Kerouac: kicks joy darkness

Abstract

Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness Robert Elliot Fox Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness. Ryko RCD, 1997. The Beat Generation currently is enjoying what some might call a renaissance and others might think of as a resurrection—designations that could seem apt, given Jack Kerouac’s persistent and powerful sense of death always awaiting us at the end of our road. But, although Kerouac died in 1969 and Allen Ginsberg just passed away (April, 1997), several of the original figures (William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder) are still with us, and the key Beat literary/philosophical principles also remain influential; thus the Beat Generation’s legacy is not dead—never died, in fact (although there certainly was a period of eclipse in which their presence was overshadowed)—so that resurgence might be the best term to describe the upswing of the Beats at this moment in history, so close to the cusp of the millennium. If I can be forgiven what I believe to be an appropriate pun, things are very upbeat now with regard to a wider acknowledgement of the contributions of the Beat Generation to American literature and American culture more generally. Consider, for example, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition, “Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–65,” or the extensive obituaries for Ginsberg which testify to his status as a trans-generational pop icon. Nostalgia may be a source of this renewed interest for those who remember firsthand the Beats’ original power and sway, while the desire to find a solution to the “X” that has been attached to the current generation of young people may explain the huge interest they appear to have in these “holdovers” from the forties and fifties. Commodity fetishism explains a lot, too—witness the images of Kerouac and Burroughs being used to promote jeans and sneakers. And indeed this marketability of the Beats poses a danger for the proper appreciation of their value. The “cool” image that is foregrounded today as a selling point may render them ultimately as shallow as the stereotyped “beatnik” image which was used by the media in the fifties to make fun of them. Lifestyle is the focus in both instances, and although the Beats certainly influenced the lifestyle of the succeeding counterculture of the sixties, it is their artistic contributions which get overlooked or underplayed in the celebration or condemnation of their lives and personalities. When I first was turned on to the Beats in my early teens by some college students who put the first issues of Evergreen Review in my hands, I was blown away by the apparent freedom of these writers, their sheer exuberance, their daring (a word that now may have lost its meaning when everything is, so to speak, out of the closet, but I’m referring here to a time when Lenny Bruce was busted for saying “fuck” in a nightclub act and great literary works still had to endure prosecution in order to reach the American public—not just Ginsberg’s Howl or Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer but D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to mention three celebrated examples). I was already in love with literature but it was mostly a rich ensemble of tradition, a “classical” art form; with the Beat writers, for the first time in my experience, literature was a living thing, an art in progress, informal and engaging. Yet—perhaps because of the formalism I had been reared on—at the same time that I was captivated and caught up in the rush of on-the-road energy and beatific inspiration and insight, I recognized a great unevenness in Beat writing and the collateral avant-garde—for example, abstract painting. (Jazz I didn’t understand at all then, although it intrigued me; and I guess in those days I thought you really weren’t supposed to understand it. I tried to “dig” it because the Beats did, but what really moved me in those days was rock-‘n’-roll.) My original adulation of the Beats has been tempered a bit over the years, but my respect for them has deepened as well; I’m confirmed in my sense...