I recently received a copy of Rethinking Kerouac: Afterlives, Continuities, Reappraisals, a new essay collection edited by Erik Mortenson and Tomasz Sawczuk that aims to shine a new light on Jack Kerouac. It is one of the challenges of studying people whose lives and work have been so extensively studied but this book is a useful addition as it does succeed in its goal.

There are 16 essays collected here and divided into three sections:

  1. Rethinking the Writing
  2. Kerouac and the Social
  3. Kerouac’s Influence and Legacy

I will discuss some of the parts of the book that I most enjoyed or found most provocative.

I very much enjoyed the first essay in the book: Matt Theado’s “Reading a Copy of On the Road.” I seem to recall Theado talked about similar ideas in his EBSN presentation from 2021. I cannot remember the specifics of that talk but basically it was about the idea of “texts” and how we think of On the Road, for example, as a single text or book or story or whatever you want to call it, but in fact it is not such a simple matter for it exists and existed in many different forms. This essay takes On the Road as its focus and discusses how the novel was written, edited, and published, and what that means for how we view this book. Theado writes:

What I wanted was a definite, standard, agreed-upon edition of a work by Jack Kerouac titled On the Road. I’m not surprised I didn’t find it. Such a book does not exist.

He goes on to show how Kerouac wrote and rewrote his book, then how he and others have edited it, resulting in significant changes to the story, and even in some cases potential plot holes… Or if not plot holes, exactly, then areas of confusion. He also notes how certain themes are changed by these alterations.

Not all changes to the book resulted in confusion or error, of course. Theado notes a very interesting and quite amusing fix and offers up “a pet theory [with] absolutely no evidence to back it up” about a Linotypist fixing a mistake Kerouac made concerning automotive parts.

There is an essay by Frida Forsgren on Kerouac and painting, for he—like his Beat peers—was a multidisciplinary artist whose creative powers went beyond the written word. This essay details his introduction to painting, talks about certain of his works, and attempts a definition of “Beat art.” This brings in a discussion of the likes of Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, Bruce Conner, and others active in San Francisco in the mid-to-late-fifties. The essay also ties Kerouac’s efforts with visual art to his famous “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” noting how this list of advice can be applied to sketches and paintings. The essay is illustrated with various Kerouac paintings and also a few by other arguably Beat artists.

a section of rethinking kerouac

Brett Sigurdson has a great essay on “Kerouac’s Obscure Experiments in Screenwriting.” He details the links between Kerouac and the world of film. These were “playful experiments,” Sigurdson notes, that tended to mix the high-brow and low-brow. Indeed, that is very much what one would expect from the author of books like Dr. Sax and Visions of Cody. We see Kerouac’s interest in turning the murder of David Kammerer into film material and also a “potboiler” called Christmas in New York, which Sigurdson notes has “emotional schlock” at its heart.

Steven Belletto then digs into that most challenging of topics: “the Fictions of Kerouac’s Non-Fiction.” The essay mostly revolves around Lonesome Traveler and Belletto talks about two versions of an essay, one of which appears in that collection, saying they allow “us to see how Kerouac was conceptualizing the real as unreal.” This is related to Kerouac’s Buddhist studies and Belletto later writes:

we see an abiding theme of Lonesome Traveler, and of the Duluoz Legend in general, that the world is “non-existent,” unreal, a product of our human perceptions, and so to write about this world is to produce simultaneously fiction and non-fiction.

This collection sometimes attempts to relate Kerouac’s novels to contemporary issues and one interesting essay by John Whalen-Bridge is given the provocative title, “Teaching Kerouac in the Time of Trump: An Orwellian Approach to The Dharma Bums.” I like that the title reappropriates “Orwellian” because I’ve always hated that the word possesses the most common meaning rather than, as one might hope, something like “relating to the works of George Orwell.” Here, Whalen-Bridge talks about teaching his Singaporean students The Dharma Bums by first giving them Orwell’s “Why I Write.” (This is freely available through the Orwell Foundation here.)

Talking about “Kerouacian Confusions,” Whalen-Bridge makes the following observations, which I entirely agree with and which has been bugging the hell out of me during the last two years of a research project: Talking about the degree of fictionalisation in Kerouac’s novels and acknowledging that many scholars have assumed them to be quite faithful accounts of reality, he says that “the critic participates rather uncritically in the fantasies celebrated in the text,” adding that “A large body of commentary on Beat writing shares too many qualities with fan fiction.” Bravo.

(I should add, however, that there is a paragraph that implies Kerouac exaggerated Gary Snyder’s sexual appetites in The Dharma Bums. Having recently read Snyder’s unpublished journals from late 1955, I can say that Kerouac did not exaggerate anything and in fact fell wildly short of capturing his pal’s interest in sex. Snyder made Henry Miller look positively Puritan.)

Kurt Hemmer’s essay on Pic is extremely valuable. It is titled “Recovering Jack Kerouac’s Blackface Novel Pic” and makes an effort to not simply condemn—as many have done—what appears to be a quite racist novel, at least from a 21st-century standpoint, but rather to take a more nuanced approach. He calls it “blackface” (as Ryan Mathews did in Beatdom #22) because Kerouac was quite likely writing his own life experiences from the perspective of a young black boy. He notes the 19th-century mystic negro elements and the inauthentic language and naivety, ultimately providing an intelligent, balanced, fair discussion of an issue that most would take for an easy target.

Nancy M. Grace’s essay on “Jack Kerouac and the Language of Populism” is also a valuable discussion. It tackles that most divisive of subjects—Kerouac and his left/right political vacillations. It talks about Kerouac’s father and his racist views, about Kerouac’s own early interest in socialism, and his later slide into crude conservativism. Grace speaks of Kerouac’s “torturous acrobatic feat of identity politics grounded in religious existentialism as he attempted to balance the individual good with the greater good in his quest for what he considered his authentic American self.

I have already mentioned Kerouac and race and indeed this book repeats that particular area of discussion quite a few times but it is raised again in Hassan Melehy’s excellent essay on “Kerouac’s Fellahin Poetics.” This book had unavoidably mentioned Spengler and Decline of the West and the fellaheen/fellahin quite a few times but this essay takes it as the primary focus, exploring Kerouac’s understanding of the term fellaheen and how it differed from Spengler’s. For Spengler, the fellaheen were a sort of absence of culture and creativity but for Kerouac it was rather the opposite:

 Just as Kerouac rewrites the work of literary authors in allusions and explicit references in his novels and poems, he reconfigures this key concept from Spengler as a way of more comprehensively grasping global culture. Though accepting the idea that Western civilization is in decline, Kerouac rather views the fellahin as entirely productive, creative people, the ones who after the fall of the West will usher in the next civilization, whatever form it will take; he sees them as a positive force rather than mere negation.

Melehy argues that Kerouac used racial stereotypes deliberately “as a setup” for exploring other cultures more thoroughly. He says Kerouac “stages these clichés” as a literary method allowing him to then “move past them.” This may sound like rationalisation by a fan, but I think Melehy is right and he makes a good case for this in his essay.

Melehy goes on to talk more about Spengler and Goethe and their impact on Kerouac and his conception of the fellaheen, concluding that:

The fellahin culture he draws on, he affirms, is filled with creative energy, necessitated by the perspective of those who live on the edges of a dominant culture and yet must survive marginalization. His fellahin poetics is not only a source of art and literature but also of a culture that may offer an alternative to the long and violent history of nations and empires.

Simon Warner, who runs the Rock and the Beat Generation Substack, has a good essay on Kerouac’s influence on music. Although Warner is almost certainly the most qualified person to write this, his essay is largely drawn from interviews with people. He speaks with many in the Kerouac and music worlds to investigate just how impactful Kerouac was on later musicians. He counts a quite amazing 450 references to Kerouac in late-20th-century and early-21st-century music. It is a wide-ranging essay that talks about sexism and race and cancel culture.

I enjoyed Ronna C. Johnson’s essay on Kerouac as an “American Avatar.” It begins with a great observation: “He has never been a writer who has evoked neutral responses” and that he has become an “ideological target.” She speaks of his “dubious transnationalism,” suggesting instead that recent focus on Kerouac’s European interests detract from the fact that those cultures “did not—and could not—have actuated his artistic emergence and character.” She goes on to call him “the personification of America” and “perhaps the final such twentieth-century American writer, as expatriation and the postmodern blurring of cultural and national boundaries relocated and reoriented many of his peers and successors.”

Finally, I really appreciated Michael Millner’s essay on the Kerouac archive at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. He describes this fascinating collection and then discusses how to bridge the gap between the academic and public worlds, both of which quite obviously have an interest in Kerouac. He makes interesting points about academics wanting to “resist seeing Kerouac or any author as a guru, guide, or saint to be celebrated without critique.” The academics may want to guard their archives as the fans want to blindly worship their hero… But perhaps there is a middle way, Millner says: “a public humanities project.”

Overall, I appreciated that this book blended different styles of writing (the very academic and the very readable, for example) and generally aimed at probing new areas of inquiry. Too often, these sorts of books are a hard slog of jargon and circular reasoning, but this was readable and interesting and perceptive. It resisted for the most part from engaging in faddish criticisms but did not avoid difficult discussions. It covered a lot of ground and lived up to the “rethinking” in the title. I believe the book retails for a surprisingly reasonable price, too, unlike most Beat essay collections, so in that regard it is accessible and should appeal to a wide range of folk interested in Kerouac Studies.

A related note: I recently helped put together Beat Spotlight, a publication from the Beat Studies Association. In this latest issue, there is an interview with Erik Mortenson and Tomasz Sawczuk, in which they talk about their new book. Join the BSA if you want to get a free copy.