ON THE DEATH OF JACK KEROUAC

  [Artifact titled “ON THE DEATH OF JACK KEROUAC” presented in the Jack Kerouac section of the exhibition]

TRANSCRIPT:

Kerouac coined ‘the Beat Generation. He could have named his price on Madison Avenue. He filled a million coffee bars he sold a trillion days. His unconsuming unproducingmantras shook the monetary system to Zurich with ominous portents of change, the Beatniks gave birth to Hippies and Yippies. Governments trembled and fell, senators faltered while their own kids were being busted for pot Hippies being born out from under us to initiate events is rearly acknowledged and especially not by the writer himself who may reject his progeny in horror. Kerouacs On The Road to San Francisco, Paris, Tangier, Afghanistan, Timbuctu. TheBeat Generation and their children, “What was Kerouac like as a person?” “Read his Books.” (And none of that snide ‘I will always remember him slouched overa beer bottle in a 10th Avenue dive’ And I hope nobody drops that on my coffin…(I w shall always remember Old Burroughs knocked out on goof balls and paregoric i his shabby Paris room.’

Putting aside, any pretense, the only thing one can feel about the death ofa friend and associate is the feeling of death. His death and what it silently conveys to you. This feeling can not be put in words since his death is the end of his spoken words.

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While beatniks were alive, they spent their time tapping into their subconscious and delving into their own identity. Whether the methods are productive towards a healthier life or their decisions drove them to death, there must have always been a sense of admiration between beatniks. No document in this exhibition shows this better than “ON THE DEATH OF JACK KEROUAC” by William S. Burroughs. As their relationship soured because of Kerouac’s alcoholism, I assumed that Burroughs’s opinion of Kerouac’s work would have soured as well. The beauty of the Beat Generation is that the participants were not part of a club, clique, or even fit a single niche. This document is evidence that they all believed in the same purpose in life, so their amicable relations did not affect their passion in the arts.

The first lines of the piece do not even recognize that Kerouac died, but instead, describe his legacy at the time of his death. Burroughs decides to start off the piece with an admittance to Kerouac’s genius and legacy that will last longer than his lifetime because Burroughs knows that Kerouac’s untimely death will be an aspect of his life that does not matter as much as his influential writing that made “governments tremble.” Later in the piece, he admits that his untimely death will shroud his legacy in the eyes of people who just saw him as a drunk poet. Burroughs refutes that by revealing that Kerouac’s true personality was contained within the literature that he produced. His entire life was dedicated towards tapping into his own psyche and his drug-infested reputation was the cost of his own progress. This “achieve-at-all-costs” attitude not only dictates their entire life, but it also dictates their legacy.

Burroughs legitimizes the movement by displaying the influence, not only in terms of literary influence, but in terms of the influence that the Beat Generation had on current events. He believed that the spread of free-thinking enabled kids for “being busted with pot.” By seeing their actions on the radio, newspaper, and television, their movement became more homogeneous. The enormity of a counterculture movement that progressed through a means other than word of mouth revolutionized how groups organize each other, with this influence being seen in a larger scale today. The revolutionary thought that a group of people could all have a mentality, separate from the mainstream culture, through the method of pulp fiction novellas made the figureheads of the movement, namely Burroughs, take pride in their influence.

Along with admitting that Kerouac’s true personality only came out through his writing, he states that his suffering to make sure that his personality best came through his writing made it possible for his work to traverse the world. He states this influence over the world to parallel his own adventure of discovering the inner realms of his heart in Into the Wild. Burroughs’s purpose in making such a grandiose comparison is two-headed as he wants to legitimize Kerouac’s actions, methods, and love for literature while also legitimizing the movement as a whole by stating the outreach. At a time when the Beat Generation was becoming the product of the media’s understanding rather than the people’s understanding, Burroughs wanted to make sure that the world knew exactly what Beats thought of each other and their art’s potential to spread its influence across the world.

This piece also gives a glimpse as to how the Beat Generation understood death. Burroughs did not feel remorseful that Kerouac was gone. Instead, Burroughs mostly felt disappointed that Kerouac would not be able to share more of his thoughts, while going deeper into his own subconscious through writing. The progress that now, sadly, will not occur almost makes Burroughs wonder where Kerouac would have gone within his own psyche if he could have had the time to keep on looking. Beatniks believe that their life purpose is to understand themselves as best as they can in their lifetime, so death really does not overwhelm them. Beatniks understand their own emotions so well that a simple death makes them conscious of their emotions but never overwhelmed.

While this composition covers a major event in the Beat Generation, the letter is in the exhibit because it conveys a larger unification between beatniks than what the media commonly portrayed during the time. Burroughs describes the “feeling of death” as whatever “it silently conveys to you.” This implies that to understand the death of a beatnik, or anyone for that matter, one must imitate the beat process of inward thinking through any means necessary. This line makes Ginsberg’s conveyed feeling special to the community that he considers “The Greatest Minds of his Generation.” This line is the reason why this letter is in this exhibit, specifically the area of the exhibit that displayed the community that the beatnik community had within the larger movement of hippies and yippies that also embraced some of their ideals. Each beatnik realized that, through their mutual interest in their own inward thinking, that they have more in common with each other than between two random people.

The artifact discussed the range of the Beat Generation’s influence on the world, while expressing a realization that Kerouac will no longer write. For many in the Beat community, they viewed their own progress in self-realization alongside Kerouac’s progression as a writer. Their idea of who Kerouac was changed after every piece that he released, unchanged from the vision that the media and sometimes Kerouac’s own actions perpetuate. The exhibit included the piece to display the ability for the beatnik community to change and also remain the same because their core values were simple enough that any passionate person could be a beatnik, yet the movement was disconnected enough that their ideals could morph into anything. The self-awareness that the Beat Generation had of its own influence is unique, and the most iconic admission of its own influence being an obituary of its most iconic artist is even more unique.

Written By:

-Pavan Bharadwaj