“Time is the purest and cheapest form of doom.” — Jack Kerouac
Apropos Kerouac, I think that there is nothing more important, more significant today, than reading his books and evaluate them without associating them with the “beat phenomenon.” Kerouac is an author too diverse and expansive, by far the best and the most influential of his generation, to merely continue to consider him “the king of the beats.” So, disregarding the “literary criticism” which continues to promote “beatness” instead of literary value, authenticity, and scope, this piece supports otherness, instead.
Kerouac established this otherness principally by writing one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century, entitled Visions Of Cody.
This peculiar book broadcasted the first signal, revealed the first trail of Kerouac upon his request for a conceptual equilibrium; mainly because its author did not scoff at the fear of the possibility, after completing the book, to arrive at the trailhead, at the point of his experimental departure. Kerouac gave all he had to this brilliant, tricky and challenging book.
Challenge was everything. Kerouac worked through a literary revelation with an ambiguous novel, where redemption and condemnation, clarity and obscurity, highlighted human complexion and intellectual abyss. With Visions Of Cody, Kerouac reached his creative death, that is, his artistic consummation (something that was unthinkable by writing important and valuable books like On the Road, Lonesome Traveler, Big Sur, Vanity Of Duluoz, etc.). He overthrew the “truth” of the literary material, of the expressional validity, by allowing himself to explore the enlightening of phenomena, in their own greatness, in their own limitations and so achieving a flight to the far ends of the potentiality of possibilities, of life and literature, and of existential suffering, equally.
What exactly do we mean when talking about spontaneous prose? What may be the maximum proximity between life and literary writing? What exactly is poetic prose? The answers to these are not few; yet, let’s spare this case from an attempt to add useless and unnecessary interpretations. Because, on the contrary, there are books which establish their own aesthetics, regardless the known restrictive arguments for or against this triad of symbolic questions above.
Visions Of Cody was written in 1951-1952 and eventually published twenty years later, in 1972, after Kerouac’s death. Like almost all the other books of the author, this one is also controversial for the mainstream critics (especially of the Marxist school which constitutes one of the most powerful establishments in the history of American letters, and abroad).
Kerouac’s devastated vision was not creatively consumed in anticipation of the death of modern civilization, nor in some steadfast predictions of its death. The corpse of civilization had already been putrefied. Society no longer had any spiritual significance beyond eschatology. That is, Visions Of Cody is an eschatological book. It is a wonderful, purely sarcastic and frank composition of contexts, characters, projections and rare assimilations, all of which sustain the ultimate song of Kerouac’s intellect, which was fulfilled by high spiritual concentration, being endlessly questioned and undefined from within.
With Visions Of Cody, Kerouac came to a complete break with his previous methodology, beginning to use recorded material, polyphonic disruptions, narrative noise, distortion and risky involvements with conceptual embodiments.
Kerouac, being a poet of a revelation raised from the cultural catacombs, expressed a series of ontological qualities of aesthetic and social experience, philosophical reflections on everyday life, while he witnessed the impossibility of an alternative future for humanity, while life appeared to be indissolubly incorporated into fraud and imitation. However, Kerouac used his heart muscles to break his ties with the social and spiritual life of modern America, of the modern cosmos in general.
Cy Lester says
A fine recognition that Visions of Cody is Kerouac’s greatest book. In this book is the flame that was was kept burning during the last dark ages. The above comment is also v. important for highlighting the existence of the Kerouac notebooks. Let’s have ’em ALL published in facsimile as was Joyce’s ULYSSES and the Waste Land. There’s enough money kicking about. These notebooks were written before the age of deletions. Kerouac is our trusty futurologist – more so, if we get to read, some day between the lines. Everything Kerouac wrote fulfilled the purpose of language.
Paul Maher Jr. says
Visions of Cody is the book that attenuates the essence of Kerouac. It is the work he was born to write, not On the Road which, in either of its incarnations (the ’51 draft hammered out to earn an advance from his Town and the City editor and its butchered emasculated published ’57 version) Kerouac was never happy with … in the pages of Cody, where he maps out his America, the fractured modernity of a nation caught in the crosshairs of self-dissolution, and almost in hyper-realism captures the heat shimmer of the highway as obsessively as he does a starlet’s self-awareness under klieg lights, or the mouths of soup-eating hoboes. Kerouac caught it all and wrote of it honestly and earnestly way before his time, and even more so to this day. The book deserves more of a treatment than it has gotten, bandied about by Kerouac as his masterpiece during his lifetime, only to have one door after the other closed due to nervous twitchy editors unwilling or unable to commodify this unruly text before an indifferent marketplace. I believe and wish that the original sacred notebooks that I have held in my hands should be published as facsimiles so that people can see Kerouac’s chilling words of prophecy for themselves. The tidied typeset prose doesn’t exactly do it justice. All of the crowded words are as unruly as Beethoven’s ink blots and streaks of score. Anyway, Yannis, thanks for the great article….