Beboping Dubliners: How Jack Kerouac Dug James Joyce

Strings of words forming unfettered thoughts of the human condition-both forgoing the constraints of modern syntax, structure, and punctuation-catching the whims of the unconsciousness as the muse strikes and changing the forms of modern prose to come-yet, all the while weathering attacks from the literati establishment-sheer genius prose and method in trance like scribings of the world around them.

James Joyce and Jack Kerouac are seemingly strange bedfellows; however, as the genius of their seminal works such as Finnegan's Wake and On the Road, respectively, gain in popularity, the importance and sheer genius of their literary accomplishments increases as time erodes the misunderstandings of their craft. Considered the father of spontaneous prose, or stream of consciousness writing, Joyce's collection of short stories, The Dubliners, fine-tuned the spontaneous prose style he would later employ in Finnegan's Wake. Moreover, Joyce's style and initial experiments with the form greatly inspired Kerouac to take spontaneous prose to new levels. Kerouac's breathless, jazz inspired prose prompted esteemed Beat poet Allen Ginsberg to label Kerouac's writing as "Jazz Prosody."

Greatly misunderstood and facing negative responses from their contemporaries Joyce and Kerouac's writing styles were attacked as sophomoric and without convention. Truman Capote, straight off the successes of In Cold Blood, appeared on TV with then up and coming author Norman Mailer. When asked what he thought of the works of Kerouac, in a direct affront to the ability of Kerouac and the spontaneous prose form, Capote likened Kerouac's style as "not as much writing but typing." (Wakefield, 165) Mailer, although invited to defend the works of Kerouac, had earlier in his career wrote in Advertisements for Myself characterized Kerouac "as pretentious as a rich whore" and "sentimental as a lollipop." (166)

With general attacks on spontaneous prose like Capote and Mailer's, Kerouac constantly defended the likes of Joyce and himself. In a letter to Carl Solomon, Kerouac reasons, "On the Road is inspired in its entirety...I can tell as I look back on the flood of language it is like Ulysses and should be treated with the same gravity." (Letters, 355) In defense of spontaneous prose he continues, "To label it incoherent is not only a semantic mistake but an act of cowardice and intellectual death." (376)

With such vehement dismissals of the merit and genius of spontaneous prose, Kerouac and his craft was not without their supporters. In the same interview with Capote, an interview in which Mailer was to support and defend the writings of the Beat generation, Mailer allowed his competitive nature cloud his judgment to defend Kerouac. Prostate to on air support, and probably star-struck sharing the stage with Capote, Mailer made half attempts to defend his foe, Kerouac. However, later in an interview with Dan Wakefield, author of New York in the Fifties, Mailer remembers "I read it (On the Road) with a sinking a heart. We were very competitive back then. I was thinking, Oh shit, this guy's done it. He was there, living it, and I was just an intellectual writing about it." (162) Moreover, in a twist of fate, the book review that launched the Beat Generation, On the Road, Kerouac, and the spontaneous prose method happened by chance. The New York Times Book Review by Gilbert Millstein characterized the writing as "a historic occasion" and Kerouac as "the principal avatar of the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat.'" (163) The incredible, career launching review would have never happened if Millstein's boss, Orville Prescott, had not been on vacation. Kerouac, throughout his life, when introducing Millstein, introduced him as "This is Gilbert Millstein-he made me." (164)

To define spontaneous prose, one must look to the earlier short stories of work of Joyce, Kerouac, and William Saroyan. Joyce's characteristic stream of consciousness prose is evident in his word and sound play. Stringing together seemingly unconnected words he would convey images through the dialectic rhyme of speech. In An Encounter from The Dubliners, Joyce relates an entire paragraph to the movements and machinations of a man with a cane. Joyce leaves no thought un-turned or image left wanting for description. He relates to the reader exactly what the narrator is seeing and what he is thinking at the time of writing. He is catching his conscious and subconscious on the page for the reader to receive the true intent of the narrator. He is catching the stream of consciousness as it develops. In Joyce's style of prose, the narrator is poetic and ephemeral catching each fleeting thought. In his later works and through the fine-tuning of the consciousness in the stories of Dubliners, Joyce begins playing with the rhythm of nonsensical words making some of his works, such as Finnegan's and Ulysses, hard for many readers to grasp. However, where Joyce's experiments ended Saroyan continued the stream of consciousness study and added a new flare and twist with short staccatoed phrases.

Saroyan's most popular short story, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, catches the essence of the dream-sleep method of stream of consciousness writing. The opening section of The Daring Young Man reads like the short choppy, image heavy scenes of a dream.

"The deep song of man, the sly whisper of someone unseen but vaguely known, hurricane in the cornfield, a game of chess, hush the queen, the king, Karl Franz, black Titanic, Mr. Chaplin weeping, Stalin, Hitler, a multitude of Jews, tomorrow is Monday, no dancing in the streets" is how he describes the opening thoughts of our daring trapeze artist. (Current-Garcia, 390) One long sentence bereft of stopping, or halting punctuation, outside of the lowly comma creates a slight shift from the long poetic ramblings of Joyce. The rambling substituted with quick, hot thoughts as they happen to the writer gives narrative insight to the reader in the form of how the human mind interprets the world.

For example, one may stare and focus on an object at length, however, even in deep meditative thought, the subconscious will still interject incongruent thoughts and observations into the viewer's perspective regardless of how focused the individual remains. Saroyan's opening thought sequence in The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, Sleep, defines this method in the purest and most obvious manner. Yet, with Joyce's and Saroyan's growth and contributions to the stream of consciousness method, Jack Kerouac took the gauntlet and ran with his stream of consciousness writing and turned it into today's spontaneous prose.

Kerouac's works are essentially autobiographical accounts of his life. A consummate writer and observer of the lives happening around him--Kerouac seldom missed a beat, no pun intended. His early short works, such as Good Blonde and The Great Western Bus Ride, were precursors to the genius work of spontaneous prose he would introduce to the world in The Subterraneans.

Written over a span of three days and three nights in the attic of his friend Neal Cassady, inspiration for Dean Moriarty in On the Road, The Subterraneans is the quintessential introduction to the spontaneous prose method of writing. Kerouac understood he was changing the tenor of conventional literature and believed in his greatness. He shows readers through his letters and interviews that he believed himself the best writer of his generation and possibly the best in American literature. In a letter to publisher Alfred Kazin lobbying The Subterraneans for publication, Kerouac claimed, "I have invented a new prose, Modern Prose, jazzlike and breathlessly swift spontaneous and unrevised floods...it comes out wild, at least it comes out pure, it comes out and reads like butter." (Letters, 391) With long rambling passages bereft of punctuation except the ( -- ) dash, which he likened to a jazz saxophonist taking a breath to hit the next chord, he would write in a steady spontaneous stream of thought.

In The Subterraneans, he takes the method one-step further and in two places explains to the reader what the novella is trying to convey. The love interests of the two main Characters, Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox, are star crossed in a trans-racial early 1950's love affair. With artist flair and a subtle introduction to spontaneous method, Kerouac outlines what is required of a writer to write in the spontaneous prose method.

Fox writes a naïve love letter to Percepied professing her feelings of love and misgivings for him. Kerouac, through the character of Percepied, begins 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." (Kerouac, 58) 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." (58) 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." (58)

Kerouac's Percepied later argues with the young poet Yuri Gligoric, roughly based on Beat poet Gregory 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 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." (83) Percepied concedes to respect the contrived phrase since Gligorc sells the idea to Percepied the phrase came spontaneously and fluidly.

The beauty of Kerouac's contributions to modern spontaneous prose not only rests in the beauty and genius of his literary works but in the form of his journals outlining the spontaneous prose method. Years later, after The Subterraneans, Kerouac officially defends and defines the spontaneous prose method in two essays Essentials of Spontaneous Prose and the Belief & Techniques for Modern Prose.

Essentials of Spontaneous Prose urges the writer to "sketch" the scene in front of their mind's eye-write with an undisturbed flow and rhythm. He also, to the dismay of English professors and the literary establishment, urges the writer to forgo the use of punctuation, scoping, or finding the right word. Kerouac, like Joyce and Saroyan, strung together a list of words and sounds until the correct notion hit the page. He also taught writers to denounce revisions; Kerouac strongly thought the first draft, was the best draft. In the true nature of stream of consciousness, he espoused writers to write in a trance, or dream like, rhythm. He outlines this as well in Subterraneans, "hints of our business of writing down dreams or telling dreams on waking, all the strange dreams indeed and (later will show) the further brain communicating we did, telepathizing images together with eyes closed, where it will be shown, all thoughts meet in the crystal chandelier of eternity-Jim-yet I also like the rhythm of to dream, to wake, and flatter myself I have a rhythmic girl in any case, at my metaphysical homedesk." (59)

Belief & technique for Modern Prose stands alone as a how-to on matters to write in the spontaneous method. Kerouac outlines thirty steps for the writer to practice to improve his craft. To succeed in the modern spontaneous prose technique, the writer should keep "scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages for yr. enjoyment." (Beat Reader,58) Kerouac reminds the writer to be submissive to everything and "something that you feel will find its own form." (59) He coaches the writer to write in a trance upon the object before them and shed the inhibitions of punctuation, syntax, and grammar. (59) The writer should never stop to find the correct word for dissertation but to flow scatological and free until the correct passage fills the writers need. (59)

Joyce, Saroyan, and Kerouac led modern prose into a new and exciting direction. Although, in the early fifties, Kerouac's methods and means were accused as uneducated and chaotic ramblings, the modern American educational system today coyly embraces the spontaneous method. Young writers and students must write a rough draft through 'free writing'-essentially, spontaneous prose; however, against the beliefs of Kerouac, young writers then pour diligently over scribbled manuscripts to revise and restructure-ironically, overturning the conventions of spontaneous prose.

The weight and depth of Joyce's literary importance and contribution defines modern literature. Many consider the works of Joyce the most important achievements of western literature. As the scope of time weighs the measure of Kerouac's importance to western and more importantly American literature, the sheer genius of his Bebop rebellion against conventional prose continues to influence and change the course of American literature.

Works Sited

Brinkley, Douglas, ed. Jack Kerouac, Windblown World. New York: Viking P, 2004.

Charters, Ann, ed. Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters 1940-1956. New York: Viking P, 1995.

Charters, Ann, ed. The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Penguin Classics, 1992. 8-59.

Current-Garcia, Eugene, and Walton R. Patrick. What is the Short Story? Case Studies in the Development of a Literary Form. Glenview, Il: Scott, Foresman, and Company, 1961. 390-395.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004. 231-416.

Kerouac, Jack. Good Blonde & Others. San Francisco: City Lights, 1993.

Kerouac, Jack. The Subterraneans. New York: Grove P, 1958.

Wakefield, Dan. New York in the 50's. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1999.