Guest Lecture Feb. 16, 2004

An On & Off Beat –

Kerouac’s Beat Etymologies

Bent Sørensen

An On & Off BeatKerouac’s Beat Etymologies

Off-Beat

On Off-Beat

On & Off Beat

An On & Off Beat

On Again – Off Again

An On Again, Off Again Beat

Philament

The ’Off-Beat’ Issue

Call for Papers:

Off the beaten track, ex-centric

Walk the beat: reporters, cops

Beat off: Repel, masturbate

Off the beat, out of rhythm

Abstract

• If one does a search in the MLA database for “off-beat” as a title word, the number of hits is limited to four different entries. This can mean one of two things: Either the notion of “off-beat” is seriously under-theorized and something needs urgently to be done about it; or else the notion of “off-beat” is completely marginal to literary and cultural criticism and should best remain so. This talk proceeds in the belief that the former is closer to the truth and that a venture off the beaten track is always worthwhile, and not merely another exercise in academic beating off. Let us therefore examine the etymologies of “beat” and “off-beat”, and use them for a discussion of Jack Kerouac and his cultural politics and poetics.

Kerouac and Beat

• Originator and namer of Beat Generation

• Beat Daddy of them All

• King of the Beats

• Beat Avatar

Was Kerouac a cool Beat road-tripper, womanizer and drinker of rot-gut wine?

Or - was Kerouac the sensitive writer type, intelligent, rugged, yet handsome?

Or – was Kerouac a Mama's Boy and a pussycat?

The truth lies somewhere between:

Kerouac was an On Again - Off Again Beat…

Etymologies: Beat

• Beat – ’strike repeatedly’

• Root: beatan (occurs in Beowulf)

• Past tense: ’beat’

• In Middle English: beted

• Past participle: ’beaten’

• Occasionally ’beat’ (as in ’dead-beat’)

Off-Beat forms of ’beat’

• ’beatan’

• ’beted’

• ’beaten’

On(e) beat forms of ’beat’

• Infinitive: To beat

• Imperative: Beat (him)

• Present trense: That beats it all

• Past tense: I beat him

• Variant past participle: I’m beat

Etymologies: Off

• Pre-1100: One word for both ’Off’ and ’Of’

• Post-1100: Gradually splits into:

• Adverb: ’off’

• Preposition: ’of’

• Original spelling: Offe

• This is of course an off-beat spelling orthographically

Off-Beat

• 1927: Unaccented beat in music

• 1938: Unusual, unconventional

Jive & Jazz

• 1928: Jive = boasting talk (Louis Armstrong: ’Don’t jive me’)

• 1918: Jazz = empty talk (college slang)• 1913: Jazz = syncopated style of music• 1909: Jazz = name of a ragtime dance• 1897: Ragtime: Music with syncopation• 1597: Syncopation: shifting of accent in

music

Negative to positive connotations• Syncopation: Contraction > Altered beat

• Jazz: Boast > Musical style

• Jive: Boast > Dance > Style of talk

• Off-Beat: Unaccented beat > Cool hipster deviance

This movement in meaning is called: Bricolage

Beat defined

• “More than the feeling of weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind.”

• “You know, this is really a beat generation”• “Man, I’m beat”• “The word “beat” originally meant poor, down

and out, deadbeat, on the bum, sad, sleeping in subways” but now means people who “have a certain new gesture, or attitude, which I can only describe as a new more.”

Beat á la Spengler

• “’Beat’ is the Second Religiousness of Western Civilization as prophesied by Spengler”, and it “always takes place in late civilization stage […] The 2nd Relig. is sublime, it takes place during the coldhearted days of big city skepsis but it is indifferent to that because it is a reappearance of early springtime forms of the culture and as such well-rooted”

Beat to Be-át

• “I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood […] and had a vision of what I must have really meant with “Beat” […] the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific… […] I knew it then”

Etymology of Beatific

• Beatifique

• Beatus

• Beare

• Bé – át

• Beat pronounced with an off-beat becomes Bé –át (ific)

Beat to Beatnik

• -nik

• Beat-nik

• Sputnik

• Nudnik

Beat as vision

• “People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the “avatar” of all this”

• “The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, curious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way”

Hippie, Yippie & A Bippie in the middle

• “I’m a bippie in the middle”

• “This is not a second-religiousness generation but the very opposite, granted, maybe, yes, our vision of the hitch-hiking Negro saint WAS but that only lasted till 1949 or so … the 1950’s began a new sinisterness in America, and now the “Soaring Sixties” is just really a soaring hysteria.”

Old School Catholicism

• “Being a Catholic, I believe in order, tenderness and piety.”

The A-political Blues

• “Oh the beat generation was just a phrase I used in the 1951 written manuscript of On the Road to describe guys like Moriarty who run around the country in cars looking for odd jobs, girlfriends, kicks. It was thereafter picked up by West Coast leftist groups and turned into meaning like “beat mutiny” and “beat insurrection” and all that nonsense; they just wanted some youth movement to grab onto for their own political and social purposes. I had nothing to do with any of that.”

The King abdicates• Paradoxically, for a writer who made the open

American road his “beat”, he preferred to stay at home with his beloved Memêre, and in the 1960s he rarely went on the road even to lecture or give readings

• By the time of his death his “beat” had extended to cover all of America and most of the world, as youngsters used On the Road literally as a roadmap for their search, but Kerouac himself had long since abdicated as King of the Road as well as King of the Beats.