On the Road: A selection of critical articles

 

Hicks, Jack. "Jack Kerouac: Overview." Reference Guide to American Literature. Ed. Jim Kamp. 3rd ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994. Literature Resource Center. Gale. NEW YORK UNIV. 29 Sept. 2008
http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:15610/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=new64731

Along with Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and their compatriots, Jack Kerouac was an unlikely cultural hero. Each, in his own very different way, was a thread in the vast social ethnic called the United States. Kerouac was rooted more than most in a traditional American mythos. Raised in a working-class Catholic family in Lowell, Massachusetts, given to normal boyhood fantasies of early greatness as a football star (he very nearly recognized them in his brief stay at Columbia University), he later became the leading prose writer of the Beat movement. His group and its substantial youthful following sparked a cultural renaissance in the mid-century United States—in literature, music, painting, and the larger realms of society and politics—that will not soon be forgotten.

Kerouac's favorite early nickname was "memory babe," suggestive of his own prodigious memory and the accompanying later desire to preserve, in a weakly fictionalized pickle, the experiences of childhood and youth in Lowell, his days on the road in the heart of America, and particularly his friends and exploits along the way. From his first and most conventional work, The Town and the City, he sought to preserve in their essences: himself (as Peter Martin, Sal Paradise, and Jack Duluoz), Snyder (as Japhy Ryder), Ginsberg (as Carlo Marx and Irwin Garden), Burroughs (as Old Bull Lee and Bull Hubbard), and Neal Cassady (as Dean Moriarity and Cody Pomeray). He had hoped, in later life, to collect his works—uniformly bound as multi-volumes of a single gigantic work, with real names and places restored.

Kerouac, the man and the writer, represented a revitalization of the romantic spirit in America. He idealized a return to a more essential and authentic life and intense existence in the present, be it in the streets of his fictional Lowell (The Town and the City, Doctor Sax), along the streams and fire trails of his fictional Oregon (The Dharma Bums), in the barrios of his fictional California and Mexico (On the Road, Big Sur, Mexico City Blues), or in subterranean clubs of New York, Denver, San Francisco, and points along the way. His biographers, particularly Ann Charters and Charles Marcus, document his own fierce and often troubled individualism, recurrent optimism, and reverence for sentient life, and the tragedy of his later years—virtually alone in Florida and finally Lowell.

Kerouac's work depicted both the ideals of the "hot" beats—those like Neal Cassady who burned their lives as filaments in a quest for "IT!," "Kicks," pure ecstatic existence in what Norman Mailer calls "the enormous present"—and the "cool" beats—Gary Snyder and kindred spirits who sought a return to essence in the more Eastern detached, ascetic realms of Zen and allied philosophies. A keynote of his fiction and poetry is the notion that the act of creating literature is in itself a performance, an authentic act testifying to intensely felt experience. (We should recall the great popularity of poetry as a declaimed form, a song as well as a text, often combined with jazz, during the Beat years.) Thus Kerouac's work rarely responds well to the techniques of close textual reading. He claimed to have written On the Road "at white heat" in several weeks on an unbroken roll of teletype paper; his later work was rarely revised, very loose in form, episodic and lyrical at best, improvised like the jazz the Beats so admired, given to humor and nostalgia and the crests and valleys of romantic fiction.

Like many of his fellow Beats (a predominantly masculine group), Kerouac was widely lauded and damned—in his own day and in the present. Like Burroughs and Cassady and Ginsberg, Kerouac lived his life as a kind of work of art, an action painting, a jazz riff. Their experiments in sexuality, with drugs, with the many and often frightening potentialities of psychic and social order and disorder, their bold and often naive desires to re-awaken dormant chords in American life and writing—these have rarely been met with balanced opinions. And Kerouac, as the central figure of the most well-defined literary movement in 20th-century America, like most truly revolutionary figures, found no final peace in his life and will not soon rest easily in mass thought or literary history.

Source Citation:Hicks, Jack. "Jack Kerouac: Overview." Reference Guide to American Literature. Ed. Jim Kamp. 3rd ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994. Literature Resource Center. Gale. NEW YORK UNIV. 29 Sept. 2008

 

 

Kohl, Judith C. "Jack Kerouac: Overview." Contemporary Popular Writers. Ed. Dave Mote. Detroit: St. James Press, 1997. Literature Resource Center. Gale. NEW YORK UNIV. 29 Sept. 2008
http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:15610/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=new64731

Having coined the word "beat," Jack Kerouac defined the Beat Generation for the Random House Dictionary as "members of the generation that came of age after WWII, who, supposedly as a result of disillusionment stemming from the Cold War, espouse mystical detachment and relaxation of social and sexual tensions." For most, Jean-Louis Lebrid de Kerouac is the quintessential Beat, the "poet of the pads," the "bard of the bebops," and his novel On The Road (1957) is the quintessential record of that counterculture.

Churned out in three weeks (according to one source), On the Road is a roman a clef recounting the adventures of Sal Paradise (a.k.a. Kerouac), Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsberg), Old Bull Lee (William Burroughs), and especially Dean Moriarty (Kerouac's life-transforming friend, Neal Cassady). So seductive were the compulsive continental road trips, the jazz, and the experiments with sex and drugs that the novel became the back-pocket bible for restless late-1950s youth. Sven Birkerts claims that even in 1968, it "could not have felt more present tense."

Despite fans' adulation making the novel a bestseller and Gilbert Millstein calling it "a major novel," dismissive early criticism saw only the high-energy, Bohemian lifestyle, labeling it an immoral "sideshow." Critics, however, now look at Kerouac and his novels in new ways; they read for his descriptions and use of women, jazz, marginalized groups, and particularly his "spontaneous prose," or the exhausting, confessional, high-speed writing Kerouac developed as a way to capture his careening consciousness.

Multiculturalism also calls for a fresh reading. According to Ann Charters, Kerouac's books, arranged chronologically rather than in order of composition, tell the story of a life "deeply marked by the different cultural experience of his [never assimilated] French Canadian family." Kerouac called his Proustian sequence "The Legend of Dulouz"; he was "Dulouz" (the "louse").

Kerouac's first published novel, The Town and the City (1950), dramatizes an idyllic New England immigrant life shattered by war and a move to the city. At story's end, the favored son takes to the road. Despite cool reception of his first attempt, Kerouac feverishly produced 12 books between 1951-1957, many of which were at first considered unpublishable.

On The Road was followed by two other "Beat" novels. The Subterraneans (1958), spontaneously written in three days in 1953, immediately became a poorly conceived 1960 movie. The Dharma Bums (1958), written in ten days and set in 1955-56 when Kerouac was deep into Buddhism, introduces Japhy Ryder (the poet Gary Snyder), who prophetically calls for "a great rucksack revolution" anticipating, as Joan Goldsworthy points out, the 1960s hippies.

Other novels fictionalize Kerouac's earlier life in a French-Canadian community in Lowell, Massachusetts. Visions of Gerard (1963) tenderly honors his older brother Gerard and the emotional impact of his 1926 death. Doctor Sax (1959), which combines Kerouac's mother's strong Quebec Catholicism, youthful fantasies nourished by pulp fiction, and idealized memories, is a valuable document about French-Canadian acculturation. Two others show a young man's partially successful struggle to break from his immigrant background: Maggie Cassidy (1959) records his high school football career and love for an Irish girl, while Vanity of Dulouz (1968) covers his leaving home for college and the city.

To these and subsequent works critics remained hostile, despite Ann Charters' evaluation that the above novels are "some of his strongest and most original spontaneous extended narrative." In them, French Canadian critics see Kerouac seeking a balance between his family's marginal status and his personal desire for participation in American life. He never lost sight of his immigrant heritage. As late as 1965 he traveled to France in search of his ancestry. He immediately fictionalized the journey in Sartori in Paris (1966).

Other novels in the autobiographical "Dulouz Legend" include Tristessa (1960), about his 1955 Mexico City affair with a morphine-addicted prostitute, andDesolation Angels (1965) which includes the group's famous trip to visit Burroughs in Tangier. The Big Sur (1962) account of a previous summer's alcoholic madness could only have reinforced the critics' distaste for Kerouac's lifestyle.

Reevaluation, however, strengthened with the posthumous republication of the complete Visions of Cody (1960), a reworking of On The Road, which Aaron Latham reassessed as "The Huckleberry Finn of the mid-20th century." Others attribute Kerouac's work with language as a "liberating influence" on authors such as Ken Kesey, Thomas Pynchon, Bob Dylan, and Hunter S. Thompson. Finally, in 1991, On The Road was republished as an American "classic."

 

 

Holton, Robert. "Kerouac among the Fellahin: On the Road to the Postmodern." Modern Fiction Studies. 41.2 (1995,Summer) 265-283. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Linda Pavlovski and Scott T. Darga. Vol. 117. Detroit: Gale Group, 2002. 265-283. Literature Resource Center. Gale. NEW YORK UNIV. 29 Sept. 2008
http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:15610/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=new64731>.

We need studies that analyze the strategic use of black characters to define the goals and enhance the qualities of white characters. Such studies will reveal the process of establishing others ... so as to ease and to order external and internal chaos. Such studies will reveal the process by which it is made possible to explore and penetrate one's own body in the guise of the sexuality, vulnerability, and anarchy of the other.--Toni Morrison (52-53)"It's the world," said Dean. "My God!" he cried, slapping the wheel. "It's the world! We can go right on to South America if the road goes on. Think of it! Son-of-a-bitch! Gawd-damn!"--(On the RoadOn the Road 277)
1.

During the early postwar era, the pressures to conformity in middle-class white American culture were enormous, and it should come as no surprise that a reaction against that conformity--the Beat Generation--should arise and attain notoriety. In some ways this response may now seem shortsighted or dated, yet there are nonetheless aspects that remain contemporary, especially in the light of recent discussions of postmodernism:1 one of those is the attempt to rethink the white American male subject in relation to the racial diversity of the nation. While a sense of racial alterity had long been a central topic of white American literature--examples from Freneau to Faulkner come to mind--one can argue that in Kerouac and the Beats a quite different manifestation of this American preoccupation appears. In Kerouac's Beat classic On the Road there is, on one hand, the expression of a radical desire to challenge the existing social order through a foregrounding of the conventions and limitations of racial identity; and, on the other hand, there is a misrecognition of those conventions and limitations so profound as to justify the claim that ultimately On the Road legitimates as much as it challenges the master narratives that postmodernism seeks to undo.2

As a young writer, Kerouac attempted to escape from the constraints of the bourgeois position which awaited him by seeking out a liberated discursive space in an exploration of American racial heterogeneity. However one assesses its literary strengths and weaknesses, Kerouac's On the Road has had an undeniable impact in ways that very few novels ever do. Enormously successful and influential, it contributed significantly to the alteration of postwar culture's universe of possibilities by making an image of white male subjectivity defined in terms of alienation, rebelliousness, intensity and spontaneity widely accessible--qualities repeatedly associated in the book with America's marginalized racial others. Given the endemic racial prejudice and oppression of the period, there would, however, seem to be a profound paradox entailed in Kerouac's search for freedom in the realm of injustice's victims, a paradox that calls into question the political and aesthetic presuppositions underwriting this strategy.

Alienated from the white mainstream, the Beats found models to emulate in all kinds of excluded groups, most notably perhaps African-Americans. In his influential 1957 essay "The White Negro," Norman Mailer asserted that "the source of Hip is the Negro" (313), adding that "The hipster ... for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro" (315). Allen Ginsberg's classic "Howl" begins with a vision of "the best minds of [his] generation," "dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn" (126). In their virtual deification of jazz greats such as Charlie Parker, the Beats turned away from the aesthetic traditions of white America;3 and in their adoption of a slang based on a style of "hip" African-American speech, they articulated a radically redefined relation both to the dominant white community and to the black community.4 Even Malcolm X commented on this development, observing that during the 1940s "A few of the white men around Harlem ... acted more Negro than the Negroes" (George and Starr 191). While it was not, of course, unheard-of for American whites prior to this to accept the equality of African-Americans, outright emulation was unusual. Furthermore, rather than working for the integration of marginalized peoples into the American mainstream, in their discourse and their behavior the Beats expressed a desire to join the excluded others on the margins--not on the barricades. A peculiar reversal of Frantz Fanon's notion of black skin/white masks, this sense of racial alterity contrasted sharply with prevailing American ideologies.5

Throughout On the Road, Kerouac celebrates America's racial diversity. Mill City, for example, is described as "the only community in America where whites and Negroes lived together voluntarily," and, he adds, "so wild and joyous a place I've never seen since" (60). In California, Sal (Franco-American) and Terry, his Mexican-American lover, eat in a Chinese-American restaurant and spend a pleasant evening with an African-American family she knows (87-89). This passage seems to anticipate Lyotard's description of contemporary culture in which "one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong" (Postmodern 76); but Kerouac's depiction of this postmodern moment seems less depthless than Lyotard's "eclectic degree zero of culture" which is predicated on an evacuation of cultural depth. Whether African-American or Chicano, North American Indian or Asian, the imaginary racial other that Kerouac constructs and sometimes refers to as "the great fellahin peoples of the world" (98) offers him a discursive opening by means of which some of the structures of freedom and necessity that organize his subjects may be inverted. Adapting the term fellahin from Spengler, Kerouac employs it very generally to designate all those peoples--in North America and throughout the world--who appeared to him to be culturally situated outside the structures and categories, the desires and frustrations, of modernity.6 Whatever their own problems, problems of which he seems for the most part unaware, Kerouac's fellahin appeared to exist in a more authentic, more real and vital space beyond the confines of a consumer culture which defined its subjects as those who "consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway ... all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume" (Dharma Bums 78).

For Kerouac, racial difference is conflated with escape from that prison. George and Starr note that this vision from the margins not only accepted difference, it valorized difference: in doing so the Beats were able to "ridicule the authorities, debunk the myths, expose the hypocrises, and, thus, delegitimate the culture of domination" (203-204). This postmodern desire for a heterogeneous, fellahin world, while scandalous at the time, offered the Beats a sense of renewed possibility, of release from conventional white middle-class desires. If this position provided them a vantage point which ultimately proved not only uninhabitable but also insufficiently aware of the real conditions of existence of the dominated groups, it did nevertheless afford for a time a much-needed disruptive critical perspective on the stifling affirmative culture of the period.

In their discussion of Kerouac, Deleuze and Guattari point out the importance of artists who know "how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause flows to circulate. ... They overcome a limit, they shatter a wall" (132-133). And, they continue later, "What matters is to break through the wall" (277). But which wall is the wall? Kerouac, a Deleuzian nomad, at least temporarily deterritorialized, does break through a wall, but other walls stubbornly remain. As Sal watches a sandlot baseball game, for example, he is touched by the peaceful scene: on the field, "heroes of all kinds, white, colored, Mexican, pure Indian." And in the stands a similar mix:

Near me sat an old Negro. ... Next to him was an old white bum; then a Mexican family, then some girls, some boys--all humanity, the lot. ... Across the street Negro families sat on their front steps, talking and looking up at the starry night through the trees and just relaxing in the softness and sometimes watching the game.(180-181)

There is an idyllic, almost utopian quality to this all-American scene, but as Deleuze and Guattari note, cultural revolutionaries like Kerouac who choose the road of cultural flight are rarely able "to complete the process" (133). While the apocalyptic overtones of this postmodern formulation may be open to dispute--what, precisely, would it mean to complete the process?--the estimate of the limits of Kerouac's accomplishment is accurate.

For instance, while celebrations of diversity and difference are frequent in the novel, at times Kerouac attempts further transformations. At one point, Sal Paradise finds himself "wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough. ... I wished I were ... anything but what I was so drearily, a 'white man' disillusioned." He blames his sense of emptiness on the fact that "All my life I'd had white ambitions," and concludes by "wishing I could exchange worlds with the ... Negroes of America" (180). This longing--a sort of fantasized racial version of cross-dressing--tells us little, however, about that other world. A distant and indirect descendant of minstrel show blackface perhaps, a peculiar inversion of the earlier African-American concern with "passing," this desire comes up often in one form or another during the period. "Blackface whiteness," writes David Roediger, most often meant "respectable rowdiness and safe rebellion" (127) rather than any real cultural understanding. And, like the minstrelsy tradition described by Alexander Saxton, Kerouac's evocation of African-American life combines aspects of critique and naive escapism: a "ridicule of upper-class pretensions" (170), argues Saxton, is linked to a fantasy of "moral permissiveness" (171), and a nostalgia for a life of "simplicity and happiness" (173).7While Sal's desire to be black shares none of the overt and sometimes vicious racism of the earlier minstrel show tradition, it does in fact lead here to a revelation of a similarly extreme cultural misrecognition: as he gazes at the African-American family he is filled with a kind of envy for this "life that knows nothing of disappointments and white sorrows'" (181). The suggestion seems to be that African-Americans are insulated from disappointment because they are lacking in aspiration, a notion that can be sustained only at a considerable distance from the actually existing African-American community. Nor could these fantasies of the placid fellahin survive exposure to the African-American literary culture of the time which included Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Chester Himes and Ralph Ellison, writers whose articulations of disappointment and frustration are, to put it mildly, unmistakable.

It is not difficult here to realize the limitations of Kerouac's naive vision; and ultimately his predicament conceals more than it reveals about "the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America" (180). Nor is it hard to predict that his desire to avoid his "white sorrows" by changing racial/cultural worlds will not be realized. The transformation Sal desires is, then, an impossibility based on a misconception: a doubly obstructed road to heterogeneity. For all his desire to be black, the limits of his cross-cultural vision are all too often in evidence.8 Kerouac's ethnic others rarely emerge from a sort of pastoral (or urban-pastoral) simplicity9 and, as Kaja Silverman argues in her study of T. E. Lawrence's somewhat analogous "alignment with a series of Arab figures," this kind of "symbolic and imaginary identification [has] concrete political consequences ... since imaginary identification always carries meanings in excess of its fantasmatic use value" (337). Indeed, in light of the cultural limits of Kerouac's flight, and his eventual retreat to alcohol-fueled right-wing delirium, one might question whether Kerouac's work does not ultimately do far more to confuse the issues than to clarify them, more to augment than to destabilize the reified racial and gender categories of social identity. Still, to dismiss Kerouac entirely would be as simplistic as to elevate him to the level of cult hero, which many hagiographic Kerouac studies continue to do.

2.

Kerouac's deployment of the fellahin registers a concerted move away from at least some of the master narratives constraining early postwar culture. According to Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac took the term fellahin from Spengler's The Decline of the West (Gifford and Lee 38). Originally signifying Arabic peasantry, the term is extended by Spengler to include one of the three types in his historical "morphology of peoples" (169). The first stage, the primitive, refers to the predecessors of the world-historical cultures, the imperial cultures which make up the second term. The fellahin is the third term and refers in part to descendants of the primitives, those groups marginalized by civilization during its ascendancy who remain when a culture, having risen to world dominance, ends its trajectory with a gradual collapse. "[B]etween the primitive and fellah," he writes, "lies the history of the great culture" (362). In the aftermath of civilization, "The residue is the fellah type" (105) which occupies its ruins. Spengler thus sets up an opposition between the "historical peoples, the peoples whose existence is world history" on one hand, and the fellahin on the other, whose lives are post-civilization, posthistorical. Whereas the lives of the former are imbued with the meaning and depth legitimated and guaranteed by the imperial culture, "[l]ife as experienced by ... fellaheen peoples is just ... a planless happening without goal ... wherein occurrences are many, but, in the last analysis, devoid of signification" (170-171).

According to Spengler, a curious thing begins to happen when an imperial culture goes into decline: the intelligentsia, once leading the nation's historic climb from the local and primitive to world significance and imperial dominance, gradually become "the spiritual leaders of the fellaheen" (185). In their rejection of the metanarrative of national destiny, these "cosmopolitan" literary intellectuals too begin to accept that reality is "a planless happening without goal" in which the significance of events is not guaranteed. In their self-conscious relativist recognition that their national narrative or myth is in fact only one among many, neither unique nor divinely ordained, their existence becomes a "being without depth" (172-173). As the numbers of such intellectuals--"world-improvers" Spengler calls them dismissively, historical "wasteproducts" (185)--increase, so is the ultimate demise of the culture assured.10Spengler's conservative and pessimistic vision was enormously influential and can be found echoed in many cultural documents of the first half of this century.

Kerouac recognized himself in this description, but with a major difference. The image of the postimperial, postcivilization, postcolonial--indeed postmodern--depthless life of planless happening shared by fellahin and intellectuals that Spengler disparages, Kerouac, at least at the outset of his career, inversely admired and emulated. On the Road details a virtually plotless series of journeys across the continent, occurrences valuable not for their depth of signification but for their immediacy, their sense of thrilling surfaces. And as Fredric Jameson argues, "perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms" is "a new kind of ... depthlessness" (9). Rather than the careful construction of nuanced levels of symbolic resonance which give a multilayered sense of depth to modernist art, Kerouac experimented with what he called the "spontaneous prose method," an attempt to record both the mind's surfaces and America's surfaces on paper as directly and immediately (literally without mediation) as possible.

Kerouac's reversal of Spengler's valuation, if not his teleology, stems from his sense of the relation of surface and depth. The surest way to allow the emergence of the deepest contents of the mind, he argues in "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose," is to transcribe its surfaces as immediately and unobstructedly as possible.11 The great model for such an art form is, of course, the improvisational jazz developed by African-American musicians--further confirmation for Kerouac that the fellahin margin rather than the imperial center is the site of authentic existence and true art. Thus fellahin culture, by virtue of its immediacy, its spontaneity, appears to afford access to a depth that the dominant culture increasingly voids.

Arriving in Cheyenne, for instance, Sal encounters a manifestation of postmodern history we have all become familiar with. The streets are crowded with people: in cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats, they "bustled and whooped on the wooden sidewalks of old Cheyenne." The saloons are crowded and gunshots are ringing out. Alas, it is "Wild West Week": tourists and businessmen are dressed up as cowboys, the guns shoot blanks, and history has become a parody of the past, a consumer spectacle without depth typifying postmodern historicity in one of its most banal forms. Except for one curious and repeated detail: scattered among these postmodern cowboys, the "fat burpers [who] were getting drunker and whooping up louder," are some Native Americans looking "really solemn among the flushed drunken faces ... a lot of Indians, who watched everything with their stony eyes" (33-35). In these, Kerouac's fellahin, there is a suggestion of impenetrable depth wholly absent from the general scene which, Sal says, "was ridiculous: in my first shot at the West I was seeing to what absurd devices it had fallen" (33-35). The fall he speaks of is the collapse of history into depthless postmodern parody. In a curious nearreversal of Spengler then, the fellahin "residue," whose evident alienation is strategically juxtaposed in order to highlight the superficiality of the event and to lend another dimension to Sal's parallel disillusion, seems to possess a kind of historical depth that the postmodern bourgeois subject lacks, and it is this that attracts Kerouac's imagination--if not to sound those depths, at least to reflect them.

One has the sense that there is a finite amount of reality in white America and that it is being consumed too rapidly by the culture industry, whose function it is to transcribe reality into depthless signifiers, simulacra. Soon, perhaps, reality will be exhausted and only empty signifiers such as Wild West Days will remain to remind people of their relation to a past whose specificity will have utterly disappeared.12 This is the transformation of the real into the simulacrum that Baudrillard describes, a process in which the real is lost. It is, as Baudrillard suggests of postmodernity, a world strangely similar to the original but, he adds ironically, "even better" and "more authentic" (23). Kerouac, reacting against this postmodern tendency, locates the "real" in the fellahin, who have not experienced this loss presumably because they never identified with (or were excluded from) the narratives of white dominance that traditionally legitimized white versions of reality. The figure of the fellahin, then, is employed by Kerouac to represent a position that is neither wholly premodern nor wholly postmodern but more accurately extra-modern, thus making available a critical perspective outside the degraded culture of modernity.

The obvious problem with this notion is that it constructs others purely from the point of view of the alienated white male observer and never from the point of view of the others themselves--a fact that is never more apparent than when the privilege of the white subject is explicitly compounded by the privilege of masculinity. In a Mexican brothel, for instance, the necessity of restrained behavior that accompanies white middle-class respectability is transformed into its opposite, a carnivalesque indulgence in transgressive sexuality, alcohol and drug consumption--behavior that Sal associates with the freedom of lowered expectations supposedly experienced by the fellahin. That this space is constructed as freedom from a white male point of view, however, does not mean that it can be understood that way for anyone else, a point that emerges as Sal notes the sadness and despair of the young prostitute whose "awful grief" drives her to outrageous alcoholic consumption, who fixes "poor sunken lost eyes" on him as she begs for money and drinks (289-291). Yet his (un)critical analysis of the situation stops there, leaving her grief as an aesthetic or existential effect rather than one with more definite political or cultural reference. The description of the scene, the frequently noted skin colors of the "girls," place this narrative episode within the now-familiar racial and gender category of Orientalist discourse: Sal compares it to an "Arabian dream ... [including] Ali Baba and the alleys and the courtesans" (289).13 As the white American men leave and the Mexican "girls ... gathered around the car," Sal reflects that they had "left joys and celebrations over hundreds of pesos behind us, and it didn't seem like a bad day's work." This postmodern quester wants the depth of real experience to be there, to be in evidence, but does not sound those fellahin depths himself. As Sal declares giddily elsewhere, "I was rushing through the world without a chance to see it" (205).

Similarly, when Sal and Dean finish a long night of drinking with a visit to the tenement apartment of an African-American man named Walter, they are very impressed by his wife's compliant behavior which contrasts markedly with the resistance to male dominance and irresponsibility articulated earlier that evening by the white women they know. While those white women are dismissed for their very vocal criticism of the men ("It wasn't anything but a sewing circle" [193]), the positive depiction of the black woman stands in marked contrast. She was "the sweetest woman in the world," says Sal, "She never asked Walter where he'd been, what time it was, nothing. ... She never said a word" (203). In fact she never speaks at all, only smiles as they repeatedly wake her up with their drunken comings and goings, and their admiration grows in direct proportion to her silence and submissiveness. As they leave at dawn, Dean remarks, "there's a real woman for you. Never a harsh word, never a complaint. ... This is a man, and that's his castle" (203). In this incident, as in the brothel incident, the multiple layers of dominance and submission--determined by race or gender--remain uninterrogated as Sal and Dean's admiration grows. The reduction to cliché of the significance of this event suggests in fact the degree to which the other is established not in order to investigate the complexity of social relations but precisely to limit that complexity and to act as a shield from it.

It is at least possible, then, that Kerouac locates depth in the ethnic or racial other in an attempt to maintain a distance between the personal and the political rather than traverse it. Unlike questions of race or ethnicity, which could in a sense be addressed from a safer distance, questions of gender seem to pose problems too difficult and too immediately threatening to address. For instance, to explore the depth in marginalized gay experience (with which he was intimately involved) would be to transgress a very powerful masculine taboo. Despite the very autobiographical--almost confessional--content of On the Road, and despite its importance to Kerouac and to a number of his male friends, gay sexuality is largely repressed in the book. One revealing reference occurs when Sal moves from discussing his erotic frustrations with women ("I tried everything in the books to make a girl") to the availability of gay men:

There were plenty of queers. Several times I went to San Fran with my gun and when a queer approached me in a bar john I took out the gun and said, "Eh? Eh? What's that you say?" ... I've never understood why I did that; I knew queers all over the country. It was just the loneliness ... and the fact that I had a gun. I had to show it to someone.(73)

The mixture of an explicit threat of anti-gay violence with barely concealed desire, of the evident phallic imagery of the gun with a denial of understanding, suggests the existence of a complex pattern of attraction and repulsion that Kerouac apparently preferred not to investigate further.14 Similarly, to explore depth in women's experience would be to call into question his own complex and fragile relationship to women, including not only wives and lovers but also his mother (from whom he never managed to separate) and daughter (whom he refused to acknowledge). Gender and sexuality seem frequently to exist in Kerouac's life and work as a site of fear and confusion and his resort to fellahin stereotype in many instances appears as an attempt to ease those fears and reduce those complexities.

The fellahin, in Kerouac, thus becomes the sign of the real, a device which allows him, a white male, a means of reflecting on himself--at times even deflecting the difficulties of selfhood--more than it provides insight into the experience of the marginalized other. Baudrillard speaks of a postmodern sense of "mourning for the real" (46), and Sal's response finally, as always, is sadness, a kind of nostalgia for the vanishing American "real" which increasingly, he feels, can only be located in the fellahin. If, as Jameson posits, "a history lesson is the best cure for nostalgic pathos" (156), this cure by means of exposure to historical depth fails to penetrate the surface of Kerouac's subject. Certainly in Kerouac, with his location of a nostalgia for the real at the sign of the fellahin, the attribution and exploration of depth in women, African-Americans, American Native people, Chicanos and so on could only have been successfully accomplished at the cost of forcing a political dimension to puncture the aestheticizing surface of the postmodern white male subject--a step away from cultural fantasy Kerouac was not interested in taking nor able to take. As Gifford and Lee put it, Kerouac's position "was subversive without being political" (232). Yet this separation of subversion and the political accepts not only a collapse of political resistance, but also of the very depth Kerouac was attempting to preserve.15

Sal's encounter with Terry, a Mexican migrant fruit picker, provides an interesting example of this problem of fellahin depth and postmodern surface. Having been beaten by her husband, she has left him and is heading to Los Angeles to stay with a sister. Her child has been left with her parents, grape-pickers who live in a shack in a vineyard (81-82). Despite the levels of social mediation implied in this brief narrative, Sal accepts it primarily as an aesthetic surface--borrowed in part from Steinbeck to whom he refers (90)--on which he can inscribe his own identity problems. During their time together, there do occur genuine attempts to cross or at least gaze across the ethnic barrier, attempts that recognize the real differences and depths of culture; at other times the situation wholly dissolves into stereotype and cultural fantasy. While picking cotton with her, for example, one of the common American images of fellahin labor, Sal realizes just how arduous it really is and how difficult to make a living at. Yet the responses he has to this and to his fellow workers are notable: The "old Negro couple in the field," for instance, "picked cotton with the same God-blessed patience their grandfathers had practiced in ante-bellum Alabama" (96), remarks Sal, an observation leaving a great deal of history and ideology unpacked. At the end of the day, he proclaims, "I looked up at the sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved." The condescension and cultural distance articulated here collapses on the next page into something even odder. That evening, Sal's desire for the real, for depth of experience, leads him to absorb, as if by osmosis, aspects of another subjectivity: "Sighing like an old Negro cotton-picker, I reclined on the bed and smoked a cigarette" (97). Later, following further osmosis, he uses the phrase "we Mexicans" and adds that the other pickers "thought I was a Mexican, of course; and in a way I am" (97). He does not make it clear exactly in what way that is though, and his summation of the pastoral idyll has a similarly peculiar ring to it: after a few days with Terry and her child in the cottonfields, he declares, "I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be." His dreams have not so much been realized though, as they have been overlaid as depthless cultural stereotypes on the backdrop of his surroundings. A couple of weeks cannot make Sal a "Mexican," or "a man of the earth" any more than it can make him "an old Negro cotton-picker." Rather than offering a renewed sense of the authentic reality, this fascination with the fellahin tends instead to obscure in nostalgia and cliché the real historical conditions of their lives.

3.

There is, toward the end of the novel, an apocalyptic vision of a future which can be taken to frame On the Road. While they travel through Mexico, a powerful sense of cultural difference is manifest as Sal and Dean pass through "[s]trange crossroad towns" and encounter "shawled Indians watching us under hatbrims" (299). As these people reach out their hands, begging for "something they thought civilization could offer," Sal reflects that "they never dreamed the sadness and poor broken disillusion of it. They didn't know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they some day" (299). With a nuclear holocaust, the gap between civilized and fellahin would finally be closed. This is, in a sense, Kerouac's version of the conclusion to modernity as predicted by Spengler--but again with a twist. In Kerouac's rendition, the decline of the west is also a return to a unified source: "For when destruction comes to the world of 'history' and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before, people will still stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know" (281). Albeit tragic, this is the fulfillment of Sal's desire to put an end to his white bourgeois life. Just as they begin there, all Keroauc's roads lead back to the fellahin. In On the Road, the road of modern western history leads inevitably to its own destruction--"bridges and roads" reduced to jumbles--and thence to ultimate union with the fellahin who, in the end, remain nonetheless misrecognized: a signifier of depth remaining unsounded, a unitary term masking a cultural multiplicity, a fantasy of freedom extrapolated from lives of marginalization.

In works such as On The Road, as well as The Subterraneans (in which he recounts a relationship with a woman whom he idealizes as half African-American, half Native American) and Pic (narrated from the point of view of an African-American child) Kerouac seems to be trying very hard--if naïvely--to reach out across boundaries of race and class, but is finally unable to get beyond his dreams of racial and class identity. Ultimately the effect is double: on one hand Kerouac draws the reader's attention toward the lives of marginalized people, to heterogeneous experience. On the other hand his inability to penetrate the stereotypes that frame his cognition of the marginalized other, his aestheticization of subversion, establishes very constricting limits for the understanding of those lives. In his recognition of the heterogeneity of human experience, Kerouac's road to the postmodern, like much contemporary postmodernism, runs alongside a postcolonial highway, but no junction had been constructed which could make available to him a point of view from the margins themselves. As Catharine Stimpson has written, there is much to learn from what the Beats could not say as well as from what they could: "Yet because of what they could not say or imagine, the Beats also caution us that those regulated by taboos, those whom history tightly nets, must speak for themselves. They must form their own communities of naming, and renaming" (392).

Given his retreat into an increasingly outspoken--even paranoid--right wing stance, it would be easy to dismiss Kerouac entirely as a man who in his youth was blinded by his romanticizing of the other and in his maturity was blinded by his fear of change. This would, however, be to overlook the Kerouac who in his life and writing did, for a while at least, challenge some of the orthodox boundaries constricting the categories of social cognition of his time. As a writer whose enormous influence over a (white? male?) generation extended beyond the literary to popular culture as well, Kerouac displays a combination of insight into the compelling need to break down the hegemonic structures of race and ethnicity and blindness to the lived experience of the marginalized people he looked to as a means of breaking them down. Whether one defines the postmodern with Baudrillard as the era of the depthless simulacra, or with Lyotard as the era of the breakdown of the grand metanarratives and the proliferation of heterogeneous discourse communities, or with Deleuze and Guattari as the era of the deterritorialized nomad, Kerouac's work provides a signpost indicating a route to postmodernity. The construction of a network of such roads allowing America's heterogeneous communities to communicate remains an ongoing project.

 

Notes

 

1While postmodernism has developed somewhat autonomously in the realms of literature and philosophy, Kerouac has been an influence both on the American postmodernist fiction of Thomas Pynchon--who remarks on the "centrifugal lure" of On the Road, "a book I still believe is one of the great American novels" (xvi)--and on the French postmodern philosophical theory of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (cited below).

2In her discussion of gender, postmodernism, and the "pervasive misogyny" of the beats, Ellen Friedman has recently argued that Kerouac and the Beats, alienated from modern culture, looked backward to earlier versions of master narratives rather than forward and beyond them. "The master narratives," she maintains, "strangely, seem more alive in the beats' work than they do in works of modernity. They are the context of the beats' rebellion. The beats, in their very opposition, legitimate master narratives" (250).

3As Dick Hebdige notes in his important study of subcultures, "by the mid-50s a new, younger white audience began to see itself reflected darkly in the dangerous, uneven surfaces of contemporary [African-American] avant-garde, despite the fact that the musicians responsible ... deliberately sought to restrict white identification (47).

4Seymour Krim commented at the time that these whites, the Beats, were "pick[ing] up not only the fascinating American-Negro rhythm and notes [of jazz] ... but the spoken language as well." They absorbed the "improvisations and verbal inventions of the Negro" and incorporated them "in their language and in their thinking" (39-40).

5The Beats, writes Barbara Ehrenreich, "were probably the first group of white Americans to believe that 'black is beautiful,' for blacks were, perforce, permanent outsiders, who ... creat[ed] their own language and art" (56). As Hebdige remarks, "This unprecedented convergence of black and white, so aggressively, so unashamedly proclaimed, attracted the inevitable controversy" (47).

6While I recognize that such a vague and general term is of very limited use, if any, in describing so many different cultural formations, I have used it here in order to understand how it functions in Kerouac's discourse. Kerouac writes, for example, of the fellahin as "the basic primitive ... humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world" from Malaya to India to Arabia to Morocco to Mexico to Polynesia to Thailand and so on (280). In the earliest use of the term I am aware of, Kerouac speaks of the music of the international fellahin as "the world beat" (287).

7Although Roediger and Saxton are both discussing the nineteenth century, their general points remain relevant. The most striking example of transracial identification is perhaps John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, although his transformation was motivated by very different factors. Pop music is, of course, rife with this phenomenon: from Elvis (as Alice Walker's "1955" demonstrates) to Vanilla Ice, the imitation of African-American cultural forms animates the scene. An ironic comment on all this can be heard in Lou Reed's "I Want To Be Black."

8Dick Hebdige, for example, writes of the "breathless panegyrics of Jack Kerouac (who carried the idealization of Negro culture to almost ludicrous extremes in his novels)" (47-48). And Simon Frith dismisses the concept of the White Negro with its valorization of the imputed rebelliousness and natural freedom of the African-American as "weirdly racist" (180).

9Pierre Bourdieu asserts that "certain populist exaltations of 'popular culture'" constitute "the 'pastorals' of our epoch." Bourdieu suggests that such genres

offer a sham inversion of dominant values and produce the fiction of a unity of the social world, thereby confirming the dominated in their subordination and the dominant in their superordination. As an inverted celebration of the principles that undergird social hierarchies, the pastoral confers on the dominated a nobility based on their adjustment to their condition and on their submission to the established order.(Invitation 83)

10Such identification with the most dominated social group is an instance of the social dynamic Pierre Bourdieu describes whereby artists and intellectuals who have not found (or perhaps not sought) bourgeois acceptance tend to feel an affinity with other socially marginalized groups whose position is somewhat homologous. While having themselves the more direct connection to the dominant groups which is customary for the producers of "high culture,"

intellectuals and especially artists may find in the structural homology between the relationship of the dominated classes to the dominant class and the relationship of the dominated fractions [of the dominant classes] to the dominant fractions the basis of felt and sometimes real solidarity with the dominated classes.(Distinction 316)

11The spontaneous surface and the depth of the real are typically conflated. "Not 'selectivity' of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought," writes Kerouac. This is the way to "Blow as deep as you want--write as deeply, fish down as far as you want" ("Essentials" 744).

12This process is evidently occurring on the literary as well as the popular level. At an early point in the book Sal Paradise--a writer himself--describes a short story by his friend Roland Major--another writer--about two men--presumably "arty types" themselves--who arrive in Denver but, ironically, are disappointed in it since there are arty types there already. "The arty types were all over America, sucking up its blood," laments Sal (41). Indeed, Sal's reality is often mediated by art: a town is seen as Saroyan's or Wolfe's; people imitate Hemingway and his characters; conversations are lifted from books and movies--The Sun Also Rises (78), Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (90); being with Terry is described in terms of Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake in Sullivan's Travels and so on.

13Orientalist imagery pervades the scene: they approach the bar "through narrow Algerian streets" (286); when it is time to go, they "still wanted to hang around with our lovely girls in this strange Arabian paradise" until Sal finally recalls that he is "in Mexico after all and not in a pornographic hasheesh daydream" (290-291). Although there has been much recent discussion of the term, current debate is still framed by Edward Said's Orientalism.

14Gerald Nicosia discusses Kerouac's struggles with sexual identity at various stages in his life, including a "general tolerance ... [of] homosexuality as just another interesting lifestyle" (117), his own bisexual experiences (154-155), and, latterly, "a rage against homosexuals" (493).

15In One Dimensional man--a work published only slightly later whose title suggests an analogous sounding of depth and depthlessness in contemporary culture--Herbert Marcuse argued that "such modes of protest and transcendence" as the Beat movement "are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative" (14). In their loss of depth or dimensionality, such apolitical subversives "are no longer images of another way of life but rather freaks or types of the same life, serving as an affirmation rather than negation of the established order" (59).

 

Works Cited

 

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.

Bourdieu, Pierre, and L. J. D. Wacquant. An Invitatgion to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking, 1977.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. Garden City: Anchor-Doubleday, 1983.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks: The Experiences of a Black Man in a White World. Trans. Charles Lam Marksman. New York: Grove, 1967.

Friedman, Ellen G. "Where Are the Missing Contents? (Post)Modernism, Gender, and the Canon." PMLA 108 (1993): 240-252.

Frith, Simon. "The Cultural Study of Popular Music." Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. 174-186.

George, Paul S., and Jerold M. Starr. "Beat Politics: New Left and Hippie Beginnings in the Postwar Counterculture." Cultural Politics: Radical Movements in Modern History. Ed. Jerold M. Starr. New York: Praeger, 1985.

Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin's, 1978.

Ginsberg, Allen. "Howl." Collected Poems: 1947-80. New York: Harper and Row, 1984.

Griffin, John Howard. Black Like Me. New York: New American Library, 1976.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. New York: Signet, 1958.

------. "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose." boundary 2 3.3 (1974/75): 743-745.

------. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1957.

------. Pic. New York: Grove, 1982.

------. The Subterraneans. New York: Grove, 1958.

Krim, Seymour. Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer. New York: Excelsior, 1961.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

------. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Mailer, Norman. "The White Negro." Advertisements for Myself. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1959.

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon, 1964.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.

Pynchon, Thomas. Slow Learner. New York: Bantam, 1985.

Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: The Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1992.

Saxton, Alexander. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth Century America. London: Verso, 1990.

Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. 1918-1922. 2 vols. Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926.

Stimpson, Catharine R. "The Beat Generation and the Trials of Homosexual Liberation." Salmagundi 58-59. (1982-1983): 373-392.

 

Vopat, Carole Gottlieb. "Jack Kerouac's On the Road: A Re-evaluation." Midwest Quarterly. 14.4 (1973,Summer) 385-407. Rpt. in Novels for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski and Deborah A. Stanley. Vol. 8. Detroit: Gale, 2000. 385-407. Literature Resource Center. Gale. NEW YORK UNIV. 29 Sept. 2008
http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:15610/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=new64731

Nothing has been published about Jack Kerouac for seven years. Most of what has been written is either hostile or condescending or both. While it may perhaps be true, as Melvin W. Askew suggests, that to speak of Jack Kerouac in the same breath with Melville, Twain and Hawthorne is to leave a smirch on the configuration of classic American literature, Kerouac has, as they have, provided an enduring portrait of the national psyche; like Fitzgerald, he has defined America and delineated American life for his generation. Certainly, Kerouac is not a great writer, but he is a good writer, and has more depth and control than his critics allow. On the Road is more than a crazy wild frantic embrace of beat life; implicit in Kerouac's portrayal of the beat generation is his criticism of it, a criticism that anticipates the charges of his most hostile critics. For example, Norman Podhoretz' assertion that the Beat Generation's worship of primitivism and spontaneity ... arises from a pathetic poverty of feeling, parallels Kerouac's own insights in On the Road.

In that novel Kerouac makes it clear that Sal Paradise goes on the road to escape from life rather than to find it, that he runs from the intimacy and responsibility of more demanding human relationships, and from a more demanding human relationship with himself. With all their emphasis on spontaneity and instinct, Sal and his friends are afraid of feeling on any other than the impassive and ultimately impersonal wow level. For Sal especially, emotion is reduced to sentimentality, roleplaying and gesture. His responses are most often the blanket, indiscriminate wow! or the second-hand raptures gleaned from books and movies; he thrills to San Francisco as Jack London's town and melodramatically describes leaving his Mexican mistress:

Emotionlessly she kissed me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.... Sal is continually enjoying himself enjoying himself, raptly appreciating his performance in what seems more like an on-going soap-opera than an actual life: She'd left me a cape to keep warm; I threw it over my shoulder and skulked through the moonlit vineyard.... A California home; I hid in the grapevines, digging it all. I felt like a million dollars; I was adventuring in the crazy American night.

Sal's self-conscious posturing undercuts his insistence on the life of instinct and impulse, and indicates his fear of emotions simply felt, of life perceived undramatically and unadorned. He responds to experience in a language of exaggeration; everything is the saddest or greatest or wildest in the world. Although on page 21 he meets a rawhide oldtime Nebraska farmer who has a great laugh, the greatest in the world, a few pages later he encounters Mr. Snow whose laugh, I swear on the Bible, was positively and finally the one greatest laugh in all this world. Reality is never good enough; it must be classified, embroidered and intensified; above all, the sheer reality of reality must be avoided. Sal's roleplaying shelters him from having to realize and respond to actual situations, and to the emotions and obligations, whether of others or of himself, inherent in those situations. He is protected from having to face and feel his own emotions as well as from having to deal with the needs and demands of other people. What Sal enthuses over as a California home Kerouac reveals as a place of poverty, frustration, anger and despair, but Sal's raptures cushion him from recognizing the grimness of the existence to which he is carelessly consigning his mistress and her small son, a child he had called my boy and played at fathering. By absorbing himself in the melodramatics of a renunciation scene, Sal is protected from the realities of Terry's feelings or her future, nor must he cope with his own emotions at parting with her.

Kerouac's characters take to the road not to find life but to leave it all behind: emotion, maturity, change, decision, purpose, and, especially, in the best American tradition, responsibility; wives, children, mistresses, all end up strewn along the highway like broken glass. Sal refuses responsibility not only for the lives of others but for his own life as well. He does not want to own his life or direct his destiny, but prefers to live passively, to be driven in cars, to entertain sensations rather than emotions. A follower, Sal is terrified of leading his own life; he is, as Kerouac points out, fearful of the wheel and hated to drive; he does not have a driver's license. He and Dean abdicate self-control in a litany of irresponsibility: It's not my fault, it's not my fault ..., nothing in this lousy world is my fault. Both of them flee from relevance and significance, telling long, mindless stories and taking equally pointless trips. They avoid anything--self-analysis, self-awareness, thinking--which would threaten or challenge them, for with revelation comes responsibility for change and, above all, they do not want change. They demand lives as thin and narrow as the white lines along the road which so comfort and mesmerize them, and are content with surfaces, asking for no more. Thus they idolize Negroes as romantic and carefree children, seeing in the ghetto not the reality of poverty and oppression, but freedom from responsibility and, hence, joy.

Sal and his friends are not seeking or celebrating self, but are rather fleeing from identity. For all their solipsism, they are almost egoless. They do not dwell on the self, avoid thinking or feeling. They run from self-definition, for to admit the complex existence of the self is to admit its contingencies: the claims of others, commitments to society, to oneself. Solipsism rather than an enhancement of self is for them a loss of self, for the self is projected until it loses all boundaries and limits and, hence, all definition. Sal in the Mexican jungle completely loses his identity; inside and outside merge, he becomes the atmosphere, and as a result knows neither the jungle nor himself. For Sal and Dean, transcendentalism, like drugs, sex, liquor, and even jazz, leads not to enlightenment but to self-obliteration. Erasing both ego and world, nothing remains save motion and sensation, passive, self-effacing and mechanical. Only the sheer impetus of their frantic, speeding cars holds their scattered selves together.

Their selves have no definition and their lives no continuity. Nothing is related, neither self nor time; there is no cause and effect, life is not an ongoing process. Rather, there is only the Eternal Now, the jazz moment, which demands absolutely nothing. Their ideals are spontaneity and impulse because both are independent of relation to what has gone before and what may come after. Spontaneity and impulse are the ethic of disjunction, recognizing neither limit, liability or obligation. Their emphasis on spontaneity is a measure of their fear of life. In their cars they are suspended from life and living, as if in a capsule hurtling coast-to-coast above the earth. They seek out not truth nor values but this encapsulated almost fetal existence as an end in itself, an end that is much like death.

For even their much touted ideal of Freedom is in reality a freedom from life itself, especially from rational, adult life with its welter of consequences and obligations. Dean is utterly free because he is completely mad. He has defied maturity and logic, defied time with its demands that he grow up to responsibility. Like Nietzsche's superman, he is beyond good and evil, blame and expectation, nor must he justify his existence through work and duty, a state Sal sorely admires: Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness--everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being. Sal's own longing for freedom is embodied in a mysterious Shrouded Traveler, a figure who unites the road and death. In many avatars, he pursues Sal in his headlong flight down the highway, offering, through solitary travel, the lost bliss which is the death of the self: The one thing that we yearn for in all our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that we probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.

Free love is rather freedom from love and another route down that same dark deathwish. For Sal the lovebed is the deathbed, where he goes to obliterate himself and to find the safe lost bliss of the womb, blindly seeking to return the way he came. But Sal is only able to find this particular version of lost bliss when he has reduced his partner to the non-threatening role of fellow child. He has trouble succeeding with adult women; he fills Rita with nothing but talk and is convinced Theresa is a whore until he discovers with relief that she is only a baby, as fragile and vulnerable as he:

I saw her poor belly where there was a Caesarian scar; her hips were so narrow she couldn't bear a child without getting gashed open. Her legs were like little sticks. She was only four foot ten. I made love to her in the sweetness of the weary morning. Then, two tired angels of some kind, hung-up forlornly in an LA shelf, having found the closest and most delicious thing in life together, we fell asleep ...

Sex here is not a wild explosion but the desperate, gentle solace two babes in the woods haltingly offer each other.... Sal says he ought to be seeking out a wife, but his true search is, as is Dean's, not for lover but for father, for someone to shelter him from life and responsibility. He turns to Terry not for ecstasy or even sensation, but as a respite from his search, an escape from the demands of life: I finally decided to hide from the world one more night with her and morning be damned.

In short, for all their exuberance, Kerouac's characters are half in love with easeful death. And this Sal Paradise and his creator well know. Neither is deceived about the nature of beat existence. Kerouac is able to step back from his characters to point out their follies; to show, for example, Dean's pathetic justification of life on the road.... Sal himself is able to articulate his own fear of feeling and responsibility and his resultant, overwhelming emptiness:

Well, you know me. You know I don't have close relationships with anybody anymore. I don't know what to do with these things. I hold things in my hand like pieces of crap and don't know where to put it down.... It's not my fault! It's not my fault! ... Nothing in this lousy world is my fault, don't you see that? I don't want it to be and it can't be and it won't be."

He realizes that he has nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion, and marks the deaths of his various illusions with the refrain, Everything is collapsing.

Kerouac further points out that the shortcomings of his characters parallel the shortcomings of the country to which they are so intimately connected. Kerouac's response to America is typically disillusioned. America is a land of corruption and hypocrisy, promising everything and delivering nothing, living off the innocence and opportunity, the excitement and adventure of the past. In particular Kerouac indicts America for failing to provide his searching characters with any public meaning or communal values to counteract the emptiness of their private lives. Sal looks to America much as he looks to Dean, to provide him with direction, purpose and meaning, to offer him a straight line, an ordered progression to a golden destination, an IT of stability and salvation. But IT never materializes, and the straight line itself becomes an end; the going, the road, is all. Dean's response to continual disillusionment is to forsake the destination for the journey: Move! Sal follows his leader but eventually becomes disgusted with the purposeless, uncomfortable jockeying from coast to coast, just as he becomes disgusted with Dean. Unlike Dean, Sal is able to recognize and identify his despair and, ultimately, to act on the causes of it; where for Dean change is merely deterioration, Sal undergoes true development.

In addition to Sal's growing insight, Kerouac equips his narrator with a double vision, enabling Sal to comment on the people and events of the novel as he saw them when they happened, and as he views them now that they are over, a sadder-but-wiser hindsight which acts as a check upon his naive, undiscriminating exuberances and provides a disillusioned alternative view of the beatifics of the beat generation.

While the younger Sal idolized Dean upon first meeting him, the older Sal reminds the reader that this is all far back, when Dean was not "the way he is today ... ," and notes that the whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then; it would mix up all my friends and all I had left of my family in a big dust cloud over the American night. He observes the sad effect of Time upon his old friends who once rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later becomes so much sadder and perceptive and blank. He corrects himself when his earlier view of Dean intrudes upon the more precise voice of his older self: Dean ... had finished his first fling in New York. I say fling, but he only worked like a dog in parking lots. Sal continually checks and repudiates his youthful self, and deflates his naive view of Dean and life on the road: I could hear a new call and see a new horizon, and believe it at my young age; and a little bit of trouble or even Dean's eventual rejection of me as a buddy, putting me down, as he would later, on starving sidewalks and sickbeds--what did it matter? I was a young writer and I wanted to take off.

Sal's double vision does more than correct his impulses. It projects the reader forward in time and provides the sense of continuity the disjunctive characters, including the younger Sal, lack. This older voice offers relations and connections, causes and effects, connects past with present and projects into the future. It firmly anchors reader and narrator to the familiar world of change and conjunction. It knows the discrepancy between appearance and reality and realizes sadly that Time eventually captures even frantically speeding children. It is the view of a man who has, in Dean Moriarty's words, come to know Time, it prepares the reader for Sal's eventual disillusionment with beat life and the sordid hipsters of America.

Sal's double vision is proof of his eventual recapitulation to time and change, a recapitulation which he battles for most of the novel. It is this battling, perhaps, so constant and monotonous, which has infuriated readers used to traditional novels of development and makes them wonder, indeed, whether anything happens to anyone in the novel at all. Sal alone of the characters continually perceives the futility and insanity of his journeys, yet continually makes them, always with the same childlike innocence and expectation, always to follow the same pattern of hopefulness ending in disillusionment as he learns and relearns the same weary lessons about America and Dean Moriarty. Nonetheless, Sal does finally accept the obligations of his insights and revelations, decides to bear the heavy weight of change and responsibility, and grows up to understand, evaluate and finally repudiate Dean Moriarty, the American Dream, and life on the road.

Dean offers Sal more than direction and meaning; he simultaneously provides both a quest and an escape, a hiatus from adult life and adult feelings, a moratorium on maturity. Sal associates Dean with his own childhood: "... he reminded me of some long-lost brother ..., made me remember my boyhood.... And in his excited way of speaking I heard again the voices of old companions and brothers under the bridge.... "

Indeed, although Sal is older than Dean, he regards Dean at first not so much as long lost brother but as Father whom he passively follows, trusting to be protected, loved and directed. Sal is disenchanted with Dean at the end of Part Two not because Dean has proven himself a poor friend, but because he has turned out to be yet another bad father: Where is Dean and why isn't he concerned about our welfare?

Sal's emotional maturation is evident in his first lover's quarrel with Dean. Enraged by Dean's casual reference to his growing old (You're getting a little older now), Sal turns on him, reducing him to tears, but immediately afterwards realizes that his anger is directed at aging rather than at Dean: I had flipped momentarily and turned it down on Dean. He takes responsibility for hurting Dean, and apologizes to him, humbly and lovingly: Remember that I believe in you. I'm infinitely sorry for the foolish grievance I held against you.... He sees that his present anger springs from sources buried in his youth (Everything I had ever secretly held against my brother was coming out...). This insight into himself helps him to understand Dean, who is, like him, mired in a past whose anger and frenzy he is compelled to act out, but, unlike Sal, without benefit of apology or insight: "All the bitterness and madness of his entire Denver life was blasting out of his system like daggers. His face was red and sweaty and mean." Regarding his friend without desperate idealism, Sal sees that Dean's frantic moving and going is not a romantic quest for adventure or truth but is instead a sad, lost circling for the past, for the home and the father he never had. He sees that both he and Dean are as frightened and lost as the Prince of Dharma, going in circles in the dark lost places between the stars, searching for that lost ancestral grove. The road on which they run is all that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day. True to his vow, he takes Dean back to New York with him, yet knows that for them a permanent home is impossible. Their marriage breaks down; Dean returns to his crazy welter of wives and children, Sal to his aunt and his disillusionment.

In Mexico Sal hopes to escape from the self, civilization, and their discontents. At the bottom of his primitivism is a desire to confront the primal sources of pure being, to discover life as it was--shapeless, formless, dark--before being molded into self or society; in short, to find once and for all the womb he has been seeking all his life. If nothing else, he hopes to search out his final, true and ultimate parents among the Indians who are the source of mankind and the fathers of it.

But the strange Arabian paradise we had finally found at the end of the hard, hard road is only a wild old whore house after all. The Indians are coming down from the mountains drawn to wristwatches and cities. They and the Mexicans welcome Sal and Dean not as brothers or fellow children, but as American tourists to be exploited. The brothel where they converse for their ultimate mind-and time-blowing fling is a sad, frantic, desperate place, full of eighteen-year-old drunks and child whores, sinking and lost, writhing and suffering.... Their great primitive playground is no more than a sad kiddy park with swings and a broken-down merry-go-round ... in the fading red sun.... And in that sad kiddy park Sal leaves behind his faith in the possibility of an infantile paradise and, with it, his faith in Dean.

Dean first induced Sal to accompany him over the border with the happy announcement that ... the years have rolled severally behind us and yet you see none of us have really changed.... In Mexico Sal finds this denial of time not a reprieve but a condemnation. Dean cannot change and he cannot rest, not even in the great and final wild uninhibited Fellahin childlike Mexico City. Wedded forever to his terrible, changeless compulsions, not the love of his friend nor the possibility of paradise can stay him from his rounds. He leaves the delirious and unconscious Sal to return to all that again, for, as he himself announces, the road drives me. Sal understands and pities him ("I realized what a rat he was, but ... I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes"), realizing his friend is the least free of anyone. Dean leads not a primitive life of spontaneity and instinct but instead a sorry, driven existence of joyless sweats and anxieties. Sal has a vision of Dean not as sweet, holy goof but as the Angel of Death, burning and laying waste whatever he touches....

Returning to America, Sal meets up once more with the Shrouded Traveler, a symbol of the fatal lure of the road and the restless, nomadic beat life. Sal wonders if this tall old man with flowing white hair ... with a pack on his back is a sign that I should at last go on my pilgrimage on foot on the dark roads around America. He wonders, in short, if he ought to become the Ghost of the Susquehanna, to enter the darkness from which the old man appeared and into which he vanished. He responds to the romance of this suggestion, but is haunted by its loneliness. Later, in New York, he calls out his name in the darkness and is answered by Laura, the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long. Settling his dreams of paradise and salvation in her, he gives up the road.

In a sense, Sal's growth as an adult can be measured through his responses to Dean and in the changing aspects of their relationship. Sal moves from idolatry to pity, from a breathless, childlike worship of Dean as alternately Saint and Father, to a realization of Dean's own tortured humanity, marked by Sal's attempt to be brother, then Father, to his friend, sensitive to Dean's needs without melodrama, facing responsibility and decision, allowing himself to feel blame and love, yet, eventually, for the sake of his own soul, rejecting, deliberately and sadly, his lost, perpetually circling friend.

When Dean arrives to rescue him once more from the world of age and obligation, Sal refuses to go. He discards Dean's plan to leave for San Francisco before he himself is absolutely ready (But why did you come so soon, Dean?), and, deciding that he wasn't going to start all over again ruining [Remi's] planned evenings as I had done ... in 1947, he pulls away from Dean and leaves him behind.

In the course of his scattered journeys Sal has learned, perhaps to his regret, what rather tentatively might indeed finally matter, and to this tenuous value he cautiously decides to commit himself, giving up the ghost of the Shrouded Traveler, of Dean Moriarty and Old Dean Moriarty and dead America, and accepting in their place feeling, responsibility, and roots--not in a place but in another person, Laura. Sal's relationship with Dean has served as an apprenticeship during which he has learned how to accommodate to intimacy, as his disillusionment with America has prepared him to look beyond the road for salvation and paradise. Neither America nor Dean can successfully order his life, provide him with direction or meaning. Neither can father him; ultimately, he must father himself, must look inward for purpose and belief. For America has lost her innocence and her sense of purpose just as Dean has and, like Dean, is continually making bogus attempts to pretend it still has all the potential and grace of its youth....

On the Road ends with an elegy for a lost America, for the country which once might have been the father of us all, but now is only the land where they let children cry. Dean Moriarty is himself America, or rather the dream of America, once innocent, young, full of promise and holiness, bursting with potential and vitality, now driven mad, crippled, impotent (We're all losing our fingers), ragged, dirty, lost, searching for a past of security and love that never existed, trailing frenzy and broken promises, unable to speak to anybody anymore.

 

 

 

Alexei, Richard. "Jack Kerouac: Overview." Gay & Lesbian Literature. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 1994. Literature Resource Center. Gale. NEW YORK UNIV. 29 Sept. 2008
http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:15610/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=new64731

Any appraisal of Jack Kerouac's work immediately butts up against the autobiographical content of the books, allowing little separation between the author and his writing. Beginning with his debut novel, The Town and the City, through his more famous efforts such as On the Road, Kerouac's subject nearly always involve Kerouac and his companions, and in most regards, the books remain very true to the facts of his existence. In many cases, the factual basis of his work has made analysis of his impact more fruitful; critics have been better able to assess Kerouac as a voice of the Beat generation because the books explicitly outline his relationship to other figures in the group, including Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, all of whom figure as characters in On the Road and other Kerouac titles.

When addressing the depiction of homosexual relationships in Kerouac's books, however, one finds that certain aspects of his life were more accessible through his fiction than others. In this area it is the absence of autobiographical material that is notable, making Kerouac a more enigmatic figure. At the same time, his treatment of same sex relationships illumines an issue that was somewhat taboo, even for an author who was thought to be a saboteur of mainstream American values in the 1950s.

Kerouac's treatment of gays becomes clear when one considers the predominance of homosexuals and bisexuals among those people who are the focus of his autobiographical accounts. First on this list is Ginsberg, who met Kerouac when both were students at Columbia University in the early 1940s. According to Gerald Nicosia's biography, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg summoned the courage to reveal his homosexuality and his attraction to Kerouac early in their relationship. Kerouac, according to Nicosia, initially reacted negatively, but the men remained close friends and Kerouac gradually came to accept Ginsberg's sexuality. Neal Cassady later became Ginsberg's lover, Kerouac's friend, and, eventually, the quintessential Beat hero of many of Kerouac's novels. Cassady was renown for his sexual prowess with women, but was nonetheless perfectly comfortable with homosexual encounters. Burroughs, another of Kerouac's close acquaintances and a central figure in the Beat movement, likewise engaged in homosexual relations.

Kerouac clearly had a considerable exposure to gay relationships through his friends, whom he often used as models for the literary characters in his autobiographical novels; however, their homosexuality is conspicuously absent in these works. Only rarely is there a reference to anything gay, despite the fact so many of his friends were gay or bisexual and the social and literary world in which he traveled was so imbued with homosexuality. When Kerouac does mention homosexuality in his books, it is often quite inconsequential—like meeting some fellow writers in a "Frisco" gay bar before going off to someone's house for a night of drinking in The Subterraneans—or sometimes a portrayal of gay characters as flawed and fatalistic. In The Town and the City, part four ends with the suicide of a handicapped homosexual, Waldo Meister. Meister takes his own life after being spurned by his inamorata, Kenny Wood, the person responsible for the accident that maimed Meister. Kerouac paints a ghoulish portrait of Waldo stalking Kenny. While leaving a nightclub with a group of people, Kenny takes his girlfriend by the arm to go home and is grabbed by Waldo in a supplicating way. "I said let go, you old fairy!" Kenny screams and sends Waldo sprawling across the pavement. While his friends berate him for abusing a poor cripple, Kenny advises them, "You're not acquainted with the facts." After Waldo's suicide, it is Kenny who must go to the morgue to identify the mangled corpse.

More revealing are passages from On the Road, a book that concentrates on Kerouac's relationships with Ginsberg, Burroughs, and especially Cassady. While the novel reflects their real life journeys and experiences, the emphasis is on heterosexuality—Burroughs and his wife (known as Bull and Jane Lee, respectively, in the book) and Cassady's romantic exploits with a variety of women. Homosexuality is noticeably omitted, and when it is mentioned, it is referred to in negative terms and derided by stereotypic portrayals—the depiction of the mincing "fairy" that sits in with a San Francisco jazz band being a prime example—or incidents have been altered in Kerouac's retelling. For example, in On the Road when Dean (Cassady's fictional name in the book) and Sal (Kerouac) are traveling east from San Francisco in a travel-bureau car, the driver of the car is described as a "fag" who is targeted by Dean as a source of money. In a Sacramento hotel room Dean tries to hustle the man, promising sex for money, but when the man becomes sullen and suspicious, Sal and Dean leave the room with no cash. Biographical accounts of this incident, however, claim that a sexual encounter did take place and that Kerouac was kept up all night by the bedroom athletics of Cassady and the driver. Here we see Kerouac carefully manipulating his account in regard to gay relations. In the fictional account the homosexual act is not consummated, and Kerouac's Beat hero, Dean, emerges unscathed from his same sex flirtation. In the end he appears more as a trickster figure who is scheming to separate the "fag" from his money rather than a man who would willingly engage in sex with another man.

Such incidents point to paradox regarding Kerouac's role as a social provocateur in the years following World War II. On one hand, he was viewed as a radical threat to the conservative values of the 1950s, a stance that was exemplified in his controversial writings about drugs, alcohol, and heterosexual sex. When it came to addressing the behavior of gays, however, Kerouac's writings remained much closer to the mainstream. While his personal relationships seemed to have been marked by an acceptance of others' homosexuality, his books adopt the status quo position of ignoring or attacking same sex relationships.

 

 

Feied, Frederick. "Chapter Three." No Pie in the Sky: The Hobo as American Cultural Hero in the Works of Jack London, John Dos Passos, and Jack Kerouac. The Citadel Press, 1964. 57-80. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Matuz and Cathy Falk. Vol. 61. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990. 57-80. Literature Resource Center. Gale. NEW YORK UNIV. 29 Sept. 2008
http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:15610/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=new64731

It was the political significance of the hobo that [John] Dos Passos undertook to explore in the pages of U.S.A.; it was his economic significance that [Jack] London chiefly stressed at a time when vast economic disturbances triggered by the crises of industrial capitalism threw large numbers of men out of work and onto the road. In both periods, the existence of a s

erious hobo problem stimulated an interest in the hobo that was sociological as well as literary. By the late 1940's, however, following a period of war and unparalleled prosperity, the hobo was no longer a factor of any proportions in American political life, and scarcely an economic one. Railroad spokesmen were agreed that the days were gone “when nearly every freight train was infested with tramps.... ” Literature devoted to the subject of the migrant, as recorded in the various indices, had diminished to a trickle, and an affluent and self-satisfied society seemed to have eliminated the conditions which in earlier times had given rise to a hobo problem and to a literature concerned with the hobo. Yet, despite all this, the theme of the tramp and the hobo (neither category completely covers the case) found expression in two of the most widely read and controversial novels of the 1950's—On the Road and The Dharma Bums.

Perhaps the reason the theme of the hobo could arouse widespread interest in such a period is that the hoboes of the 1940's and 1950's appeared as one of the first concrete manifestations of a movement of wholesale rejection of contemporary values, and Kerouac's use of the theme dramatized the sense of alienation of large numbers of his contemporaries. For although hoboes of the type he describes were few in number, their presence attested to the existence of a condition that was fairly widespread. They reflected a growing uneasiness in America, a gnawing sense that all was not well in the richest land in the world. Their frantic flights across country, their rootless and disaffected behavior, but above all their profound sense of disaffiliation, testified to a growing spirit of discontent. In going on the road they gave expression, in the clearest and most direct way possible, to all the repressed longings and vague dissatisfactions abroad in the populace at large. (pp. 57-9)

Dynamic obsolescence—planned waste—is one form of madness which contributes to this sense of uneasiness. One of the characters of On the Roadexpresses something of this feeling when he says:

"they prefer making cheap goods so's everybody'll have to go on working and punching timeclocks and organizing themselves in sullen unions.... ”

Another is the threat of nuclear destruction. At one point in On the Road the narrator gives vent to this feeling when he sees a group of Indians who

had come down ... to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn't know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and railroads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way.

For Kerouac's hoboes the very act of going on the road amounts to a kind of protest, inasmuch as it represents a symbolic turning of one's back on society as constituted. In the era of “the great McCarthy hysteria,” flight is the only means they have of expressing their dissent, and flight here functions as a substitute for more direct forms of protest which “had been closed for some time.” In both On the Road and The Dharma Bums this fugue, or flight, is portrayed on the realistic level as an attempt to escape from an intolerable personal or social situation, and on the symbolic level as a search for values or for inner light and understanding, a search for the road, the way to spiritual truth, in short, a search for God.

But, despite the difference in motivation between Kerouac's hoboes and those of the past, the two characters whose adventures and philosophies are described in On the Road and The Dharma Bums can be seen, in one light at least, as counterparts of the types encountered in the works of London and Dos Passos . Dean Moriarty of On the Road is an unconscious caricature of Nietzsche's superman, and Japhy Ryder of The Dharma Bums is a natural descendant of the vanishing wobbly. Kerouac's first-person narrator, called Sal Paradise in On the Road and Ray Smith in The Dharma Bums,treks back and forth across the country in tutelage to these two characters. He is “digging” American life and apparently attempting to formulate some sort of philosophy out of the ideas and attitudes of his tutors. Though Kerouac's two heroes are strikingly different, the road as a way of life looms large in both their philosophies.

In the first of the two books, On the Road, it is an encounter with Dean Moriarty, a road-kid of the 1940's just out of a New Mexico reform school, that sends Sal Paradise off to “dig” the West.

With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.... Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles.

Dean had spent a good part of his childhood, during the Depression, bumming around with his father and his father's drinking cronies. When the book opens, however, Dean's days as a railroad bum are far behind him. In the affluent society of the 1940's there is always a car to be come by in some fashion, whether it be a second-hand borrowed jalopy or a late-model stolen car. It is Sal Paradise, middle-class, college-educated romantic, who hitchhikes, hops freights, and waxes poetic over hobo life in On the Road.

The book deals with the period from the winter of 1947 to the late fall or winter of 1950. In that brief span Paradise, alias Kerouac, treks back and forth across the American continent no less than five times. Each journey is progressively more feverish, more frantic, and more “beat” in character than the preceding. The action boils over in a score of American cities where the fugitives pause in their flight only long enough to replenish their resources and wear out their welcome. Numerous side trips and a final junket to Mexico lace up the continent from east to west and north to south.

Paradise's first journey west is almost leisurely in pace by comparison with later trips when he travels with Dean Moriarty, and in the beginning he is anything but knowing about the ways of the road. After “poring over maps of the United States in Paterson for months, even reading books about the pioneers,” he finally sets out, he tells us, “filled with dreams” of what he would do “in Chicago, Denver and then finally in San Fran.” But instead of thumbing his way west, he indulges a notion to head due north to Route 6, which “was one long red line ... that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and then dipped down to Los Angeles.” Route 6 turned out to be a little-used road through the Catskills, however, and on his first night out Sal Paradise is stranded in Bear Mountain in the middle of a rainstorm. “It was my dream that screwed up,” he admits, “the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.” He winds up taking a bus to Chicago and renting a room at the Y.M.C.A., but despite this inauspicious start he does succeed in hitchhiking part of the way across the continent. Twice more before he arrives at his destination, however, he resorts to the bus lines.

Each ride, each adventure along the way, is duly recounted and described, for this is the stuff of Kerouac's novels—experiences and encounters reported upon for their own sakes. If there is an occasional suggestion of the flight motif at this point, it does not yet emerge as anything like a theme. Sal Paradise is primarily “digging America,” he is “reading the American Landscape,” and nothing is too trivial to be breathlessly recounted—cold and hunger, the meals eaten in restaurants or over campfires, discomfort and dullness, sunsets and dawns and the excitement of new towns and cities. Sal Paradise ingests it all, consumes it with his senses. This is not the satisfaction of obstacles surmounted, of hardships overcome, that one finds in London. It is, rather a sensuous devouring of every new experience like a child gorging himself on sweets. He parades before us an array of mid-century American types as varied and exhaustive as anything to be found in Chaucer: motherly, middle-aged women in tidy coupes, blond young Minnesota farmers in trucks who pick up every hitchhiker on the road, truckdrivers and salesmen, waitresses and cowboys, criminals and con-men, Mexican field hands, hoboes, prospectors, Hollywood pimps, nature-boy saints and religious zealots, Arkies and Oakies, homosexuals and dope addicts in an unending procession. To these he adds portraits of intellectuals of the incipient beat generation.

Among those he describes with great zest are the other hoboes and hitchhikers he meets on the road. The first is a young New Yorker, a heavy drinker, whom Paradise suspects is fleeing the law. He is as much a novice on the road as Paradise himself.

We didn't know how to hop a proper chain gang; we'd never done it before; we didn't know whether they were going east or west or how to find out or what boxcars and flats and de-iced reefers to pick, and so on. So when the Omaha bus came through just before dawn we hopped on it....

Memories of the hoboing of the 1930's are evoked when a cowboy who gives Paradise a ride tells him:

“During the depression ... I used to hop freights at least once a month. In those days you'd see hundreds of men riding a flatcar or in a boxcar, and they weren't just bums, they were all kinds of men out of work and going from one place to another and some of them just wandering. It was like that all over the West. Brakemen never bothered you in those days. I don't know about today.”

Kerouac is constantly haunted by visions of lost bums, solitary figures tramping their rounds from one end of the States to the other. He is filled with a poignant awareness of their loneliness, their isolation, both spiritual and physical. London did not make much of this theme of isolation. His tramp is satisfied if he can escape the crushing horrors of existence in the Social Pit. If warm and well-fed, he is not likely to be concerned over the fact that he is a thousand miles from anywhere. Dos Passos' characters have a sense of participating in a movement. They find their fellow workers everywhere. It is only when they are removed from the arena of class struggle that they are likely to feel isolated.

All the types that Kerouac catalogues seem to reveal a chronic restlessness, an uneasiness that manifests itself, no matter where they are, in a desire to get going and keep moving. They do not always have a destination in mind. “`You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?'” a carnival owner asks Paradise at one point. “We didn't understand his question, and it was a damn good question.” This quality becomes more exaggerated as the chronicle progresses. Everyone Paradise meets is just starting out, just arriving, or making plans to depart. Each one offers different reasons, but they all add up to dissatisfaction with the conditions of their lives, and the theme of mass flight slowly begins to make itself felt. Whatever their motivation, Kerouac “digs” them all, but the person he digs the most is the clawing, flapping, demonaic Dean Moriarty.

Paradise is attracted to Dean because he feels that he is different from his old friends and college buddies who

were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons.... Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn't care one way or the other....

Even his criminality, Paradise tells us, “was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy.... ”

Dazzled by Moriarty's pyrotechnics, Paradise confesses:

I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the “Awww!” What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany?

Moriarty is a truly awesome figure, a personification of the wasteful spirit of our age. He uses up objects at an astonishing rate. He steals cars, or a series of cars, runs them at top speed and leaves them beat-up and battered at the side of the road. He uses up people in much the same way. He runs everything at top speed, including himself. He leaps from friend to friend, from mistress to mistress, in the same way that he leaps from one stolen car to another.

Dean had never seen his mother's face. Every new girl, every new wife, every new child was an addition to his bleak impoverishment.

There is no sating his appetites, no way to halt his flight. Motion is the rule and guide of his life. His soul “is wrapped up in a fast car, a coast to reach, with a woman at the end of the road.... ” When Paradise begins to travel with Dean, the pace of the novel becomes more frantic.

Paradise sees Dean and others like him “rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.” Dean's frantic pursuit of the road is to him symbolic of the plight of thousands of others who have nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody to believe in, or who cross and recross the country every year because they have no place they can “stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere.... ”

The death of Dean's mother when he was just a child had left the elder Dean Moriarty and his son without a hub to their universe. Dean's father had become a cook-shack tramp, a down-and-out bum, drinking himself unconscious at every opportunity. Dean had grown up on the rods and had been on the move ever since, “surrounded by the battered suitcases of his motherless feverish life across America and back numberless times, an undone bird.”

One of the few things in the book which humanizes Moriarty and sets him before us in a way that we can feel sympathy with is the search for his father. This theme, which seems to have deep significance for Kerouac, is one which recurs again and again. Ever since the death of his mother, Dean's life on the road has accentuated his double loss as he follows his father from one skid row to another, through one debauch after another, seeking the love, guidance, and understanding that his father, in his demoralized state, could not give. (pp. 60-8)

As Paradise contemplates their frantic balling and bumming across “ole tumbledown holy America” it comes to represent for him, as for the others, the only meaningful act that is permitted them. In taking to the road they are “leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.” The pattern of restless, unprovoked and aimless flight gradually begins to take on the aspect of a pilgrimage. Through a kind of motivational metamorphosis, flight becomes transformed into its opposite—a search for values, for something to do, somewhere to go, someone to believe in.

More and more as the novel progresses the talk turns on religion—God. Every happening of any possible religious consequence is examined for any significance it may possess. At one point they pick up a mad Jew named Hyman Solomon, who “walked all over the USA, knocking and sometimes kicking at Jewish doors and demanding money: `Give me money to eat, I am a Jew.'” They “carried Solomon all the way to Testament“—a small Southern town where Paradise's brother lived. Dean finds in this coincidence sure proof of the existence of God:

“Now you see, Sal, God does exist, because we keep getting hung-up with this town, no matter what we try to do, and you'll notice the strange Biblical name of it, and that strange Biblical character who made us stop here once more, and all things tied together all over like rain connecting everybody the world over by chain touch.... ”

In the course of their search the old bum Dean Moriarty, the tinsmith, becomes the tramp equivalent of the mendicant Jesus, the carpenter.

Where was his father?—old bum Dean Moriarty the Tinsmith, riding freights, working as a scullion in railroad cookshacks, stumbling, down-crashing in wino alley nights, expiring on coal piles, dropping his yellowed teeth one by one in the gutters of the West.

The road is equated with the Tao, the way:

“Someday you and me'll be coming down an alley together at sundown and looking in the cans to see.”
“You mean we'll end up old bums?”
“Why not, man? Of course we will if we want to, and all that. There's no harm ending that way. You spend a whole life of non-interference with the wishes of others, including politicians and the rich, and nobody bothers you and you cut along and make it your own way.” I agreed with him. He was reaching his Tao decisions in the simplest direct way. “What's your road, man?—holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?”

In a sense, On the Road is a twentieth-century restatement of The Pilgrim's Progress. Sal and Dean are on the road, the holyboy road, and the road is life. Like Christian and Faithful their goal is the Celestial City, but Sal has a premonition that they will never make it. He has a dream about a Shrouded Traveler:

... a strange Arabian figure that was pursuing me across the desert; that I tried to avoid; that finally overtook me just before I reached the Protective City.... Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to reach us before we reached heaven.

It's an anywhere road and the road is the way to eternal life, but what emerges from their search at last is a perverse religion compounded of all the sick elements of mid-century America.

Sal and Dean want to be good, they talk of Jesus, they refer to God, they try to be tender, they seek to love, but somehow it all turns to kicks, somehow everyone who comes in contact with them gets hurt in the process. They steal another car and race away in another direction, or a fifty-dollar bill from the aunt back East and the call of the middle-class life lures them away from the path of the mendicant Jesus. Though they love Negroes and “Japs” and especially Mexicans in Mexico, and though they hate their own sick culture, they end up sick, diseased, and crippled, revealing in exaggerated form all the vulgarity and grossness from which they allege themselves to be fleeing.

Kerouac's hoboes are seeking escape—escape not only from the threats of a hostile society, but escape from their own inadequate personalities and unsatisfactory human relationships. They seek to make good their escape in moment-to-moment living, digging everything, pursuing their kicks with a kind of desperate energy that passes for enthusiasm. Narcotics, jazz, sexual experimentation are the vehicles of their escape. Fast cars and all-night talk jags are a part of the play, but the road always turns back on itself, and the talk never leads anywhere. Their religion ends up in a fetishism of jazz, their love in a debauch of sex. The communicants line up to receive God, but the wafer has lost its transubstantiating power, and the host is impotent to bring the holy vision of God without the intercession of Benzedrine or “H.” The “connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night” turns out more often to be a connection with a dirty needle in the arm, for God has made a fair-trade pact with the pushers, and refuses to show his face for free.

The plight of Kerouac's hipster hoboes is in some ways more desperate than that of the submerged tenth of London's experience or the most persecuted of Dos Passos' wobblies. In the war-deranged culture of the 1940's, Kerouac's characters live in a value void, a mores nihilism. It is this void that they seek to fill with bizarre and frantic activity or a wistful seeking for something in which to believe, but there is no voice crying to them from out of the wilderness; John the Baptist has been bugged for observation at Rockland, and Moloch reigns unchallenged, God of the establishment. (pp. 69-73)

Malmgren, Carl D. "On the Road Reconsidered: Kerouac and the Modernist Tradition." Ball State University Forum. 30.1 (1989,Winter) 59-67. Rpt. inTwentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Linda Pavlovski and Scott T. Darga. Vol. 117. Detroit: Gale Group, 2002. 59-67. Literature Resource Center. Gale. NEW YORK UNIV. 29 Sept. 2008
http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:15610/ps/start.do?p=LitRC&u=new64731

There was a conference in Boulder, Colorado, in the summer of 1982 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. In the brochure advertising the week-long multimedia "event," various novelists, poets, and critics paid tribute to Kerouac's literary accomplishments. Not surprisingly, the compliments and claims are hyperbolic. William Tallman asserts that "you've got to get past Jack to get down to writing in our time." James Laughlin states, "I think he was a turning point in the history of modern American fiction." And the poet Ted Berrigan goes so far as to say, "I think that only with the arrival of Jack Kerouac did American fiction become American." These are some pretty extravagant claims for the significance of Kerouac and On the Road, even given the promotional context. Now that we have passed the silver anniversary of its publication, it is appropriate to establish the place of On the Road in relation to postwar American fiction, to assess its contribution to the evolution of new narrative forms, to ascertain just how much the "Bible" of the Beat Generation opened new roads for narrative energies, roads that were intended to depart significantly from the closed systems of narrative that predominated in the fifties.

By closed systems of narrative, I refer of course to the other literary narratives of the fifties and, more specifically, to the aesthetic that informed them, an aesthetic that may be termed modernist because it adhered to aesthetic principles formulated by the great modernists and hypostatized by the New Criticism. Some of the tenets of this artistic creed were as follows:

True art is impersonal. T. S. Eliot argues in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that "the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man that suffers and the mind which creates" (54). A poet must distance himself from his own experiences because "it is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting" (57). Elsewhere in the same essay he says that poetry "is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality" (58) and that "the emotion of art is impersonal" (59). Eliot's remarks are about poetry, but they express a point of view that characterized modernist art in general and that called for the necessary separation of art and life.

True art is detached from its subject matter. The artist cultivates an attitude of detachment toward his material, presenting it dispassionately or disinterestedly. Contemporary novelist John Hawkes, describing his own relation with his fictional creations, defines the nature of that detachment and its raison d'être as follows:

Detachment does not mean indifference, detachment is a psychic state that one learns in the face of the most overwhelming emotional destructiveness. You can live and create only when you manage to control, to keep at a distance the terrors that exist within the human being.

This detachment might be accomplished by any number of literary devices, including paradox, deliberate ambiguity, "showing" rather than "telling," the adoption of ironic masks or unreliable narrators, or Eliot's own "objective correlative."

The true work of art is, above all, a crafted or made thing. The modernists share an overriding concern or preoccupation with the form or structure of the art work. This fascination manifests itself in a self-consciousness about the how and what of art but, more importantly, in works that were carefully constructed, "architectonic" objects.

These three characteristics--impersonality, detachment, form--are not the only or even the defining characteristics of modernist art, but they constitute the primary literary pillars that Kerouac and other Beat writers attempted to topple.

As suggested above, the modernist definition of art had been, during the forties and fifties, canonized and given normative force by the New Critics in the universities, who acted as the arbiters of order and taste in the world of letters. The Beats rejected the modernist aesthetic as productive of art that had become, over the years, esoteric, obscurantist, elitist, safe, sterile, dead. Beat poetics called for rebellion against all forms of authority, especially culturally sanctioned authority, like Eliot's "great tradition." It rejected the notion that the artist must distance himself from his material, seeing in it an unhealthy need to control or contain nature, life, people; the Beats preferred to "dig it." Beat epistemology preferred intuition to logical or rational means of cognition as a more valid means of apprehending and comprehending are problematics of experience. For them the more authentic way is an emotive being that is more immediate, more true. Accordingly, the Beats tended to exalt the unique moment and the pure sensation of the experiencing and testifying individual--poetry for them was very much the expression of personality, the "with it" personality, not an escape into impersonality. Where the modernist sensibility preferred its life "cooked," the Beats desired to present it "raw." Where the modernist sensibility leads to and culminates in Wallace Stevens's idea of poetry as the "supreme fiction," the Beats took their lead from William Carlos Williams's dictum: "no ideas but in things" (Paterson 1.15).

Kerouac championed the Beat sensibility and its corresponding aesthetic in his literary manifesto, "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose." In this piece he specifies how the Beat Generation expresses itself in prose narrative. He calls for a highly personal and confessional narrative, one scribbled down without correction and at a high speed in a quest for spontaneity and, consequently, authenticity: "Never afterthink to 'improve' or defray impressions, as the best writing is always the most painful personal wrung-out tossed from cradle warm protective mind" (532). He thus subverts the modernist emphasis upon impersonality and form and le mot juste; he even subsumes the latter two under the word "craft," a word that he uses pejoratively. His own work is interesting just because it is not "crafted." For Kerouac revision is a form of inhibition, a repressive force that muddies the purity of the vision, destroys the immediacy of the experience recounted, dilutes the impact of "felt" life. He admits having been a "craftsman" once, but at inordinate expense to his writing:

And be sure of this, I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddam it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.("Art of Fiction""Art of Fiction" 541)

The best writing approximates the emotional release of orgasm: "Come from within, out--to be relaxed and said" (Kerouac, "Essentials" 533).

This form of writing, Kerouac asserts, will not only convey an emotional charge, it will also come closer to the original experience and thus be more authentic. To write spontaneously is to discard the artistic mask, a mask that for Kerouac is a sign of distance and dishonesty: "If you don't stick to what you first thought, and to the words the thought brought, what's the sense of bothering with it anyway, what's the sense of foisting your little lies on others?" (Jones 500). When one denies the mask, one removes the artificial barriers between art and life and exposes the naked self, regardless of the personal or artistic consequences.

One critic summarizes Kerouac's attack on modernist literary "sacred cows" as follows

The writer was not to revise his original impulses, for revision was a function of conditioning, a concession to standards of taste and propriety. ... Revision was inhibition, the censoring of the purity of the artist's vision, the betrayal of immediacy, the lie in the face of actual experience.(Tytell 144)

In order to breathe life back into art and to bring art back to life, Kerouac felt compelled to abandon modernist precepts and to run the risks of "imitative form." The new narrative idiom more faithfully conveyed the "feel" of contemporary life. The polemical call for a spontaneous prose, then, was at once a rejection of an outdated literary code and at the same time a project for a new, free, more authentic narrative form.

Kerouac felt he had achieved the beginnings of this narrative revolution in On the Road. The Kerouac figure in Desolation Angels describes the earlier novel in the following way:

I was originating (without knowing it, you say?) a new way of writing about life, no fiction, no craft, no revising afterthoughts, all of it innocent goahead confession, the discipline of making the mind the slave of the tongue with no chance to lie or elaborate.(Tytell 146)

In On the Road, then, Kerouac was attempting a new kind of narrative, one incapable of "lying," if only because it tried to tell everything, all at once, to let it all spill out at once according to the peregrinations of a retentive active mind. And in its original form, it certainly was a radically shaped narrative. Kerouac had typed the entire novel in one paragraph on a typewriter scroll 250 feet long, without using any other punctuation than the dash. It is perhaps a measure of his "revisionism" that at his publisher's insistence (after waiting six years for someone to publish it), he agreed to allow the work to appear in well-punctuated, tidy paragraphs, divided into five sections. He even condensed a number of the cross-country journeys in order to give the novel a tighter structure. Allen Ginsberg, for one, insists that we have yet to read or experience the "real" On the Road.

It is, of course, the published version that I would like to examine, in order to assess its "newness," its status as innovative or experimental fiction. First, we might consider the setting of the novel. It is almost redundant to say that almost all the episodes in the novel take place "on the road." It would be more pertinent to point out that Kerouac deliberately invests the road with symbolic value, a value it traditionally has had in American road narratives fromHuckleberry Finn to Catcher in the Rye. The road represents an avenue of escape from the limitations, restrictions, conformity, and claustrophobia of society, from the regimentation inherent in mass society and its organizations. To go "on the road" is to enter a kind of interzone where all the "mad" misfits inevitably meet and mingle and where there exists the possibility of growth and choice and spontaneity. To envision the road in this manner is not really to depart from a time-honored American tradition, but it should be noted that Kerouac could conceive of personal freedom only in the form of a flight from an oppressive society and that he necessarily took his show "on the road."

Adhering to another tradition of road narrative, Kerouac adopted the potentially open-ended picaresque mode as the armature of plot. The picaresque mode, with its episodic form and its apparent submission to contingency, conventionally allows life to assert primacy over the aesthetic demands of art. A picaro follows the call of life or chance. In On the Road, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty wander from adventure to adventure, responding to the call of the road, exploring and experiencing the squalid and sensational subterranean zone of American life. Sal and Dean are true picaros, to be distinguished from the quasi-picaresque heroes of two other famous fifties novels that also take place on the road, The Catcher in the Rye and Henderson the Rain King. Salinger's Holden Caulfield and Bellow's Henderson both go on the road in search of something, although that something may not be well defined. As numerous critics have argued, they are both picaro-pilgrims, journeying through an enigmatic and occasionally hostile world toward some unknown temple of truth. Although Sal Paradise exults about the possibilities of "visions" somewhere ahead, and although he and Dean seem from time to time to approach asymptotically the elusive "IT," in fact their various journeys are not so much motivated by a specific goal as by a simple need to be on the road. Throughout the novel, various minor characters (like Carlo Marx once he has become "straight") pose the question "Where are you going?" but for Dean and Sal the question is irrelevant. For them the road is not a means but an end. The road is their element: "And [Dean] hunched over the wheel and gunned her. ... We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move! And we moved!" (Kerouac, Road 133-34). Their movement, like the novel, has no specific telos.

If On the Road is a true picaresque novel in terms of plot, it deviates from the traditional picaresque in terms of function. The traditional picaresque serves a satirical function, pointing out the vices, wickedness, selfishness, etc., of the so-called good society through which the picaro moves. The picaro goes on the road ultimately to discover the "way of the world" and to suggest a more ethical alternative. On the Road, though it does make the distinction between the world of the Beats and that of the "squares," does not dwell on the conformity, the hypocrisy, the emptiness, of that latter world. In fact, throughout the novel, we remain immersed not in the world of the squares, but in the fringe mileu of the Beats, which Kerouac is at pains to celebrate. On the Road is a novel that, like Dean, continually and fervently says "Yes!" It recounts Sal Paradise's love affair with the road, an affair that has its sensual side. The car hugs the white line in the middle of the road, Dean caresses or cradles the steering wheel, the road stretches out in front of them like an object of desire, with more allure than the various women the two men encounter along it.

By way of summary, then, the picaresque mode invests On the Road with a degree of formal openness that in itself distinguishes the novel from others of the fifties. The novel also does away with the modernist techniques of impersonality and detachment. In the original manuscript, Kerouac used the real names of his "real life" characters (Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, Allen Ginsberg, Carolyn Cassidy, etc.). He supplied pseudonyms only at the insistence of his publishers, who were worried about possible lawsuits. In effect, Kerouac was trying to tell the "true" story of the way it was on the road in the early 1950s, to erase the artificial distinction between art and life. And there is no irony or detachment in the discourse of the narrator Sal Paradise, from the moment that he first declares his true allegiances: