MICHAEL CUTHBERTSON
Arts Writer

I have read few books that speak to me so directly as the road novels of Jack Kerouac.

His writing style, which he dubbed “spontaneous prose,” is purely and simply the voice in his head. To me, Kerouac is the king of transcribing real-time thought. He avoided the bullshit that is “literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition.”

  But this style earned him critics. They mockingly labelled him a typist, not a writer.  Sure enough, the man could type: writing On the Road in just three weeks, all on one single scroll of typewriter paper. 

I should say this feat was also the result of his Benzedrine use, a stimulant the Beatniks used to write under.

    Uniquely, his style is rooted not so much in other literature as the bebop jazz music of his age. Kerouac writes just like a trumpeter improvising one long wild solo.  His ideas fly all over the place but there’s an overriding melody that one can hear.  His paragraphs run on and on, his sentences have about 10 ideas in them and yet it’s fantastic.

    Published in 1957, On the Road was utterly incendiary (and still is). This work arguably triggered the whole counterculture of the sixties. After all, Kerouac’s main thesis is to drop out of society (an argument he gives most compellingly). 

Take his declaration in The Dharma Bums that “colleges are nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity.”Â That kind of stuff really spoke to me in high school and actually caused me to embark on my own cross-country adventure.

    So I took a Greyhound bus clear from Saskatoon to New York City and later out to San Francisco. Along the way I realized you gotta cover this continent by land to get Kerouac, to dig why he’s so mad about life on the road. 

Like him, I travelled for no reason except that cathartic feeling you get when you “Go, go, go.”Â  To me, nothing was better than seeing Canadian Rockies, Redwood forests and finally Californian deserts all passing by me in mere hours. Nothing makes you feel more like you’re conquering the world and life itself than epic land travels, especially that first time you’re far from any sense of home. I was as Kerouac, “somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.”Â I felt road travel was not only a great way to “get your kicks” but also a spiritual journey.

    Kerouac realized in travelling he “no longer had a way to go, but no matter, the road is life.”Â  Along his travels, he found himself absorbed in Buddhism. Really, the Buddha was just like Kerouac. Both were travellers in search of enlightenment. In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac wonders, “Are we fallen angels who didn’t want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?”

This really captures the Buddhist belief of this world as unreality, an idea Kerouac explores throughout his road novels. He wasn’t moved by any events in life, just the perspectives he could have about events.

    A friend once remarked, “Kerouac has a real zest for life,” which is also true. The man loved life, telling us “that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.” Such is the gospel of Kerouac, a gospel without beliefs or goals besides trying to “dig” life as much as possible. He called himself a prophet carrying the single word people need: “Wow!”Â 

Still, Kerouac never glosses over the melancholic aspects of existence.  For the man himself came to be seen as a fairly dark figure. The darkness unravelled as he became more and more of a drunk, a habit that resulted in his premature death at age 47. But don’t let this make Kerouac out to be a tragic figure or something. 

The man had to be a drunk, if only to stay drunk on life. And according to Allen Ginsberg “Jack was never a sloppy drunk,” which is great. Sincerely kids, holding alcohol well is one of the finest qualities a human can cultivate. When Jack got drunk he didn’t stammer on in nonsense.  Instead, his inebriated mind became a fountain from which poetry sprang forth. 

    So you can brand him a drunk, a hobo, a typist and a womanizer, as many have branded him. But really, Jack was just one of the mad ones, “desirous of everything at the same time.”Â