Dr. Sax: a book I must read

[stilltrucking]

FIVE THE MEMORY AND DREAM OF SPONTANEITY IN DR.
SAX………………………………………………………..…….166

Typical of Kerouac’s critics of the time, the reviewers of Dr. Sax would not agree with his assessment that the novel is his “greatest.” The New York Times rejected the novel as “largely psychopathic … pretentious and unreadable farrago of childhood fantasy play.” There was one positive review from Time magazine based not so much on the novel’s merits as on what the novel did not contain. The reviewer described Dr. Sax as “an elegy to the warm, safe smells of a tenement kitchen and the dark mysteries of a city neighborhood,” but went on to praise it because it didn’t mention “such adult concerns as marijuana, Zen Buddhism, or women” (Letters 1957 230). Ironically enough, Kerouac wrote the novel in a junkie’s bathroom using scraps of toilet paper at times, a place where drugs were not only available but also rampant.

Both reviews show incredulity for Kerouac as a serious writer and a general refusal to piece together the various discourses operating within its experimental voice(s). Perhaps for this reason, as well, neither the general readership nor literary scholarship has paid as much attention to the novel. But Kerouac himself provides remedy to understand the experimental nature of the novel, offering early on that “Memory and dream are intermixed in this mad universe” (Dr. Sax 5).

http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-0 ... au_dis.pdf

[Artguy]

Read it under the covers with a flash light.....things will go bump in the night..........

[stilltrucking]

Thanks kurt, just what I needed to hear.