On the Road, Q2

2. Can you tell Kerouac loved language? Reflect on where in the novel this love-of-language is most evident and explore its impact on the telling of the story.

As fantastic as many older books are, I have learned not to crack their spines with the expectation of brilliant language. Sure, the words of the book may have been groundbreaking when they were published, but by now many authors have recycled those once-original phrases, turning them into well-known clichés.

However, from the first sentence it was evident that 56 years hasn't dulled the vibrance of Kerouac's linguistic passion.

For me, really excellent writing is that which transcends function, that draws attention to itself as language, not just as a symbol to serve a blank purpose of driving plot. Don't get me wrong, I won't stick my nose up at a good plot, but beautiful writing juxtaposes words in new ways that remind us how gorgeous English can be. At this Kerouac passes with flying colors. Without having to flip through a dictionary, his major literary weapon is his recycling of words we use everyday, bringing new light to the ways in which they are beautiful and the ways that they create meaning.

The most direct example of this is his creation of new words by eliminating the spaces between plainer ones. "Heavengoing" (83), "Overanxious" (84), "Sometimeboy" (97), "upjutting" (122), and "honeythighs" (105). Though weaving some metaphor or simile wrapping honey and thighs together would, itself, probably be powerful if made by Kerouac, putting the two words together as if they are one noun suggests that the two words are inseparable. In just one word now he has told us how sweet, and warm, and homey Terry's thighs are, not just in that moment but forever have been.

A similar technique, though a step removed, from actually pasting words together is the elimination of commas in his descriptions. “sad red dusk” (145) and “big clean hard white bed” (14). Again, this brings his adjectives away from a description to a point of coexistence with the noun itself. The bed isn’t a bed that also happens to be big, clean, hard, and white, it is all of these at once, inextricably.

Another way Kerouac does this is through what I guess I can only name as personification, though I don't think a word as fifth-grade-English-class-word-wall can properly describe the new properties and abilities he grants to inanimate objects. Particularly as, often, these properties and abilities are not human ones, my vocabulary is a bit insufficient here. In any case, “Fury spat out of his eyes” (105) and “Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers” (119). It’s when piano chords don’t just ring but roll, when clocks don’t tick but tock (252), when fury spits, that we as readers are rapt with attention. Each new picture he paints is as fresh as his experiences on the road, forcing us to pay attention and dig life right along with Sal and Dean.

When words aren’t descriptive enough for Kerouac (which is, admittedly, not often), he makes excellent use of onomatopoeia. Though, again, that word evokes in me memories of middle school expository CMT writing, Kerouac manages to use the technique without gimmick. He lets the onomatopoeia slip into the rest of the sentence without drawing attention to it with italics or even quotations. “My soul whoopeeing” (13) and “I let out a yahoo” (48). This technique is most fantastic in the sections where he describes jazz. Never before have I been able to understand the sound an author was trying to convey with such clarity, but Kerouac has a knack for capturing trumpet in English letters.

I, like many others on this blog, have been completely ensnared by Kerouac. He has a gift for freeing language from its shackles of cliché, words magnetized by years of use, to make English not a barrier to communicate our thoughts but an art that can give us more meaning than the actuality of what it is describing.