Spontaneous Free Writing

Friedrich Nietzsche would have claimed it is the result of the Apollinian decadence of society. Achebe or any other student of Nigerian post colonialism would have called it the postcolonial hangover. Oswald Spengler would have attributed it to confluence of an oppressive society and an individual's natural instinct to break free and express the inner-self. Kerouac simply called it 'Beat.'

Kerouac and Tutuola both write in respectively tumultuous times in their societies. Kerouac's formative and writing years coincided with the "time of J. Edgar Hoover's industry of lawless demonization; of Senator McCarthy's "One Communist too Many!" harangue to the 1952 Republican Convention, marked by his compulsive giggling; and Congressman Dondero's coupling of innovation to treason in his tirade to the House of Representatives in 1949 ("

Tutuola was writing near the birth of Nigerian independence and was oppressed by the "struggle that exists between the two opposing forces-the colonizers and the colonized." The society that produced Tutuola's work came from a place where "the discourse and cultural codes of the colonizers occupy a place of privilege and control." Tutuola's world was dominated by "the colonial machine" which was "oiled by public, and quite frequently brutal, displays of power and discipline." (Tobias 69)

The conservative societal afflictions foisted upon these writers created a set of rules and power structures that staunched, or at the very least, discouraged imaginative outward growth as a prerogative to the advancement of literature. Kerouac, with whom we have to witness as exhibit one, allowed the decadence and conservatism of society to constrain him to the consummative norms that prevailed in the arts during the period of his first novel draft.

The Town and the City (TC), Kerouac's first and only traditionally structured novel, is inspired heavily by Thomas Wolfeian like prose. Kerouac employs complexly structured sentences and metonymic devices that capture the tension and beauty of the character's surroundings but leaves Kerouac searching anemically to find his natural voice. To write TC, it took Kerouac four years at his mother's kitchen table banging away between long, 'soul-inspiring' walks. Kerouac sadly bought into the Apollinian notion that all things have to be like those that came first-or better said, follow the tried and true form of novels previously published in the canon. (Windblown World) However, as we see in his Selected Letters, Volumes I& II and in Windblown World, Kerouac struggled with these modern constraints of novel form. The constraints gravely wore on his mind and creative genius leaving him striving for something more from his writing. Kerouac's struggle as Nietzsche sees it is "Apollo as the transfiguring genius of the principium individuationis through which alone the redemption in illusion is truly to be obtained" Kerouac must heed "the mystical triumphant cry of Dionysus" and break the spell of 'individuation" which "lies open the Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of things." (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 99)

Tutuola, on the other hand, was railing against a similar set of norms and struggles foisted on him by an external force rather than Kerouac's preconceived internal Apollinian notions. Tutuola's greatest challenges were not the floundering style of colonialism on the eve of Nigeria's national independence but the limitations and variations of his ancestral oral folkloric traditions. As William Ferris reflects in 'Folklore and the African Novelist:'

The Nigerian writer is acutely aware of problems created when one combines oral and literary forms. The two most common problems are that the audience consists of readers rather than listeners and that is difficult to translate oral lore from a native tongue into English. The first problem is basically one of shifting traditional lore from an oral to a literary context and expecting it to continue its function. (Ferris 30)

Not only does Tutuola have to struggle with the task of taking traditional Yoruba folk tales and translating them into a non-indigenous tongue, he has to remain true to the tone and tenor of the original intent of the story. Here Tutuola must at once "transmit and criticize traditional lore," but "he cannot simply reflect the views of his past." Tutuola must essentially toe a fettered line since he is "imposing his own personality on this lore, an act that requires detachment from the material. His separation from the communal audience is essential in assuring him the freedom to manipulate and discuss freely his traditional lore." (30)

With both men struggling with divergent forces and constraints, Tutuola's external and Kerouac's internal, each creative geniuses' art festered under the Apollinian oppressor of their respective society. This Apollinian pustule, to steal a disgustingly apropos image from Tutuola, begged to pop. The Dionysian Bacchanal was imminent:

It purged the individual of those irrational impulses which, when dammed up, gave rise, as they have always done in other cultures, to outbreaks of dancing mania and similar manifestations of collective hysteria; it relieved them by providing them with a ritual outlet. (Dodds 45)

This cathartic redemption of spirit from the throes of oppression breaks down the theory of Nietzsche's principium individuationis, reconnects man with nature, allows him a transvaluation of normal constructs, and thrusts him back into the realm of the metaphysical. Kerouac and Tutuola's lashing out at the substantive constructs of the novel and Yoruban folklore leads them to the edge of the Apollinian and into the realm of the metaphysical. The cosmos into which they now find themselves staring is where we find the creation of new art and literature forms.

The motivating factors that lead each Kerouac and Tutuola into the 'Shakespeare Squad' were as diverse as the societies from which they came. Kerouac, riding the pine for Columbia University's football team after a devastating knee injury, simply stared at his iced knee one February day and decided "I am going to be an artist." (Weinriech 12) Tutuola, almost as instinctively, sat staring as his mid-level governmental secretaries wall one day and out of boredom decided to "sketch down a couple of stories." (Collins 20) As inauspicious as both careers began, their publishing success once again reflects the bifurcation of their literary successes.

Kerouac, after TC, struggled to find a publisher for the 'Scroll'-On the Road was written in a three-week span on a one-hundred and twenty foot roll of taped together rice paper. On the Road, published in 1957, took eight years to find a house. However, Tutuola on a hunch sent a manuscript of The Palm Wine Drinkard to a bookselling firm that specialized in missionary books-he did not intend to become a professional writer. The firm sent back a letter stating they would help him find a publisher and Faber and Faber came forward and published The Palm Wine Drinkard in 1954. (21) Even as seemingly divergent as their careers and societies appeared, prolifically and stylistically Kerouac and Tutuola's works harmonized contrapuntally often finding tenor amongst the voices of the literary establishment and hyper-educated critics that denounced the style of writing they were creating.

When one studies the breadth of Kerouac's literary biographies, the prolific nature and speed with which he created his canon was mind-boggling. Tristessa was written in a hovel by candle light in forty-eight hours. (Weinreich 121) The Subterraneans was written in the attic of Neal Cassady's San Francisco home in three consecutive nights. (Charters 9) The 'Beat' bible, On the Road, the seminal account of the Beat Generation, was written in a Benzedrine binge over a three-week period in 1949 after his first cross country trek with the hip prankster, Neal Cassady. (Hrebeniak 12) The sheer volume and grace of his writing exhibited the Dionysian spirit that enraptured Kerouac and battled against the constraints of the Apollinian. An ocean away, locked away as a mid level government clerk, and bored 'out of his mind', Tutuola was too battling his Apollinian aggressor. The Palm Wine Drinkard, his first novel, took two days to write. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts also only took two days. (Collins 12) With this kind of artistic explosion, one has to imagine a drunken Dionysian muse sitting on a respective shoulder whispering inspiration into a listening ear.

The writing style they employed is not a new phenomenon. Joyce used it for Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses. William Saroyan used it, most notably, in The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. Kerouac even goes as far as to accuse Shakespeare of employing the Spontaneous Prose Method-or 'Bop Prosody' as Allen Ginsberg called the mode. Although Tutuola's writing is not directly called Spontaneous Prose in critical commentary, the methodology and constructs are there. Most importantly, Tutuola's prose most often considered a literary interpretation of the oral tradition may miss the Bop Prosody moniker simply because the number of critics that reviewed his work did so before On the Road found success and Kerouac's spontaneous visions hit the literary presses.

However, reading a few reviews does shed some light on the manner critics reviewed the works. Harold Collins quoting West Indian writer Mercedes Mackay from the journal West Africa says:

"The translation if well known and rather horrific folk stories into ungrammatical and incomprehensible English [much exaggerated, this charge of obscurity] is naturally shocking to an African (or European) who has labored with his grammar and got prizes for essays at school..." Miss Mackay admits that Tutuola's work has the spontaneity essential to good art and she makes a very astute judgment on Tutuola's maverick manner when she says that "a writer that has no grammar just does without; but the flow and the colour and the rhythm remain, even in some comprehension lost." (21)

Taking Miss Mackay's floutingly naïve critique, she does hit o a few of the tenets that would expound the notion Tutuola was writing spontaneously. Kerouac can provide us some of the clues to validate this claim. More suggestive though are the words of Wole Soyinka writing for a small West African student literary magazine.

Tutuola's spontaneous kind of English hit the European critics at their weakest point-boredom with their own language and the usual quest for new titillations. (113)

At the behest of other Beat Generation writers like Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and John Clellon Holmes, Kerouac wrote a list of thirty essentials required to write in his Bop Prosody style. What he created were the Essentials of Spontaneous Prose and Belief & Technique for Modern Prose in a letter to Grove editor, Don Allen, in 1958. Coincidently, Grove Press held the publishing rights to both The Palm Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts-for further Beat Scholarship this coincidence must not be overlooked. To formulate the Belief & Technique of Modern Prose, was Kerouac inspired by Tutuola? Was Kerouac reading the reviews? True he was already thinking and outlining the basic formulations for his wild writing style by 1954 but one does have to wonder. (Selected Letters I)

Tutuola, notoriously shy, in an interview, one of the few he allowed, admitted to interviewer Gerald Moore as quoted by Collins, "he (Gerald Moore) has noticed that Tutuola notifies the reader at the very beginning of the story what the quest is to be: "Tutuola...understands very well that however he may expand or digress in the body of his story, he must introduce us to the main plot at once." (34) This method of telling the reader what Tutuola is about to write about fits snuggly into Kerouac's sixteenth essential: "The Jewel Center of interest is the eye within the eye." (Charters 59) The jewel center is the idea or concept and the writer must write his way from the inside out--precisely as Tutuola does in his fiction. The beauty of this is the comforting notion that the jewel center coincides perfectly with the oral tradition-once upon a time...

When The Palm Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts won critical acclaim from western readers and scholars, the West African backlash was vehemently negative. As Steven Tobias relates, Anthony West, a critic for The New Yorker reviewed:

"[o]ne catches a glimpse of the very beginning of literature, that moment when writing at last seizes and pins down the myths and letters of an analphabetic culture."

Tobias goes on "although most Western critics praised the book in a similar backhanded fashion for its freewheeling descriptions of exotic characters and situations, they ultimately found it lacking in "true" literary merit." (66) As the saying goes, "Any publicity is good publicity" rather it was a tongue in cheek compliment like West's or not. However, Tutuola's countrymen were not as mindful as Tobias reflects:

African reactions to the book were generally less favorable. Many educated Nigerians were highly incensed to discover that such a 'primitive' book, written by a lowly messenger was being lauded in intellectual circles as the pinnacle of Nigerian culture.

While his compatriots shred Tutuola, he was not alone. In an eerie resemblance, Kerouac was receiving the same duplicitous reviews. Truman Capote, fresh off his In Cold Blood success, touted Kerouac's brand of writing was "not writing, but typing." (Charters 35) However, Norman Mailer confessed, "When I first read On the Road I thought, 'Shit, he did it. He wasn't only writing about it; he was living it." (36)

The confusion and diametric praise was a simple constraint placed upon the Ivory Towers by that handcuffing Socratic beast the Apollinian. While Tutuolaean critics were accusing him of using "broken English showing the effects of his straining to write literate, formal English" or calling his writing "junior clerk English," (Collins 98) Kerouac was pontificating to "remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition." (Charters 59) When the anthropologist John Murra "called Tutuola's English a 'terse, graphic, and personal' kind of 'young English,' (Collins 99) Kerouac was encouraging to "not think of words when you stop but to see the picture better. (Charters 59) The importance of Tutuola's verse:

is not nearly as important to place Tutuola's English in the proper social and usage level as it is to recognize its power and grace. Pritchett suggests some of its compelling power by saying that 'Tutuola's voice is like the beginning of man on earth, man emerging, wounded and growing...' (Collins 99)

As Kerouac would say, "work from middle pithy eye out, swimming in language sea" while "telling the true story of the world through the world in interior monolog." (Charters 59)

Aside from the language and syntax similarities or the spontaneous musings, the stylistic formulas were shockingly similar. The New York Times Square and San Francisco Jazz movements drastically inspired what Ginsberg termed 'Bop Prosody'--Kerouac's writing. Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, and the be-bop movement can be heard in the rhythm and rhyme of Kerouac's work. The Subterraneans, considered by most Kerouacean Scholars the epitome of his Bop Prosody prose "has a measured breath, and timing that is the key to purity of rendition." (Weinreich 43) John Tytell elaborates in Weinreich's Kerouac's Spontaneous Prose, "a passage builds on improvised digressions as jazz does, using what blues players call 'landmarks,' repeated images that help to unify, and scat 'calling' using the voice as an instrument." (131)

Kerouac in addition was not bashful about the influence of jazz on his writing. In fact, he used musical metaphors to enhance his writing style. Kerouac instructs as to the method in the Essentials of Spontaneous Prose:

No periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas-but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)-"measured pauses which are the essentials of our speech"-"divisions of the sounds we hear"-"time and how to note it down." (William Carlos Williams) (Charters 57)

Kerouac coaches here to write like you speak-lose the Apollinian chains of grammar and syntax. Collins categorizes Tutuola's work much like Kerouac professes we should write. Collins states "in syntax or sentence structure any reader would notice the tautologies, syncopations, sentence fragments, and strange idioms. The tautologies are often rather attractive, often sharpen the meaning." (101)

The accusation as to syncopations is most decidedly musical in nature. Kerouac and Tutuola were both relating a story. A tradition. A Folklore. An oral tale. Through the medium of literature, they took the myth of ones tribal pride and the other's life's odyssey and turned the oral tradition into a written tale. Tutuola used the heroes from the stories of his childhood to weave his ghost-enlivened quests into a didactic, folkloric tradition for future generations to learn. Kerouac penned the Vanity of Dulouz to tell his life story--the hero quest of a lost man in the middle of the twentieth century on the brink of nuclear annihilation and a society stale with its own economically infused ennui.

However, this ennui and social stagnation foisted these two into a Dionysian rage. What inspired these Dionysian Bacchanals? What makes two writers separated by the middle passage, facing different oppressive constructs, writing antipodal narratives, and struggling with a literary establishment that does not see the wealth of their contributions architect a post-modern writing style that in actuality and necessity is the 'jewel center' of our respective languages? More importantly, Kerouac's contribution to the canon becomes more evident each year; however, Tutuola's is relegated to graduate level post-colonial classes and a few eccentric, deep readers. How, we must answer, did these two, writing in the same spontaneity of spirit, organically grow out of the oppressive societies that shaped them? What were the influences? Could they, did they, influence each other?

Kerouac and Tutuola were both publishing in the Evergreen Review at the same time. William S. Burroughs, Kerouac's close friend and contemporary, was in Tangiers in 1954 while Tutuola was writing The Palm Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; he most certainly had to come across Tutuola's works. Coincidently, Burroughs too was publishing in the Evergreen Review and most notably the imagery that will characterize Burroughs 1959 Naked Lunch is very mimetic of Tutuola's ghost novels. (Morgan) The key to this mystery is out there. The what-if's are shattering. What if Tutuola is the West African lost Beat? What if he was the influence of Burroughs huminoid centipedes? What a fun ride this research will be?

Works Cited

Charters, Ann, ed. The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Viking Adult, 1992.

Collins, Harold R. Amos Tutuola. New York: Twayne, 1969.

Fox, Robert E. "Tutuola and the Commitment to Tradition." Research in African Literatures Autumn 29 (1998): 203-08.

Hrebeniak, Michael. Action Writing : Jack Kerouac's Wild Form. New York: Southern Illinois UP, 2006.

Kerouac, Jack, and Robert Creeley. Good Blonde and Others. Ed. Donald Allen. New York: Grey Fox P, 1993.

Lindfors, Bernth. "Amos Tutuola: Debts and Assets." Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines 10 (1970): 306-34.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, Incorporated, 1994.

Tobias, Steven. "Amos Tutuola and the Colonial Carnival." Research in African Literatures Summer 30 (1999): 66-74.

Tutuola, Amos. Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. New York: Grove P, 1988.

Weinreich, Regina. Kerouac's Spontaneous Poetics. New York: Westview P, 2002.