This chapter focuses on Kerouac’s epic “Duluoz Legend,” a series of autobiographical books that form the core of his oeuvre. These books include seminal works such as On the Road, Visions of Cody, and The Dharma Bums, and although such books can be read outside the context of the Duluoz Legend, Kerouac saw them as pieces of “one enormous comedy.” This chapter focuses on the Duluoz Legend as a whole, exploring: 1) how the idea of writing a series of autobiographical books “on the run” occurred to Kerouac; 2) how the books comprising the Legend are related; 3) the different literary models for the Legend, with particular attention to the example of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; 5) the various prose styles in the Legend; and 6) how to read the Legend as a record of both Kerouac’s evolving consciousness and the events of his life.

The usual view of Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose is that it is a matter of writing fast without reflection, and the story of Kerouac drafting On the Road in April 1951 by typing/composing the whole novel onto a roll of paper in a three-week marathon presumably legitimizes this view. However, this chapter argues that we should understand Spontaneous Prose as a reinvention of textuality rather than simply a matter of writing fast and without reflection, which in turn allows us to understand Kerouac’s responsiveness to modern media (film and analogue recording in particular) to the paradigm of conventional print textuality, bringing into view his development of what might be termed “post-print textuality” in even his seemingly more conventionally written novels. Ultimately, this chapter shows that Kerouac’s experiments with textuality rewrote the standards by which “good literature” in the postwar era was measured.

This chapter examines a central motif that runs throughout Kerouac’s corpus – the desire to capture the events of the past in a literary form that lends them affective force in the present. In novels like Doctor Sax, among many others, Kerouac relied on Spontaneous Prose to infuse the earlier occurrences of his life with renewed vigor and immediacy, resulting in works that challenge the more staid narrative styles of memoir or autobiography. At his best, Kerouac was able to make the past “come alive” again in the present and this sort of intensity has been one of the major reasons for the interest in his work as well as for its longevity. But despite this success, Kerouac’s attempts at writing memory are continually subject to intrusion, indecision, and uncertainty. This chapter shows that Kerouac’s attempts to record memory in a form that retains intensity across time provide insight not only into his literary method, but allow us to reconsider more generally how the events of the past can be usefully brought into the present, and the stakes involved in doing so.

Kerouac considered Visions of Cody his masterpiece. A strange, highly complex work, it is both a radical reimagining and rewriting of some central motifs and characters found in On the Road, and a showcase for Kerouac’s varied theories of writing. If On the Road is “about” the relationship between two friends, a writer and a raconteur, Visions of Cody is about how to best represent this relationship, and so becomes in turn “about” the nature of the writer’s consciousness and his ability to represent or not “the real.” Given such preoccupations, Visions of Cody more closely resembles postmodern metafiction than it does On the Road. This chapter reads it in light of its metafictional experimentations and explorations. In Visions of Cody, Kerouac strives to get down what “actually happened” by turning to sketching, Spontaneous Prose, and even tape recording and transcribing lengthy conversations between him and Neal Cassady. Ultimately, this chapter shows, by reading Visions of Cody as metafiction, we can see how Kerouac created new possibilities and directions for postwar avant-garde writing.

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.