as two of his greatest influences, Kerouac mimicked the prose and styles of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and Saroyan’s The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. Although Joyce is credited, as the father of stream of consciousness, some schools of thought believe the great Shakes himself may have employed the stream of consciousness writing style first. However, influences and rhetoric aside, Kerouac penned the essentials necessary, in his opinion, to write successfully in the stream of consciousness, or spontaneous prose, style.
In the Essentials of Spontaneous Prose, Kerouac outlines nine essential elements he considers are befitting to write in the spontaneous prose method. He urges the writer to dig deep within their souls’ and blow, freestyle like a jazz artist, to find their defining rhythm. Kerouac urges the writer to not stop and think about a particular word, or structure, but to simply write what the thoughts dictate to the typing fingers.
In method, he espouses the writer should never mind the commas and arbitrary semi-colons–they take away from the normal flow of the writers thoughts. He strongly believes by writing unfettered by style or defined modern structure the writer can telepathically convey his message to the reader through the natural flow of human thought.
For Kerouac, revisions, or poetic insertions, were anti-stream of consciousness. He thought the first take was the best and any revisions should solely be to change or edit names. He also believed in the unhindered style of ‘trance’ writing. Where the writer simply writes in an uninterrupted flow of thought and wrote as they thought. He urged the subconscious to infiltrate the narrator’s voice and take over the controls unabated by structure and punctuation.
He also left future writers his thirty steps for the Belief & Technique of Modern Prose. In an effort to outline his writing practices, he teaches the writer to be a scribe of everything and watch the world as an observer. Kerouac urges the writer to scribble frantically in notebooks and fill pages of typewritten thoughts for their enjoyment. Kerouac embraced the world around him and reported the human condition as he witnessed it happening around him.
The Subterraneans, a loosely autobiographical account of a wayward affair with Mardou Fox set to the backdrop of the Bebop nights of 1950’s San Francisco, can be considered as an introduction treatise on how to write in spontaneous prose. Young Mardou Fox pens a naïve love letter to Leo Percepied and as Percepied reads the letter, the narrators voice coaches the absent writer, Fox, and adept reader on the ways to write more fluidly and without constraint. The Belief & Techniques of Modern Prose are virtually outlined throughout the thought process of Percepied’s reading of the leader.
He starts with an attack on the current literary establishment by comparing Fox “she talks like all of em, the city decadent intellectual dead-ended in cause and effect analysis and solution of so-called problems instead of the great Joy of being and will and fearlessness-rupture’s their rapture.” Speaking through Percepied, Kerouac has laid down the gauntlet. He continues on to say, “but, as I told her often, not enough detail, the details are the life of it, I insist, say everything on your mind, don’t hold back, don’t analyze or anything as you go along, say it out.” Juxtaposed to numbers 8 and 22 in Belief & Techniques:
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see the picture better
He is teaching us through the Subterraneans, and little Mardou Fox, to write without restraint.
Percepied continues to read the letter and feels “the whole complicated phrase further complicated by the fact it is presented in the originally written form under the marks and additions of a rewrite.” In Belief & Techniques, Kerouac tells the writer to “remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition.” Furthermore, in Essentials of Spontaneous Prose, he tells would-be writers to omit revisions. Deep from within the pages and plot of the Subteranneans Kerouac is leaving us the map on how to write in the spontaneous form.
Kerouac’s Percepied later argues with the young poet Yuri Gligoric, roughly based on beat poet Greg Corso, on the virtues of spontaneous prose. Percepied, in a jealous funk over the philandering of Fox and Gligoric, attacks a phrase from one of Gilgoric’s latest poems, ‘seldom nocturne.’ Percepied believes the phrase is contrived and planned, “I would say rather it was great if you’d written it suddenly spur of the moment.” Gligoric responds, “But I did-right out of my mind it flowed and I threw it down, it sounds like its been planned but it wasn’t, it was bang! just like you say–spontaneous vision.” Percepied concedes to respect the contrived phrase since Gligorc sells the idea to Percepied the phrase came spontaneously and fluidly.
Written over a period of three days and three nights, the Subterraneans is a tribute to the spontaneous prose style. Moreover, the work itself is a manual for aspiring writers attempting the spontaneous prose method. In my writing, outside of the halls of academia, I try to emulate the casual lack of form and freedom Kerouac’s writing conveys. The method, at times, can be quite challenging. However, with practice and the proper muse, the writing, thoughts, and process flow from the inside out. The steady stream of consciousness overcomes the writer and the words fall trance-like along their narrative arc. The reader reaps the rewards with a telepathic journey into the mind of the character narrator.
Bibiography
- Charters, Ann. The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Penguin Classics, 1992. 8-59.
- Kerouac, Jack. Good Blonde & Others. San Francisco: City Lights, 1993.
- Kerouac, Jack. The Subterraneans. New York: Grove P, 1958.
