Normally with my blog posts I try to explore some larger
idea in connection to a particular event or symbol in our readings, but I found
the excerpt from Big Sur such an
unpleasant reading that I can’t help but use this post to complain about it.
Seriously, I think I would rather read technical writing than Big Sur!
My main issue with the story is that Jack Kerouac’s unique
writing style is incredibly distracting for me. I had trouble reading more than
a sentence or two at a time before I had to stop and wonder what on earth I
just read. All of the double dashes and nonconventional spellings and missing
commas are distracting enough, but the general tone is the most distracting, to
me. The way Kerouac writes seems almost like a conversation. I’m sure some
people might appreciate that, but not me. If I want to have a conversation with
somebody, I’ll have a conversation with somebody. If I want to read some
literature, I’ll read some literature. To me, they cannot be mixed. Why?
Because I can’t actually have a conversation with the story. It isn’t a
dialogue; it’s a monologue. We’ve all encountered at some point a person who is
an overly aggressive speaker: interested in speaking only about the topics they
want to talk about, won’t let you get a word in anyway, and generally just seem
to talk for the sake of hearing themselves talk rather than actually having a
conversation. To me, that’s exactly how Kerouac’s writing feels. It feels like
he’s just talking at me since he can’t
talk to me, and I don’t particularly
enjoy being talked at.
In the author profile, it mentioned that Kerouac usually
took only three days to six weeks to write a novel. I can definitely believe
that. Feel free to disagree, but it seems to me from this small sample that
Kerouac was able to take advantage of the fact that there will always be people
who just want to read something different,
and who will be enthralled by anything that they come across that deviates from
the norm. Kerouac’s “conversation”-style writing is definitely different, and I
wouldn’t be surprised to learn he just churned out stories with little effort
knowing people would be interested in the style of writing regardless the
substance of the stories. I would be more surprised to discover that he
actually spent time revising his stories.
I think my dislike for the story was compounded by the
setting. Some people like to read about unfamiliar things, thinking “what’s the
point in reading about things I already experience in my own life?” Personally,
I have a poor imagination, so reading about familiar things is much easier for
me and the imagery is much stronger. Seeing “Los Gatos” and “Santa Clara Valley”
in the first paragraph obviously clued me in that the story would take place in
California, and being a loyal, proud Californian, my expectations were probably
higher than usual. Finally, a story that I could easily visualize since it
relied on familiar scenery, and scenery I love to boot. Instead, I got a story
that was harder for me to read than any other I’ve ever encountered. I just
finished reading it before starting this post, and already I honestly can’t
remember a single detail from the story other than somebody named Cody being
involved—that’s how distracting the writing style is for me. I wholeheartedly
hope that Big Sur isn’t going to be
on the next test.
If there are any Kerouac fans in the class, let me know what
I’m missing, where the appeal is, why Kerouac’s writing is so appreciated as to
be included in the Norton Anthology. With as harshly as I just critiqued him, he probably deserves a little defense!
YES.
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