Geoff Dyer

Beat echoes

His ambition, his hunger, what was lost when they were sated – it’s all there in a single frame

Laid out flat, running the length of the exhibition, the original scroll of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road forms the spine of the large Beat Generation show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Even for those familiar with the published version of the manuscript seeing this holy relic — the founding document for all sects of Beat worshippers — is a powerful experience. For about a minute. It’s everything else — the movies, the posters, the paraphernalia — that takes the time and generates an exhibition on such a tremendous scale. But how could it not sprawl? You start with the writers — Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs — and before you know it there’s jazz, Neal Cassady, the Merry Pranksters, acid, you name it.

And there are, of course, a lot of photographs. No literary movement or group generated as many impressive photographs. Burroughs and Ginsberg took a bunch of photographs of themselves and their friends. And Kerouac is assured a cameo role in the larger history of the medium by virtue of the essay he contributed to Robert Frank’s The Americans. Frank’s work — both his photographs and the tedious film Pull My Daisy — is featured in the show and he himself crops up in a number of photographs taken by others. That’s the repeated motif of the exhibition and the movement to which it is devoted: the makers of the documents are themselves documented — often in the process of making their documents. Ensemble photographs featuring the main players are imbued with the conviction that they would become stars in a firmament of their own creation. We have a wealth of documentary evidence of the formation of a myth whose power endures to this day.

But always one comes back to Kerouac.

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