"I think you can get enlightened through reading a Jack Kerouac novel"
Wow, David Keenan really gets Kerouac — I’ve never heard anybody communicate the delirious joy of reading Kerouac with such fierce clarity and urgency.
In this episode of The Library of Lazy Thinking, host Glenn Fisher talks with David Keenan about one of Kerouac’s most challenging books, Visions of Cody (which I’ll admit I put aside years ago and haven’t finished). In the middle of the book, there’s a long transcription of some recorded conversations with Neal, which struck me as indulgent at best: Kerouac being lazy and letting his fascination with a tape recorder substitute for writing. Keenan handily convinced me to take a closer look:
There’s none of that cynicism that he’s presented something in order to create an effect. He’s creating the structure in real time in front of you and kind of exposing the scaffolding behind it. And he does it so wonderfully in Visions of Cody, so many times.
One of the things I love about Visions of Cody is the way that he will say, well, wait, let me start again. And he will go back and describe that whole scene from another angle yet again. As if there are a million ways of witnessing this one unfolding in time. …
They jump into the tape section where they’re actually recording — it’s him and Cody and Carolyn Cassidy and a few other people, Herbert Huncke, are coming in and out. And even in that, they’re reading some of the text that’s been written previously in the book and discussing it and Cody’s like, “well, why did you describe me having that sort of forlorn face, sort of looking down,” and they obsess over the tiniest little minutia all the way through the book!
The real gift in this episode is a new way to contextualize Kerouac’s disconcerting break from the counterculture in his later years. It doesn’t fully redeem him, but it makes it make sense: it was coming from the same sensitive soul that he bared to us in his books.
Kerouac, in the tradition of James Joyce, was a yes-sayer. Someone who came to say yes. And that’s the hardest challenge. And I think that’s what broke Kerouac’s heart in the end — that he was hijacked by people who were activists. People who wanted to say, “only once this is solved will we be able to live in heaven”. Whereas Kerouac said we’re living in heaven, alongside the gift of suffering.
Apple Podcasts: The Library of Lazy Thinking Podcast: David Keenan on Visions of Cody, Jan 16, 2025