Chapter 18 - The Essentials of Archival Prose

Summary

This chapter argues that Kerouac’s oeuvre must be reassessed as a unique case of the literary deployment of the archival. “Spontaneous” names the author’s instrument of choice because it serves his goals of leaving a “complete record” behind and becomes the means of (re)capturing the origins – or provenance – of the poetic insight and narrative structure of his innermost memories. Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose method is thus a technique in the service of the most archival of impulses; the wish to record and preserve all experience for posterity. Spontaneous poetics is where provenance meets recording eye. This thirst for capturing the moment is motivated by Kerouac’s passion for origins – not just regarding his own ancestry and French-Canadianness but, as a writer, he further hopes to record the very inception of all epiphanies, emotions, sensations he experiences. In particular, this chapter examines Visions of Cody, in which his archival sensibility is most evident, showing that the novel both embodies the archival character of Kerouac’s novelistic form while simultaneously serving an archival function of preservation.