Guest post by Erik Mortenson & Tomasz Sawczuk
Jack Kerouac is a polarizing figure.
On the one hand, you must admire his dedication to the craft of writing. He is the consummate stylist, concerned with capturing thoughts, feelings, and memories with his inspirational “spontaneous prose.” Reading Kerouac is like listening to a close friend relate the intimate details of their life in a hushed tone of immediacy, carrying the weight of authenticity and vulnerability that is hard to find today. With his jazz-inspired lines that run endlessly on with the rhythm of the spoken word, Kerouac is a beacon for those looking for a way to capture the essence of human experience, to turn the revelation of an event or memory into a present-tense event. He is simply unlike other writers.
The fact that he only spoke a dialect of French until six years of age makes his literary feats all that more impressive. Kerouac’s story is classic. He is the striver, the “local boy made good,” the son of lower-middle-class immigrants whose talent at football carries him from the mill town of Lowell to the glitz of New York City. And in classic American fashion, he throws it all away to live the bohemian life of a writer. What’s not to love? The fact that he succeeds at all of this, travels the world and becomes famous, then grows frustrated and reclusive, only makes the story that much richer.
Yet ask your friends or perform a quick google search and you’ll see that not everyone is happy with Jack Kerouac.
There are good reasons for that. Kerouac celebrates African American life, but for the wrong reasons. His treatment of race is naïve and destined for trouble in our current climate of trigger warnings and cancel culture. And he is not much better with women. Kerouac’s misogyny is palpable, and makes for difficult reading, even for supporters. The confessional nature of his work, and its exuberance, only go so far, leaving many to conclude that Kerouac is a young person’s writer—fine when twenty, but someone to leave behind as maturity grows.
The contributors to Rethinking Kerouac: Afterlives, Continuities, Reappraisals argue for a reassessment of this complex and paradoxical Beat figure. The essays in this volume do not absolve Kerouac for his indiscretions. On the contrary, they address them directly. The result is a volume that, like its title signals, offers a reconsideration of Kerouac, his writing, and his legacy by offering new contexts and theorizations meant to foster an honest appraisal of Kerouac’s achievements, and his failures.
Why care? Because as the editors and authors both argue, Kerouac is not only still important, but his work, even when (or maybe especially when) flawed, offers a revealing look into important issues that still affect us all. Kerouac is still being read. Work buried in the archive is still coming out. And people across the globe are still finding something engaging in his work.
Take, for example, our current political age. Kerouac is typically seen as progressing (or devolving) from a more socialist viewpoint in youth to his later conservative bent. But his politics were complicated, and his negotiation with populism, in all its forms, offers insight into the current MAGA movement in the US as well as various right-wing movements abroad. After all, Kerouac witnessed his father’s populism firsthand, as well as both the jingoism and isolationism in the years leading up to World War II.
Kerouac’s work likewise provides an interesting filter for our digital age. While his work chronicles the importance of presence, of “being there” at the jazz club with friends or riding in the car with fellow travelers, his work has increasingly become utilized in projects exploring mediation and artificial intelligence, as Ross Goodwin’s AI road-trip novel 1 the Road aptly demonstrates. Kerouac, surprisingly perhaps, raises important questions for the digital.
He was also an archivist. Kerouac meticulously collected notes, drafts, games he made as a kid, even the wire carriers he made for his cats throughout his life, a curious counterpoint to a writer known as peripatetic. This not only raises questions about the relationship between memory (Kerouac was known as “Memory Babe” for his prodigious memory) and objects, but it also lets us think about how Kerouac’s archive should itself be used.
It might also come as a surprise that Kerouac was also more than just a prose writer. His Collected Poems, published by the Library of America, runs to over 700 pages. He painted enough to warrant two volumes of his work. And he wrote screenplays both artistically challenging and hopelessly melodramatic. Add to that his published essays and various other writings, and it’s easy to see that his output warrants more attention.
Rethinking Kerouac examines these aspects and more, using them to think not only about how we view (or should view) Kerouac and his work, but what Kerouac might mean more broadly.
In the end, Kerouac’s ability to evoke heated response is an asset to his legacy, forcing readers to make sense of an author incapable and unwilling to fit into neat boxes and tidy categories. The study of Kerouac will always be the study of an author who raises more questions than he answers. Rethinking Kerouac seeks to present Kerouac in all his complexity so readers can make up their own mind as to what to make of the writer, his work, and his legacy going forward.
Is Kerouac a mid-century anachronism? Or might his writing still have something to teach us a half century after his death? The relevancy of Kerouac resides in the fact that we keep asking that those very questions. Understanding which Kerouac we choose and why we choose it is really, in the end, about self-understanding. Kerouac functions as a cipher, and the ways we read him reveal not only our own assumptions and beliefs, but also allow us to redirect our thinking in new and useful ways.
Explore more about Rethinking Kerouac: Afterlives, Continuities, Reappraisals on our website.
Erik Mortenson is a Faculty Member in English at Lake Michigan College in Benton Harbor, Michigan, USA.
Tomasz Sawczuk is Assistant Professor at University of Bialystok, Poland.