Essentials of Beat Storytelling: Images of Documentation in Jack Kerouac's On the Road and William S. Burrough's The Wild Boys

Abstract

The writings of the self-proclaimed Beat Generation, starting in the late 1940s, bridge, as Robert Holton has noted, postwar “optimism and prosperity” on the one hand, and, on the other, “Cold War tension” and McCarthyism (On the Road: Kerouac‘s Ragged American Journey, 5). Beat Writing also serves to connect—temporally, aesthetically, and politically—the contradictions of American high modernism‘s nostalgia and experimentation with the later, radical questioning of countercultures of the 1960s and of postmodernism. Likewise, while acknowledging “traditional” literary traditions as influences, the Beats were also heavily influenced by the aesthetics of jazz and the blues, as well as the forms and texts of popular and mass culture. Their works formally experiment with replicating these structures in textual form.

Peter Saltsman‘s paper reads the work of two foundational Beat authors, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, through the lens of these experimentations. As Salstman argues, Kerouac and Burroughs sit, in many ways, at the opposite ends of Beat experimentation: Kerouac, the Romantic visionary, trying to capture the essence of the Beat moment (what Kerouac calls “IT”); and Burroughs, the novelist as filmmaker, emphasizing the grotesque realities of the modern world in an attempt to shatter its limits.

-Dr. Jason Haslam