Having finished reading Jack Kerouac’s classic The Subterraneans, one feels as though one has been embraced and punched in the guts at the same time. Harmonious near-poetry one minute, it becomes a phonetic cacophony the next. The book is the on-again off-again love story of Leo and Mardou, San Francisco bohemians in the midst of the beat movement in the 1950s. Told in Kerouac’s trademark style: stream-of-conscious run-ons - a single sentence sometimes taking up the better part of a page, it’s the story of the search for reciprocity in human connection or lack thereof. Kerouac’s wild use of language is apropos to Leo’s hunt to satisfy the soul. His writing is fast and fierce, one feels a rush here and there, like a shark has passed by swimming forward as it must to keep from drowning. That Kerouac can sustain an honest expose in his prose and not sink into more-hip-than-thou verbosity, is remarkable. “…O God the whole host and foolish illusion and entire rigmarole and madness that we erect in the place of onelove, in our sadness – but now with Mardou leaning over me, tired, solemn, somber, capable as she played with the little unshaven uglies of my chin of seeing right through my flesh into my horror and capable of feeling every vibration of pain and futility I could send, as, too, attested by her recognition ‘Are you sincere?’ as the deep-well sounded call from the bottom – ‘Baby, let’s go home.’…”With Kerouac, nothing is finalized, everything is fluid, in motion, coalescing and retreating. The Subterraneans is without a doubt a work of brilliance, but the problem with brilliance is that one is expected to be brilliant consistently from page to page. It may be unfair to expect so much from any writer, any artist, any person, but there it is. Kerouac manages to pull it off more often than not, the inevitable slow-going passages soon followed with lively keepers. Leo after a fight with Mardou...“…both of us actually hysterically smiling and as tho nothing had happened at all and in fact like happy unconcerned people you see in newsreels busy going down the street to their chores and where-go’s and we’re in the same rainy newsreel mystery sad but inside of us (as must then be so inside the puppet filmdolls of screen) the great tumescent turbulent turmoil alliterative as a hammer on the brain bone bag and balls, bang I’m sorry I was ever born…”Kerouac steps about as close to indulgence as one can get and still recover with a semblance of equilibrium.Page after page of wordplay this raw and revealing runs the risk of becoming a sort of self-plagiarism, a denouement at one point in the story can start sounding quite familiar in another when baring the flesh with such wild abandonment. It’s doubtful that one can find a better starting place to get introduced to Beat writing than to read The Subterraneans. Find an edition with Henry Miller’s preface. It’s every bit as good as the book itself.
The inspiration for a stream of conscious prose may derive from jazz music and scat improvisation. Jack Kerouac’s novel, The Subterraneans, is a daring attempt to bring to life such musical inspiration in a literary form. Unfortunately, what does a white urban writer, searching for an audience, know about jazz music and its culture? Jazz musicians are an independent breed and have their own strong philosophy that works well among their peers with face-to-face communication or with music and an audience. Such transcendent art does not always translate well to a more static form like literature. Kerouac, in his own introspective way, seems to believe that his independent searching and youthful manipulation of language can capture something that does not want to be caught. Like his previous novels, Kerouac takes a temporal moment from his own life, changes everybody’s names, and attempts to build up to something important. With “The Subterraneans” it is difficult for anybody to latch on to any importance that may coexist with the author’s attention deficit disorder, literally. The novel is a stream-of-conscious flow of narcissistic rambling that avoids plot development, time constraints, authorial reflection, and to an unknown extent, editing procedures. The main character, Leo Percepied, is infatuated with Mardou Fox. Like actors in an avant-garde movie breaking through the audience’s disbelief, Leo expounds upon his conceptions of self-awareness along with his break from social consciousness that leaves readers wondering how to perceive characters throughout the novel. Like an alternate reality, the novel blends language and experience, but misses any relatable context with readers and the audience.Fortunately for serious literary persons, readers, critics, and academics, “The Subterraneans” is a short novel. Many people, mostly die-hard Kerouac and Beat Generation fans, seem to find something in the novel and are able to construct a comprehensive plot. For poets and readers searching for a challenge, “The Subterraneans” is something worth reading. It may be short on literary and social significance, but its attempt to create an empirical temporal conscious given the constraints of written language is daring and may offer something for bored writers to aspire to. Not so much where the novel falls short, but for what Kerouac was trying to do and where he thought his idea might take him and his audience.
What do You think about The Subterraneans (1994)?
Kerouac's stream of consciousness style is perfect for narrating a jumbled, tangled, thorny love affair with a woman he can't pull himself together enough to keep but nonetheless mourned enough to write a book about, documenting their passionate flame/flame out. Subterraneans was written in three days/nights, and its pacing reflects the rush of ideas Kerouac was having at the time--about this dark skinned woman, about drinking, about jealousy, about the ways these pieces all tore at one another. His tangents never go too far off the rails, and this fever dream of a relationship is made almost tangible by the race of the words recording it and the knowledge that the writer is going to screw it all up in the end. The last two lines of the book are beautiful and crushing.
—Jennifer
I really wanted to like this book. I tried my hardest to understand its unique style, its flowing movements lacking punctuation, and the free-form stream of conciousness. The problem was, I just couldn't. The narrative itself wasn't all that exciting; a lot of getting drunk and scoring with women, but not anything substantial that makes a worthwhile story. I had trouble identifying with the characters or even liking them. They were drunk all the time, driven for nothing in life except sex and sex alone. Nothing but a hedenistic band of eclectic "do-nothings."Even the writing itself was not all that good. The language was dull and lacked description and for long periods at a time meandered off into drug-induced rants that made no real sense to the reader. I found it interesting in a way because I felt like that though these parts were hazy and often unintelligable, it did capture the feeling of being stoned or drunk or both. After reading "On the Road", "The Dharma Bums", and "The Town and The City" I very much had high hopes for this book too. The only problem is that it didn't deliever the raw excitement and adventure of "On the Road" or the self reflective loneliness of "Dharma Bums", or the emotion of "Town and the City". Some people might enjoy it, and I do recommend it for its uniqueness of style, but as a story as a whole it lacks connectivity and direction.
—TC Jones
I am occasionally dizzied or nauseated by the oddest things. Knitting with black yarn, for instance, or the novel "Nausea," of which I could not pass two pages. My reason for getting queasy with this novel, however, requires no exotic explanation. Poor grammar! Perhaps it could be mistaken for poetry in prose. A whirlwind of ideas, a maelstrom of images rushing towards the reader to allow him or her to experience the narrator's emotions and reactions. This approach may have worked, had these emotions and reactions been beyond the superficial. None of the characters seemed motivated by anything beyond sex; it was, in fact, dubitable if even sex motivated them. Had Kerouac written an account of how they lost their toothbrush and found it fallen off the sink, it could hardly be less interesting. We got no sense of what makes the "subterranean" characters themselves; they were just shadowy shapes with alcohol problems. I am not sure where Kerouac wished to go with this book; I am not even sure if he went there. In grammar, plot, and narrative, it was deficient, and dare I say it? Extraordinarily dull.
—Aditi
