| Jack Kerouac and the innocent eye: belated realizations re vision and visions |
[Oct. 24th, 2009|10:29 am] |
“Why haven’t I seen this before,” take one hundred seven: Jack Kerouac and the America of the innocent eye
Wallace Stevens wrote to somebody, if not verbatim then words to this effect, “Life is an affair of people not of places. but for me life is an affair of places and that is the problem.”
With the thousands of books that have been written about painting, fiction and poetry, surely all this has been thought before, but I’m slow.
First off, we know that we don’t all experience the world the same way, even when we have the same cultural and physical equipment. We fall into types of personality that old-fashioned psychologists define with irritating abbreviations like intuitive, extraverted, introverted, analytical, yada yada. All of which means we start with different internal arrangements of the same possibilities and wishes, dreams and desires.
And we navigate life through the function of selective attention. What we see and overlook depends on a huge number of variables, which we usually express in terms of being bamboozled, deceiving ourselves, seeing what is really there, et cetera: but to cite my old fave insight, we never see truth whole, we never see the world whole. This is obvious, and a truism. We don’t “see,” we put pictures of the world together into stories, one way or another.
So how come it has taken me a lifetime to figure out that Jack Kerouac wrote painterly novels?
Reading Jack Kerouac’s 1947-1954 journals published as Windblown World (fortieth anniversaries do that to you) I was struck with rushes of unwanted emotion from recollecting my own early trips in quest of the America that Kerouac saw, when it hit me. Yes. The America that Kerouac saw. I hadn’t known till discovering the book of Kerouac’s drawings and paintings that he had said that if he hadn’t become a novelist he would have been a painter. (He made the right choice, as with most though not all writers who paint…see my essay on Hermann Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, Kenneth Rexroth, Derek Walcott, et multa alia, in Art Papers a few years back.)
But it explains a lot. Kerouac sees the world as a succession of vivid images and tableaux. The stories are episodic because what counts is the momentary impression, the words spoken by the old hobo, Neal Cassady showing Kerouac all the places he got off the train as a brakeman in California, the one-night stands equivalent to the one-hour visits to the diner, or the night club, or the fleabag hotel with the rust-stained porcelain sink.
The long continuous structured narrative is of no interest whatsoever to him, because it doesn’t have enough vivid visual moments in it.
Now, the only way to live out Kerouac’s vision is to overlook a lot. And I want to go there first, and then end up with a few remarks on Kerouac, Robert Frank’s The Americans, and why the reactions to that book are so revelatory.
People who live by flashes of vision…and I mean “vision” as in seeing real things rather than “seeing things,” though the two overlap…people for whom meaning comes in a succession of vivid visual moments live in webs of seeing and unseeing that are different from people for whom meaning comes in a dry recitation of the facts of the matter as they see them (“facts as they see them”: we won’t go there right now, either), and different again from people for whom meaning comes out of conversation with other people, or extended interactions.
Actually, all of us have all of these tendencies mixed up inside us, as we know and say all the time. But we don’t seem to pay attention to the consequences for daily life.
The division shows up all the time: Facts-of-the-matter-plus-social-interaction types treat their environment as the background to their daily story. Those with enough money hire decorators who buy paintings that match the room. Those with even more money hire decorators who match the room to the paintings. Other types just put together something functional and get on with the story, or the number crunching, or what have you.
Flashes-of-vision or vivid-visual-moment types, on the other hand, focus on the painting to the exclusion of the room, much less the people who happen to be moving through it.
This means, paradoxically, that in the worst cases [* tries to look innocent *] they unsee almost their entire environment. Everything functional exists to be gotten around and ignored as much as possible except when absolutely needed for the job or desire at hand.
Hence the juxtaposition of beauty and unattractive disorder in so many artists’ lives (as distinct from the artists for whom all of life is an artwork…or the perfect balance of the arts-and-letters environments such as Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge)…and we do have studies of some of this, such as a psychological study of the lesser lights of the Beat Generation who constituted the Scene in which Kerouac never felt at home.
The consequences for narrative: see Wallace Stevens, above. Stevens wrote poems that were perceptual moments combined with difficult or whimsical interior monologues, many of which are unreadable for that reason. Novels written on this principle are more readable by those already inclined in this direction and bored by the long narratives of social interaction that most folks call Great Literature. Social-interaction types like Tolstoy; vivid-visual-moments types like Dostoevsky. Guess which one our boy preferred? and most American and Western European novelists and poets overlay the rational-analytical option on the social-interaction or vivid-visual-moment options; you may have an experience, but the raw experience ain’t nothing till you got the experience translated into the machinery of fiction or poetry or theatre or oral storytelling, as anyone who has had to listen to a boring recitation of an interesting event knows from earliest childhood. And of course Kerouac explored structures of narrative obsessionally; he just happened to be using it to look at an America he perceived in brief, separated bursts of looking.
In practice, as we know, in daily life as in literature, everybody pays at least occasional visits to the other possibilities for making one’s way through the world. Those who don’t are the folks who fall into the various contradictory categories of sociopath, the category depending on which of the options is effectively missing from their makeup.
So Kerouac was a natural to write the commentary for Robert Frank’s famous book of photographs. The European photographer taking pictures of 1950s America wasn’t seeing the whole picture either. He was seeing purely visual juxtapositions combined with vivid moments of encounter that implied a whole frame tale. But it would never have occurred to him to try to tell the frame tale or the back story in his photographs, if only because he thought the whole story was already there in front of us.
And Kerouac thought the whole story was right there in the handful of words spoken by the hobo in his novel, or the thoughts he knew had to be in the minds of that awkward newlywed couple in the photograph, or the cute little hatcheck girl or whatever job she had he tells us he wanted to go find and take out.
In practice, Frank’s photographs are open to interpretation precisely because they are vivid visual moments. The America that the social critics think they see in them is imposed on them by social-interaction types arriving with their own mental stories, just as much as Kerouac imposed his own version of the vivid-visual-moment story on the same photos.
And what was really going on was often something else altogether as far as the persons being photographed were concerned, or the persons with whom Kerouac collided on his ecstatic trips across the country en route into the void. But we know already just how many different worlds exist in the same space, depending on what the people present are seeing or not seeing, thinking or failing to think.
Like most vivid-visual-moments types, Kerouac got in trouble as soon as he had to settle in and try to live out a coherent narrative for any length of time. By the time he hit Saint Petersburg with his ailing mama and his latest wife, he was in the phase in which trying to live out the old let’s-go-get-drunk-in-the-Negro-bar experience would get him killed (via the secondary aftereffects of getting the stuffing whopped out of him).
Those of us who knew we would get murdered if we tried stunts like that found more subtle ways of navigating the imaginary parts of real American cities. |
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