Jack Kerouac's Essentials of Spontaneous Prose

Jack Kerouac’s Essentials of Spontaneous Prose plays at the Bondi Pavilion as part of the Bondi Feast Festival from July 22-26 2014. By Jessica Bellamy and David Finnigan, directed by Gin Savage.

Jack Kerouac’s Essentials of Spontaneous Prose is a gentle, contemplative, rich piece of theatre. Actually, I’m not entirely sure it’s technically “theatre” per se (but then we would get into a whole debate about what constitutes theatre and there would be definitions and stuff and no one wants that). It’s certainly not theatre in the traditional sense. It’s more akin to a radio play, but it’s not quite that either. I wondered for a while if it would have been best as prose – I think I certainly would have liked to read it, because there’s a lot in it and I’m sure I’ve forgotten a bunch of stuff – but on second thought, I think theatrical conceit added a lot to it. We as audience sit around a pool of water, watching and listening as conversations and snippets of stories ripple across its surface.

One of the stories Scheherazade tells in the Arabian Nights (I think that’s where I remember it from!) is about a man who, entranced by a pool of water, sticks his head into it. While his head is in the water, he lives lifetimes: he conquers cities, defeats dragons, rescues princesses, all that kind of thing. When he removes his head from the water, only a few seconds have passed. (This story was part of Kenneth Slessor’s inspiration for Five Bells, BTW.) It’s easy to imagine that the pool of water in this show is the same kind of pool – full of infinite stories.

In this case, the stories were framed by, or came from, or maybe even emerged in spite of, Jack Kerouac’s guideline for writers, which are being discussed and talked through by two writers sitting in a café. Normally, I would find a show about two writers sitting and talking about writing unbearably self-indulgent – and there is certainly an element of indulgence here – but one of the things I really liked about this show was the way that stories kind of kept crowding their way over the top of the rules for prose. The two writers describe the best way to get close to the story, a kind of monstrous creature which you must submit to. There was one line which described language not as a dress you can pull off but as a tattoo, something imprinted on you, something bound to you. And yet in the midst of this, story is happening anyway without much interference from them – they are distracted by people sitting a few tables away, wondering if they’re getting married or divorced.

There’s a Daoist meditative ritual called zuowang – literally, sitting and forgetting – where you sit and stare into water and forget all your training and education in an effort to learn simply to be, to return to a state of pu (lit. “uncarved block”), which is the natural state of humans. I was reminded irresistibly of this during Jack Kerouac’s Essentials of Spontaneous Prose, staring into the limpid pool that was our theatre. Many of Kerouac’s rules were kind of about this: removing barriers and preconceptions and pretensions to literary technique so that you were able to face the story in a kind of pure state. I don’t think we as audience ever exactly achieve a meditative state – there is way too much to think about in this – but there is something very enchanting about staring into water and letting words bubble over you. It removes a number of the barriers that usually stand between audience and language in the theatre. There seems to be an inherent contradiction in Kerouac’s rules, in that rules in general seem to be figured as a kind of restraint. I think Jack Kerouac’s Essentials of Spontaneous Prose is fascinating in its theatrical realisation of this idea.

Kids Killing Kids

So I reviewed this show over on Australian Stage, and you can read all my thoughts on it there. (Spoilers – I thought it was remarkable.) But there was one point in it that I wanted to expand and riff on a little, because it touches on my own academic area (extremely tangentially, but still).

I’m fascinated by the process of reading/watching/consuming a text in general, and what that means. There’s this assumption you get a lot with popular texts that the readers (term used for ease, though obviously this includes viewers and other consumers) blindly imbibe meaning and mimic the text. The obvious rebuttal to this is the existence of fan culture, which by definition demonstrates an active, critical, and imaginative engagement with a text. It has been argued that fan practice is largely driven by three things:

1)      The symbolic richness of the text

2)      The inherent limitations of the text

3)      The degree to which the text can be appropriated and/or reconstructed by the reader. (Lanier & Schau, 2007, 327)

The fact that Battalia Royale garnered such a huge fan following is something I find completely fascinating, because it is just not something you see in theatre at all. I think this is often to do with the ephemerality of theatre, which speaks to both the second and third points on the list above. The transmedia aspects of Battalia Royale, which had a longer life than the show itself, probably mitigated this (in this sense, it would be interesting to look at its fan practices alongside something like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, or Such Tweet Sorrow, the all-Twitter production of Romeo and Juliet that Mudlark and the RSC did a few years ago). But what is also fascinating – and what the academic in me would love to know more about – is how those who wanted the show shut down conceptualised the fan community. There’s a tendency to treat fans of popular texts as if their reactions are uniform and banal, but the diversity and creativity of fandom belies this. To borrow a phrase, “...the community of fans creates a communal (albeit contentious and contradictory) interpretation in which a large number of potential meanings, directions, and outcomes co-reside” (Hellekson & Busse, 2006, 4). I can understand how seeing audiences cheering at the murder of the high school students is deeply, incredibly, viscerally disturbing – but how is this reconciled with the creative impulse of fan culture, which seeks to constantly renegotiate meaning?

I don’t have any answers to these question – this is very much on the fringe of my area of academic expertise – but these are issues I find so intriguing. There’s an argument that mass culture and popular culture are different entities, mass culture characterised by passive acceptance of a text and its intended meaning and popular culture characterised by active appropriate and reinterpretation, transforming meaning and usage (Lanier & Schau 325). I’m not especially enamoured of this distinction – I don’t think “mass culture” in this sense actually exists – but when thinking about Battalia Royale, it’s quite interesting. Some critics of the show seem to have pigeonholed it in this “mass culture” box, worrying that the audience will blindly imbibe it. The presence of such an active fandom shows, however, that it is clearly “popular culture”: any “intended” meaning it might have had was being constantly renegotiated, both within the fan culture and night after night in performance. I found it so fascinating that the writers were consistently being asked what the political context of the show was, when perhaps that question might have been asked more fruitfully of the fans. Just because an author intends to politicise a text, does not mean that the reader will read it politically, and by the same logic, even if an author intends no political meaning, the reader may well find one – and Battalia Royale seems to have been a text which resonated on a political as well as personal level.

This has all been a very long-winded way of saying that I found the sections of Kids Killing Kids dealing with fan culture absolutely fascinating. The way people read, consume, and use texts is so, so interesting – and idiosyncratic, something which is regularly glossed over and which is one of my greatest sources of academic annoyance. If this show ever gets a second season, I would love to hear more from people who saw Battalia Royale as to how the show affected them.