A few years ago I was lecturing to a class at Princeton. After the class, a small group of students came up to me to tell me about a workshop that they were taking with one of the best-known fiction writers in America. They were complaining about her lack of pedagogical imagination, assigning them the types of creative writing exercises they had been doing since junior high school. For example, she had them pick their favorite writer and come in the next week with an “original” work in the style of that author. I asked one of the students which author she chose. She answered Jack Kerouac. She then added that the assignment felt meaningless to her because the night before she tried to “get into Kerouac’s head” and scribbled a piece in “his style” to fulfill the assignment. Initially, it occurred to me that for this student to actually write in the style of Kerouac, she would have been better off taking a road trip across the country in a ’48 Buick with the convertible roof down, gulping Benzedrine by the fistful, washing them down with bourbon, all the while typing furiously away on a manual typewriter, going eighty-five miles an hour on a ribbon of desert highway. And, even then, it would have been a completely different experience—not to mention a very different piece of writing—than Kerouac’s.
My mind then drifted to those aspiring painters who fill up the Metropolitan Museum of Art every day, spending hours learning by copying the Old Masters. If it’s good enough for them, why isn’t it good enough for us? The power and usefulness of the act of retyping is invoked by Walter Benjamin, a master copyist himself, in the following passage where he extols the virtue of copying, coincidentally invoking the metaphor of the road:
The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. The airplane passenger see only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands.… Only the copied text commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, the road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of him mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits to its command.1
The idea of being able to physically get inside a text through the act of copying is an appealing one for pedagogy: Perhaps if this student retyped a chunk—or, if she was ambitious, the entirety—of On the Road, she might have understood Kerouac’s style in a way that was bound to stick with her.
After having learned of my proposition about copying, Simon Morris, a British artist, decided to actually retype the original 1951 scroll edition of On the Road, one page a day, on a blog called “Getting Inside Kerouac’s Head.”2 In his introductory post, he wrote, “It’s an amusing anecdote and it occurred to me that it would make an interesting work. It would be interesting to realize this proposition as a work in its own right and in the process to see what I would learn through re-typing Kerouac’s prose.” And so on May 31, 2008, he began: “I first met Neal not long after my father died … ” filling up the page with Kerouac’s first page and ending the blog entry mid-sentence, corresponding with the printed page of On the Road: “which reminded me of my jail problem it is absolutely necessary now to postpone all.” The next blog entry published on June 1 picks up mid-sentence from the preceding day: “those leftover things concerning our personal lovethings and at once begin thinking of specific worklife plans.” He reached page 408 on March 22, 2009, thereby completing the project.
Morris had never read the book before and as he retyped it, he enjoyed reading the narrative unravel. It took him twenty minutes each day, hunting and pecking, to type the four-hundred-word pages. And, true to my hunch, he’s had a relationship to the book far different from the one he’d have if he had merely read it: “I have told several people in an excited manner that ‘this is the most thrilling read/ride of my life.’ Certainly, I have never paid any single book this much attention and having never read Kerouac’s book, the unfolding story is certainly a pleasurable experience—it’s a great read. Not only do I type it up, word for word, each day but I then proofread each page, checking for mistakes before posting it on the blog … so each page is being re-typed and read several times.… But the level of scrutiny that the daily activity has opened up to me in my reading has drawn my attention to certain characteristics in Kerouac’s prose which in my normal reading style I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t have noticed.” Morris echoes Gertrude Stein, who says, “I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading never can do.”3
For example, Morris takes note of Kerouac’s use of hyphens in the text, which he discovered gives the story its flow, drawing parallels with lines on the highway. He also calculated how many times the title phrase “on the road” is used (24 times in the first 104 pages). Morris muses, “In Kerouac’s book, the words ‘on the road’ are chanted like a mantra and their repetition keeps you moving through the text, along the asphalt from East to West.” He’s also gained insight into the way in which Kerouac’s shorthand allows the reader to complete sentences in their head, which has led Morris to chuck in a few words of his own: “When re-typing the following words by Kerouac: ‘The counterman—it was three A.M.—heard us talk about money and offered to give us the hamburgers for free.’ I notice I had added the word ‘for free’ to the end of the sentence and then had to delete my addition. This has happened on more than one occasion. And there is, of course, the possibility that I haven’t caught all my additions and have left some extra words imbedded in Kerouac’s text.” One wonders, then, if this is really a copy or if it in some way couldn’t be construed as an entirely different text, one based on the original. Taking it one step further, one could always write a new text simply by tossing words in as one feels the need to, the way Morris inserted “for free.”
By so doing, Morris shows us that appropriation need not be a mere passing along of information, but, in fact, moving information can inspire a different sort of creativity in the “author,” producing different versions and additions—remixes even—of an existing text. Morris is both reader and writer in the most active sense of the word.
In the 1970s the experimentally inclined language poets proposed a way that the reader could, in fact, become the writer. By atomizing words, across a page, coupled with disrupting normative modes of syntax (putting the words of a sentence in the “wrong” order), they felt that a nonhierarchical linguistic landscape would encourage a reader to reconstruct the text as they saw fit. Fueled by French theorists such as Jacques Derrida, they wanted to demonstrate that the textual field is unstable, comprised of ever-shifting signs and signifiers, thereby unable to be claimed by either author or reader as authoritative. If the reader were able to reconstruct the open text, it would be as (un)stable and as (un)meaningful as the author’s. The end result would be a level playing field for all, debunking the twin myths of both the all-powerful author and the passive reader.
I think that Morris would agree with the language poets about the need to challenge this traditional power dynamic, but he’s going about it in a completely different way, based in mimesis and replication instead of disjunction and deconstruction. It’s about moving information from one place to another completely intact. With very little intervention, the entire reading/writing experience is challenged.
Morris’s undertaking puts into play a game of literary telephone, whereby a text is subject to a remix in ways to which we are more accustomed in the musical world. While Kerouac’s On the Road would remain iconic, dozens of parasitic and paratextual versions could inevitably appear. This is what happened to Elizabeth Alexander’s Obama inaugural poem days after her reading of it, after I asked readers to remix her words.4 An MP3 of her reading was available on WFMU’s “Beware of the Blog,” and, within a week, over fifty wildly disparate versions of the poem appeared, each using her words and voice. One remixer cut up each word of Alexander’s reading and strung them back together alphabetically. Others looped and twisted her poems, making her say the opposite of what she intended; some set to them to music; others recited them verbatim, but in highly unusual voices; a pair of beat-boxing children even took a stab at it. Like Kerouac, Alexander’s status remains iconic, but, instead of an all-powerful author intoning to a sea of listeners, an outpouring of artistic responses was created as an active response. The most uncreative response was entitled, “I Am a Robot” and was simply an unaltered recording of Alexander reading her poem. Is this anything new? Haven’t there always been parodies and remixes, written or spoken, of events large and small? Yes, but never this quickly, democratically, nor this technologically engaged. And the highly mimetic qualities of the many responses—some of which just barely nudged Alexander’s words—showed how deeply ideas of reframing have seeped into the way we think; many of these responses didn’t aim to be wildly “creative” and “original.” Instead, the uncreative and untouched representation of an iconic artifact placed into a new context proved to be creative enough. However, by treating Alexander’s text as fodder for remixing, new types of meaning are created with a wide range of expressions: humor, repetition, détournement, fear, hope.
Likewise, Morris’s retyping would have been a different project altogether before the Web. It’s hard to think of a precedent for such an act. Certainly there were untold numbers of bootlegged and pirated editions of books, of which hours and hours were spent exactly retyping preexisting texts (until the advent of the copying machine), as well as medieval scribes and scriveners of all stripes throughout history. But the fluidity of the digital environment has encouraged and incubated these dormant ideas to fruition as creative/uncreative acts. As I stated in the introduction, the computer encourages the author to mimic its workings where cutting and pasting are integral to the writing process.5
Morris asks, “If Kerouac were alive today, would he be publishing on paper, or blogging or tweeting his way across America?” Perhaps the answer to that can be found in an interview Jackson Pollock conducted in 1951, responding to a question about his controversial method of painting: “My opinion is that new needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements. It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any past culture. Each age finds its own technique.”6 For Morris, it’s the blog: “I’ve probably shifted into reverse—the further forwards I progress on his road from East to West, by the nature of blogs, the further backwards ‘my’ story goes, disjointed, broken up as a daily bulletin.” He likened his readers to passengers joining him on the trip.
Traffic for Morris’s project—in this context, Web traffic—has been light, in spite of conventional wisdom that claims consistent blogging for hundreds of days in a row will generate interest. For the duration of the project and its afterlife as an artifactual blog, Morris has only had a handful commenters/passengers, and, curiously, none of them have been Kerouac’s estate or his business representatives crying foul play for freely republishing a very lucrative artwork. Morris’s work, then, is an anomaly—not a pirated edition worth legally pursing—and, as such, becoming functionless and aestheticized, it can only be a work of art.7
A few months after I finished writing this chapter, a package containing two books arrived in my mailbox from England, both sent to me by Simon Morris. One was the official British edition of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road published by Penguin Modern Classics and the other was a paper edition of Morris’s Getting Inside of Jack Kerouac’s Head. The books look identical: they’re the same size, have the same cover design and typography (the black and white Penguin cover photo of Kerouac and Neal Cassady is mimicked by a black and white image of Morris and his pal, the poet Nick Thurston). The spines, too, are identically designed, except for the fact that the Penguin logo has been replaced by the Information As Material logo (the publisher of the new edition); even the back covers are laid out identically with blurbs, photos, and thumbnails of the author’s previously published works. Inside, both have front-end biographical material as well as introductory essays. At a glance, they could be taken for identical tomes. But that’s where the similarities end.
When you open Morris’s book, the famous first line of On the Road, “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up,” is nowhere to be seen. Instead, the first line is a sentence already in progress: “concert tickets, and the names Jack and Joan and Henri and Vicki, the girl, together with a series of sad jokes and some of his favorite saying such as ‘You can’t teach the old maestro a new tune.’” Of course, the first page of Morris’s book is his final blog entry from his marathon retyping, and so, the end of the first page of Morris’s book is the ending of Kerouac’s scroll, “I think of Neal Cassidy.” The book unfolds this way throughout, progressing backward, page by page (Morris’s first page is numbered 408, his second is 407, etc.) until he reaches the start of Kerouac’s original text.
Having followed Morris’s project online, it was jarring to see a blog-driven project reborn as print. While it’s normal to see print migrate to digital forms (e-books or PDFs for example), it’s rare to encounter Web-native artifacts rendered into dead-tree stock, even more so when you consider that Kerouac’s canonized version is best known for its paper versions (the paper scroll, the paperback). The effect of Morris’s gesture is like seeing a couture dress that’s been mistakenly thrown in the wash with the gym clothes. From paper to Web and back to paper, Kerouac’s text is recognizable as itself, but is somehow shrunken, warped, and misshapen. It’s the same but very much different; it’s Kerouac’s masterpiece run backwards in a mirror.
Morris eloquently sums up the project by claiming “there are more differences than similarities which makes it challenging that the same piece of writing, typed up in a different context, is an entirely new piece of writing.” Yet, when asked how the retyping makes him feel, Morris hesitates: “One would hope for some truly profound response but really there is none. I don’t feel anything at all. A bit like Jack Kerouac’s own journey on the road and into himself in search of something he never really finds.” And then, haltingly, he asks, “Am I losing myself as I ‘uncreatively’ type words that have already been typed in one of literature’s most celebrated acts of spontaneous prose?” and answers, “All I can really say with any certainty is I’ve never spent such a long time with a book or thought about any book as much. When you read a book you are often simultaneously inside and outside of the text. But in this case, I have reflected much more on the process of reading than I would normally when I engage with a text. It’s not only about hitting the same keys as Kerouac in the same order, give or take a few slippages but it’s also about the process of the project.” In the end, he doesn’t know if he’s succeeded in getting inside Kerouac’s head, but it’s clear that he’s succeeded in getting far inside his own head, garnering a great deal of self-awareness as both reader and writer, which, after this experience, he will never be able to take for granted again.