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Kerouac, Artaud, and the Baroque Period of the Three Stooges

American life in the 1950s era was famously marked by conservative discourses of consumerism, consensus, conformity, and cold war. Less frequently noted is the fact that these ideologies were challenged by a variety of interrogative, hostile, or downright negational counterparts - or "contravisions," to borrow a term from Stan Brakhage, perhaps the most radical avant-garde filmmaker to emerge during the period (143). Such oppositional currents ranged from the socially skeptical writings of Paul Goodman and David Riesman to far-reaching artistic explorations like those of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk in music, Jackson Pollock and the New York School in painting, Judith Malina and Julian Beck in theater, and Kenneth Anger and Gregory J. Markopoulos in film, among others in sundry fields. Central to this activity was the literature of the Beat Generation. Allen Ginsberg's jazzlike poetry, William S. Burroughs's cut-up texts, and Jack Kerouac's outpourings of spontaneous prose were at once expressions of assertively "individualistic" personalities, explorations of fecund yet officially disregarded aesthetic possibilities, and deliberately chosen sociolinguistic responses to the homogenized tone of "authoritative" literature sanctioned by the academy and/or the bestseller list. To be sure, the Beats were not organized guerrillas recruiting partisans for group assaults on square ideology. Their rebellion took place on the dispersed terrain of scattered individual consciousness, not so much confronting the centers of organized power as ignoring or evading them. Yet this insurrection was no less carefully conceived or passionately pursued for being carried out through a combination of personal adventurism, aesthetic experimentalism, and intellectual eccentricity. It chipped away at dehumanizing norms by interrogating, demystifying, and ridiculing them, anchoring its own key values in the very oddness and unconventionality that rendered the Beats suspect in the eyes of the American mainstream. Focusing specifically on works by Kerouac (1922-69), in many ways the group's most complex and representative member, this essay will use Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of carnivalism to explore the Beat critique of postwar society, emphasizing such key Beat strategies as ambivalent rhetorical tropes and transgressive grotesque-body imagery. Within this context, I will then argue that Kerouac's jazzlike riffs on such seemingly whimsical subjects as a movie actress's photo, an old folk song, and the Hollywood slapstick fantasy exemplified by the Three Stooges share revealing characteristics with the similarly radical assault on 20th-century sociocultural norms launched earlier by Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), the French cultural theorist who called for a "theater of cruelty" that would represent the modern human condition with unprecedented fullness and ferocity. My goal in juxtaposing these figures is to trace an underrecognized thread of socially subversive expression woven through the dense fabric of Western culture in what many think of as the monologized and homogenized years after World War II. Kerouac thought of his work as "spontaneous bop prosody," and used his writing to rediscover in words, memories, and ideas an array of hidden or overlooked contextual meanings buried in the layers of his own consciousness and in the cultural forces surrounding him. This is especially clear in such early works as Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three (1959) and Visions of Cody (written in the early 1950s but not published until 1972, illustrating the uneasy relationship between Kerouac's unconventional style and the book business). Two of Kerouac's most complex achievements, these novels are characterized by an allusiveness, polysemia, and slippage of conventional rationality that exemplify the opposition of Beat writing to the unity and authority of most mainstream expression in the 1950s period. Viewing them from a Bakhtinian perspective, one can describe them as being rooted in the carnivalesque tradition that has mounted a centuries-long challenge to social hierarchy, constructing visions of "life drawn out of its usual rut" and of "'life turned inside out,"the reverse side of the world' ('monde a l'envers')" (Problems 122-26). …