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dous," "crazy," "mad," "wild," and perhaps
it's more than just mad or crazy or wild, it becomes "really
"really crazy" or "really wild." (All quantities in excess of three,
dentally, are subsumed under the rubric "innumerable," a word
innumerable times in
On the Road
but not so innumerably in
The
terraneans.)
The same poverty of resources is apparent in those
where Kerouac tries to handle a situation involving even slightly
plicated feelings. His usual tactic is to run for cover behind cliche
vague signals to the reader. For instance: "I looked at him;
my
were watering with embarrassment and tears. Still he stared at me.
his eyes were blank and looking through me. . . . Something clicked
both of us. In me it was suddenly concern for a man who was
younger than I, five years, and whose fate was wound with mine
the passage of the recent years; in him it was a matter that I
ascertain only from what he did afterward."
If
you can ascertain
this is all about, either beforehand, during, or afterward, you are
no square.
In keeping with its populistic bias, the style of
On the Rocul
folksy and lyrical. The prose of
The Subterraneans,
on the other
sounds like an inept parody of Faulkner at his worst, the main
being that Faulkner usually produces bad writing out of an
to inflate the commonplace while Kerouac gets into trouble by
"spontaneity." Strictly speaking, spontaneity is a quality of feeling,
of writing: when we call a piece of writing spontaneous, we are rpo',."_
ing our impression that the author hit upon the right words
sweating, that no "art" and no calculation entered into the picture,
his feelings seem to have spoken themselves, seem to have sprouted
tongue at the moment of composition. Kerouac apparently thinks
spontaneity is a matter of saying whatever comes into your head,
any order you happen to feel like saying it. It isn't the
right
words
wants (even if he knows what they might be), but the first words,
at any rate the words that most obviously announce themselves as
ing from emotion rather than cerebration, as
coming
from "life"
than "literature," from the guts rather than the brain. (The brain,
member, is the angel of death. ) But writing that springs easily
"spontaneously" out of strong feelings is
neuer
vague; it always
has
quality of sharpness and precision because it
is
in the nature of
feelings to be aroused by specific objects. The notion that a
generalized, and unrelenting enthusiasm is the mark of great serlsitivit.
and responsiveness is utterly fantastic, an idea that comes from
drunkenness or drug-addiction as the state of perfect emotional
The effect of such enthusiasm is actually to wipe out the world
