As will be discussed, the material nature of this literary object goes some way to mitigate the avowed emphasis on oral recovery that marks the Beat text, asserting instead the visual culture of inscription to critical considerations of its writing. The 120ft scroll as such stands both as relic and method for registering Kerouac’s swirling meditation on memory and the re-circulation of events, gathered through his career in a weave of poetry and prose. For this is an enactment rather than representation comprised of an improvised transmission of form, consciousness and exterior world all at once. Parkinson, perhaps unwittingly, conjures the unique material culture of the unrevised typewritten scroll of Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel, On The Road (1957), conferring not only a thematic function but a performative teleology upon the manuscript (fig. Written on a single string of paper, printed on a roll, and moving endlessly from The ideal book by a writer of beat prose would be Not so in prose, the only limits comingįrom the size of the page. Which have weight, and even if each unit weighs the same, the total weight Poetic catalogue, which is by definition one thing after another, moves in blocks Is literally one damned thing after another with no salvation or cease. There are no origins and no end,Īnd the solid page of type without discriminations is the image of life solidlyĬontinuous without discriminations in value, and yet incomplete because it That cannot be concerned with its origins. Release, liberation from fixed categories, hilarity – it is an ongoing prose Syntax of aimlessly continuing pleasure in which all elements are ‘like’. Unpredictable and unfixed, grammatical categories are not relevant.

Negligence-with the ordinary rules of grammatical function, so that noun,Īdjective, and verb interchange roles after all, if the process is endlessly Hence the long sentences,Įndlessly attempting to include the endless, the carelessness-even Unfolding outside and inside the narrator. ‘Into this revery come past and present’, noted Parkinson:īut the revery is chiefly preoccupied with keeping up with the process This was an incisive reception by an established academic whose critical acuity and outspoken political commitment prevailed, in spite of an attempt on his life the same year by an unhinged ex-student who accused him of communist sympathies (his teaching assistant was tragically killed in the attack). In an era more typically given to the tarring and feathering of its authors, Thomas Parkinson wrote admiringly of the Beat Generation in 1961, couching such work in experimental terms as ‘active revery’.

On the road scroll