What's Your Road, Man?: Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac's On the Road

L=6IÉHNDJGGD69!B6C4

What’s Your Road, Man? 8G>I>86A:HH6NHDC ?68@@:GDJ68ÉHDCI=:GD69

EDITED BY HILARY HOLLADAY AND ROBERT HOLTON

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS / CARBONDALE

Copyright © 2009 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 12 11 10 09

4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data What’s your road, man? : critical essays on Jack Kerouac’s On the road / edited by Hilary Holladay and Robert Holton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-2883-3 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8093-2883-6 (alk. paper) 1. Kerouac, Jack, 1922–1969. On the road. 2. Autobiographical fiction, American—History and criticism. 3. Beat generation in literature. I. Holladay, Hilary. II. Holton, Robert, [date]. PS3521.E735O55 2008 813'.54—dc22 2008014766 The editors wish to thank the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities for generous support during the final stages of this book’s composition. Permission to reprint materials has been granted by the Ginsberg Trust; the Estate of Stella Kerouac, John Sampas, literary representative; the Newberry Library; Robert Cowley; Chris Jennison; Dave Moore; and Berghahn Journals. Printed on recycled paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. ∞

For David Amram

8DCI:CIH EgZ[VXZ ^m  =^aVgn=daaVYVn >cigdYjXi^dc &  GdWZgi=daidc  &#GZk^h^dchd[@ZgdjVX/I]ZAdc\!HigVc\ZIg^ed[i]ZDci]ZGdVYIneZhXg^eih   BViiI]ZVYd  '#;gZZLVnhVcYHigV^\]iGdVYh/I]Z>ciZghiViZhd[HVaEVgVY^hZVcY&.*%h6bZg^XV (*   AVgh:g^`AVghdc  (#I]ZIZcZbZci8VhiaZ/@ZgdjVXÉhAjbeZc"7d]Zb^V +%   GdWZgi=daidc  )#Æ6YkZcijgZh^c6jid":gdi^X^hbÇ/:Xdcdb^Zhd[IgVkZa^c\ BVhXja^c^in^cDci]ZGdVYVcYI]Z;^ghiI]^gY ,,   BVgnEVc^XX^V8VgYZc  *#EVgVaaZa9Zhi^c^Zh^cI]Z7Zaa?VgVcYDci]ZGdVY ..   =^aVgn=daaVYVn  +#Æ9ZY^XViZYid6bZg^XV!L]ViZkZgI]Vi>hÇ/@ZgdjVXÉhKZgh^dchd[Dci]ZGdVY &&-   G#?#:aa^h  ,#L]ZcBZm^XdAdd`ha^`ZBZm^Xd/I]Z=neZggZVa^oVi^dcd[ GVXZVcYi]ZEjghj^id[i]Z6ji]Zci^X &(.   GVX]ZaA^\V^g^  -#I]ZBV`^c\hd[EVgVY^hZ &**   B^X]VZaH`Vj  .#IneZiVa`^c\/Kd^XZVcYEZg[dgbVcXZ^cDci]ZGdVY &+.   I^b=jci &%#8VcDci]ZGdVYiÉhVcVcnl]ZgZgdVY[dgVcnWdYnVcn]dl#L]ZgZWdYn]dl4Ç Å9ZVcBdg^VginheZV`^c\idHVaEVgVY^hZ

So much of what Jack Kerouac wrote in On the Road (1957) seemed to spring full-blown from the collective unconsciousness of post–World War II America. The yearning for personal relevance, the awkward infatuation with cultures other than his own, that restless desire to get up and move—these feelings were not Kerouac’s alone, though he perhaps better than anyone else of his generation knew how to put them into words. And when Kerouac (in the guise of his protagonist Sal Paradise) wrote about the bulging landscape and riddling roadways of the United States and Mexico, he was not just taking his readers on one long trip or another: he was documenting the physical, social, psychological, and religious strands of experience that make up any real journey. Kerouac’s readers, even his detractors, have always understood that the road trip stands for the life trip. By the time one reaches the last page of On the Road, it is clear that the casual, the silly, and the spectacular moments in Sal Paradise’s travels all add up to something life-changing and life-affirming. And yet, what is that something? The significantly named Paradise does not say. We are left to figure out his journey’s meaning for ourselves and to apply its lessons—whatever they are—to our own lives. Like Henry David Thoreau, whom Kerouac admired, the novel’s narrator implicitly asks us to think about who we are, what we want to do, and with whom we want to spend our time. Not only does Paradise’s meandering tale invite this sort of deep reflection; it also inspires interaction. In an age when many people prefer

^m

=^aVgn=daaVYVn

their cell phones and laptops to the person right in front of them, reading On the Road in public can get a face-to-face conversation started. It is a book that commands eye contact. In 2007, the year marking its fiftieth anniversary, On the Road and its charismatic author garnered the sort of worldwide media attention that warrants some comment in itself. Kerouac, who was remarkably prescient when it came to imagining his future reputation, would have been pleased but not entirely surprised by all the publicity. Since he had gone to the trouble of saving his 120-foot-long scroll manuscript of On the Road—the single-spaced, single paragraph that he typed rapidly in April of 1951—even the international traveling exhibit of the scroll and the publication of On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking, 2007) might have seemed perfectly natural to him. But for those of us who teach Kerouac and write about him and his books, and for those who have loved On the Road ever since they first read it, the year was nothing short of extraordinary. Rarely a week—rarely a day—went by in 2007 that Kerouac’s name did not show up in a newspaper or magazine, or on TV or radio. Now more than ever, it seems, reading Paradise’s tale brings out the questing young wanderer in many a reader, no matter one’s age, gender, nationality, or predilection for all things Beat. Paradise extends his hand and we reach for it: our fingers not quite touching his, we dream of his travels, our travels, and all the love, excitement, and sorrow in between. The public acclaim, thankfully, has not diminished the private yearnings that many people feel when reading this gentle-hearted, dizzyingly solipsistic book. It may seem that scholars are arriving late at the Kerouac party, but as my coeditor, Robert Holton, points out in this volume’s introduction, that is not entirely true. A handful of dedicated critics published important books about Kerouac’s writing within two decades of his death in 1969, and a number of biographers have filled in the details of Kerouac’s life. Without these books, current Kerouac scholarship would still be in its infancy. But it is nevertheless true that most scholars of twentieth-century American literature have long overlooked the Beat writers with whom Kerouac is always grouped. The questions that naysayers have posed about the value of Kerouac’s writing and the seriousness of the Beat Movement probably dissuaded many a graduate student from writing a dissertation on this compelling and prolific author. That is a shame but not a tragedy, since scholars both young and advanced in their careers are now turning their full attention to Kerouac and finding his books ripe for critical exegesis of many kinds. The volume that Robert Holton and I have assembled examines On the Road from ten different perspectives. These essays collectively represent an

m

EgZ[VXZ

enormous amount of research into On the Road’s literary, social, cultural, biographical, and historical contexts. In several of the essays, the application of critical theory illuminates the novel in ways that neither Kerouac nor his contemporary critics could have foreseen. Other essays enhance our understanding of the book through comparisons with a novel by a female contemporary (Sylvia Plath) and with Kerouac’s alternative versions of On the Road (including Visions of Cody). Kerouac’s portrayal of Mexicans is specifically addressed in one essay, while several others analyze issues of race, ethnicity, and sexuality in support of larger arguments. Still others reevaluate the novel’s place in American literature and comment on its continuing relevance. The first essay is Matt Theado’s “Revisions of Kerouac: The Long, Strange Trip of the On the Road Typescripts.” Through painstaking biographical and historical research, Theado has reconstructed Kerouac’s composition of his famous 1951 scroll manuscript of On the Road. Theado’s essay goes on to discuss the subsequent drafts of the novel that was finally published in 1957. From this documentary essay we turn to Lars Erik Larson’s “Free Ways and Straight Roads: The Interstates of Sal Paradise and 1950s America.” This essay examines Sal’s adventures in relation to the evolving interstate highway system of the late 1940s. As Larson writes, “Kerouac’s roads grant his protagonists freedom on a great number of different levels, including departures from capitalism, family kinships, adult conduct, heterosexuality, race, and nationality. Yet the novel’s desires run both ways, for it also stages a backlash against many of these liberations.” These roadways into the novel lead us to Robert Holton’s “The Tenement Castle: Kerouac’s Lumpen-Bohemia.” This essay, in its examination of the historical underpinnings of the bohemian label so often applied to Kerouac and his friends, helps us see both text and author in an entirely new light. “The positions occupied by Kerouac and the Beats can be located in terms of debates that arose more than a century before, when Parisian bohemians emerged from the tumult of the French Revolution brimming with artistic imagination, radical ideas, and oppositional attitudes,” Holton writes. On the Road is, among many other things, a novel about two footloose young men trying to define themselves not as Beats or bohemians but simply, and significantly, as men. As Mary Paniccia Carden shows in “‘Adventures in Auto-Eroticism’: Economies of Traveling Masculinity in On the Road and The First Third,” the works of Kerouac and Neal Cassady invite a comparative reading. Both books, Carden argues, “construct economies of masculinity in which male travelers negotiate and trade the markers of manhood encoded in Cassady’s ‘auto-erotic’ ideal. These forms of exchange, however, ultimately

m^

=^aVgn=daaVYVn

serve to destabilize connections that Kerouac and Cassady want and need to make between mobility, masculinity, and power.” I take a comparative approach of another kind in “Parallel Destinies in On the Road and The Bell Jar.” Although On the Road and the 1963 novel by Sylvia Plath are quite different on the surface, I argue that in their preoccupation with dying and their fundamental lack of direction, Sal Paradise and Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood have a great deal in common and are, in effect, equally beat. I show, furthermore, that The Bell Jar can be profitably read in the context of the Beat Movement, even though Plath chose not to ally herself with that movement. In an essay that looks at On the Road’s publication history from a perspective very different from Theado’s, we have “‘Dedicated to America, Whatever That Is’: Kerouac’s Versions of On the Road” by R. J. Ellis. Here, Ellis compares two versions of On the Road (the scroll manuscript and the published book) with the two published editions of Visions of Cody. Noting that the posthumously published 1972 edition of Cody functions “as a paratextual commentary upon Road’s aspirations, highlighting the inevitability of Sal’s failures and failings,” Ellis portrays On the Road as a fluid endeavor, which neither begins nor ends with the 1957 text. To date, scholars have only begun to respond to the novel’s conflicted portrayals of ethnicity and race. Rachel Ligairi advances the discussion considerably in her essay “When Mexico Looks like Mexico: The Hyperrealization of Race and the Pursuit of the Authentic.” Drawing on the writings of Jean Baudrillard, Ligairi reveals how Sal Paradise’s perceptions of what is real and what is only simulated determine his response to the unfamiliar people and places he encounters on his journeys in the United States and especially in Mexico. “Sal and Dean don’t recognize the gap between the simulation they project onto [the Mexican] people and the people themselves,” she writes. “Voiceless, they are relegated to the realm of the hyperreal, which Sal and Dean mistake for the authentic. And this is the novel’s final irony—at the very moment when IT seems attainable, simulacrum reigns supreme.” Sal Paradise’s perceptual difficulties have a lot to do with his tenuous sense of his own identity. So Michael Skau reveals in “The Makings of Paradise.” Given the confluence of political oppression and social experimentation that marked the Beats’ coming of age, Skau observes that Kerouac and his cohorts formed the “conviction that the personal identity of the individual was besieged; therefore, the integrity of that identity must be preserved at all costs. For Sal Paradise of On the Road, that means a quest for the idiosyncratic and often ambivalent identification of selfhood and

m^^

EgZ[VXZ

nostalgia for the security and irresponsibility of childhood in a world that seems to promise only the guarantees of aging and mortality.” The last two essays in this volume are by critics whose groundbreaking studies helped create the foundation for all subsequent Kerouac scholarship. In “Typetalking: Voice and Performance in On the Road,” Tim Hunt takes a new look at the novel he examined in his 1981 study, Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction. Returning to the novel he first encountered in 1971, Hunt asks, “[W]hy are we still able to read On the Road rather than just study it? And how might some understanding of this help us not only better appreciate the novel’s achievement but also better understand its significance as a cultural document, be clearer about the cultural work it has done, and more adequately assess the cultural work it can and cannot do?” Regina Weinreich’s essay, “Can On the Road Go on the Screen?” concludes this collection. The author of Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics: A Study of the Fiction (1987) addresses the challenges of filming a novel whose effect depends largely on the transformative power of its language. Though the book’s central friendship and its travelogue element beg for a Hollywood rendition, Weinreich argues that a new filmic vocabulary is needed in order to convey the novel’s ineffable spirit. Kerouac did not begin to receive his critical due in his lifetime. When he died in 1969, the vocabulary and theoretical structures didn’t yet exist to describe and probe all of what he was doing in On the Road. From our current vantage point, we are able to discuss his 1957 breakthrough in ways that were not available to earlier generations. In answer to the enigmatic question that Dean Moriarty poses to Sal Paradise—“What’s your road, man?”—scholars can go down many different critical paths. Although one collection cannot take on the full range of themes and issues that On the Road invites us to consider, the breadth of approaches in this volume indicates just how rich and nuanced Kerouac’s most popular novel really is.

m^^^

L=6IÉHNDJGGD69!B6C4

>CIGD9J8I>DC Robert Holton

The publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in September 1957 was an event whose significance must be considered on a number of levels. In the first place, of course, it was important for Kerouac himself. After many years of bohemian marginality, Kerouac was transformed, literally overnight, from an obscure coterie figure to a major American author. With the appearance of Gilbert Millstein’s adulatory New York Times review on September 5, Kerouac was vaulted into literary celebrity. Not only was the novel “an authentic work of art,” according to Millstein, its appearance amounted to nothing less than “a historic occasion.” On the Road, he declared, “is the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and whose principal avatar he is” (27). This review was itself an unlikely stroke of fortune: Millstein was substituting for the regular Times reviewer, and he was well aware of the Beats and already positively disposed toward their work. It was Millstein, for example, who had arranged for the publication in the Times of John Clellon Holmes’s “This Is the Beat Generation” in 1952, five years before Kerouac’s novel came out. To receive such a review in the Times guaranteed that Kerouac’s book would become a focus of national attention in the literary world. In addition, Millstein’s insistence that the author was himself his generation’s “principle avatar,” combined with the fact that the novel stayed so close to his actual life, ensured that Kerouac himself was to become the object of intense scrutiny. For some writers, those possessing the appropriate social and media skills, this sudden celebrity might have constituted a welcome ticket to the wide world of American literary fame, privilege, and prestige.

&

GdWZgi=daidc

Kerouac was not that kind of person, however, and things did not ultimately work out that way. While recognition as a serious and legitimate artist certainly constituted the fulfillment of one of Kerouac’s deepest ambitions, the immediate satisfaction that the Times review might have generated was to be somewhat short-lived. The laudatory responses dwindled as critics elsewhere, as though reacting against the initial celebration, began to take aim at him and at his novel, questioning his talent, his artistic integrity, and even his intelligence. The country’s major print media began to line up against Kerouac, against his book, and against the Beat vision they understood it to represent. The Atlantic, the Chicago Tribune, Time, the Nation, Harper’s, and others all issued condemnations. The book was variously panned for its writing style, its structure, its tone, its intelligence, and its morality. The New York Times, where Millstein’s laudatory review had appeared, published a second review in the Sunday paper, a review in which the original praise was reversed and the novel dismissed. Among the postwar cultural establishment, a consensus began to emerge that, far from being an important statement about American modernity and the cultural possibilities it afforded, the book was a descent into pointless decadence produced by a naïve author who was both out of his intellectual depth and lacking in basic talent. Although Kerouac had long lived the life of a bohemian and a rebel, he had nonetheless harbored dreams of a more traditional literary success, of winning respect in the world of intellectuals and artists. As the son of working-class French-Canadian immigrants, a man whose first language in childhood was not English and who grew up without access to the forms of cultural capital available in more middle-class communities, Kerouac may have been even more sensitive to the criticism and rejection of the establishment once it began. His desire to write arose at a very early age and was perhaps his life’s most stable point even throughout all the periods of transience and substance abuse. Not only was he a committed writer; his letters make it clear that he also remained a voracious and serious reader. The literary world, however, passed judgment on him and on his work. While his subsequent publications continued to attract loyal readers, he remained more of a succès du scandale than a serious literary figure, and, during his lifetime at least, he was never again to have such a brush with that particular combination of fame and respect. The attacks were inevitably personal as well as literary. Rather than maintaining fiction’s traditional separation between characters and author, On the Road was known to be very close to autobiography. People who loved the book and people who loathed it thus had one thing in common: they all

'

>cigdYjXi^dc

expected Kerouac to be one of the characters he described, to be one of the characters he had imbued with almost legendary stature. To make matters worse, many were unable to remember that Dean Moriarty was not the narrator and they expected Kerouac to be some version of a hyperkinetic Neal Cassady. While at one time he might at least have been able to present himself legitimately as the model for Sal Paradise, a space of several years separated the events recounted in the novel and book’s eventual publication. At thirty-five, he was no longer the young adventurer whose wanderings and explorations are narrated there, whose mythic American vision seamlessly blended the innocent and the decadent, the aspirations of a romantic dreamer and the experience of a street-smart hustler. The intervening years of hard living had taken a physical and emotional toll on Kerouac. According to Joyce Johnson, his lover at that time, the immediate result was a celebrity swirl that left him dazed and confused: “All the men wanted to fight him,” she recollects, and “ [a]ll the women wanted to fuck him” (Gifford and Lee 241). Meanwhile, he began to retreat more and more into alcohol, a strategy that of course inevitably compounded his difficulties. Complicating all this, the novel quickly became swept up in the beatnik fad that erupted briefly in popular culture and, as a result, it was taken no more seriously by many readers (and nonreaders) than any other subcultural accessory. The search for a new attitude and a new aesthetic, undertaken by Kerouac and Ginsberg as Columbia undergraduates, had culminated in national attention and an astonishing influence, but much of this attention trivialized what Kerouac had intended as a serious set of critical positions, aesthetic choices, and cultural attitudes. Suddenly there were “beatniks” all over the country and the media spotlight did nothing to illuminate the novel’s more substantial intentions. While this success may have exceeded their wildest dreams in some ways, much of it nonetheless alienated and confused Kerouac himself. Ginsberg was always more adept at navigating the perilous waters of celebrity, but Kerouac lacked that set of skills: he could be earnest and frank when a glib sound-bite might have been more effective, embarrassingly drunk at moments when he should have maintained his self-possession, disarmingly honest when he should have remained on his guard. When the beatnik craze exhausted itself through media overexposure, On the Road, like other cultural ephemera of the period, was packed away, leaving Kerouac somewhat abandoned, denied the serious readership he so desperately desired. In the minds of much of the reading public, On the Road and his other novels were condescendingly consigned to the ranks of the naïve and the passé. Instead of garnering the cultural respect he had hoped for and worked for, he had become “King of the Beats”—a

(

GdWZgi=daidc

title that seemed to mock his real ambitions—and his novel was brushed aside both by many critics and by much of the literary readership he had hoped to reach. This bleak summary may overstate the negative, but it is hard to find much to celebrate in Kerouac’s life following September 1957. Despite periods of relative calm and productivity, his general trajectory appears to have been more or less set, and few people familiar with his situation could have been entirely surprised when he died in 1969, at the age of 47, as a result of complications due to alcoholism. Among the hippie generation, the heirs of the Beats, he was still admired, despite his attempts to distance himself from many aspects of that phenomenon. As a literary figure, however, his reputation was at a low ebb. Some had declared the novel to be passé almost as soon as it appeared because it was thought to be tied a specific bohemian subculture whose prime had already passed when the book came out in 1957. Such confidence was, however, misplaced. Not only did the subculture transform itself into a counterculture and grow exponentially over the next decade or so, the novel outlived all this. His work, particularly On the Road, began to take on a life of its own, not only in bohemian enclaves such as Greenwich Village, where the hip alternative scene continued to flourish and evolve, but on university campuses across the country. As a new postwar sensibility began to emerge, On the Road remained one of its key texts. It was both a catalyst and a signifier of generalized dissent for a broad range of (mostly) young people from the political New Left to cultural rebels such as Bob Dylan and prominent literary figures such as Thomas Pynchon, who has characterized it as “a book I still believe is one of the great American novels” (xvi). For many years, interest in Kerouac’s life and legend far outstripped critical interest in his writing, and a number of ambitious biographies appeared over the decades following his death, including books by Ann Charters (1973), Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee (1978), Dennis McNally (1979), Gerald Nicosia (1983), and Tom Clarke (1984). Indeed, biographies of Kerouac proliferated, with some straying toward hagiography. This public fascination with his life demonstrates his elevation into the pantheon of bohemian heroes rather than any deep and widespread engagement with his work. Critical studies were much rarer, as the literary establishment and academic critics continued to resist On the Road for many years. Indeed, to work on Kerouac was, at one time, a choice that could put an academic career in jeopardy. The work of critics such as Robert Hipkiss (1976), John Tytell (1976), Tim Hunt (1981), Warren French (1986), and Regina Weinreich (1987) stands out against the general current of neglect during the 1970s and 1980s.

)

>cigdYjXi^dc

In recent years, however, interest in Kerouac and the Beat Generation writers has blossomed, and On the Road now appears more regularly than ever on bookstore shelves and university English course reading lists. Websites devoted to Kerouac and the Beats continue to appear, expressing interests ranging from those of devoted fans to those of sophisticated critics. The Gap’s use of Kerouac in an ad for khakis registers his importance at one cultural level, while the attention paid to his work in academic journals registers another. On one hand, first editions fetch up to $10,000; in paperback, on the other hand, On the Road is still reputed to be one of the most stolen books. Not many novels manage to remain in print for five decades, but, despite its many detractors, On the Road has done so—and it continues to attract avid new readers still today. It is a credit to Kerouac’s vision and artistry that the book’s readership today still arises at least as much from personal, word-of-mouth recommendations as from the requirements of university English professors. My own first contact with Beat writing came when, in my early teens, I picked up a copy of The Beats, Seymour Krim’s 1960 anthology, at a garage sale. I had heard of the Beats and had a vague idea that they were “nonconformists” but had no clear idea what that designation entailed. I knew that respectable people disapproved of them, but beyond that I had little sense of what they actually did or wrote. Still, this combination was sufficient to arouse my interest, and I began reading as I walked home. I no longer remember which pieces I read first, but by the time I reached home, something like a minor version of what Althusser calls “interpellation” was underway. My understanding of myself as a subject and of my subjective relation to the world had begun to shift. Soon, I was reading everything I could find by the Beats, particularly by Kerouac, whose On the Road seemed to be a definitive work—although what exactly it defined remained vague in my mind at that point. Novelist Robert Stone described his youthful reaction in similar terms: On the Road floored me. . . . Here in this book with its primordially American title, by a young man with a semipronounceable name, was the World. . . . On the Road was the narrative of someone I imagined as not much older than myself and so like myself that—he was me! Me, and out occupying my rightful place in the lost World.

Stone also cites an interesting comment by distinguished journalist Michael Herr: “There are two kinds of things guys like us do,” according to Herr. “The things we do because we read Jack Kerouac and the things we do because we read Hemingway.” The gravitational pull of Kerouac’s writing

*

GdWZgi=daidc

on a particular segment of the generation coming of age in that post-war milieu was exceptionally powerful. In the early 1990s, long after my first encounter with On the Road, I was putting together a reading list for a course titled “Twentieth-Century American Fiction.” Since entering the world of academic literary studies, I had become interested in modernism and postmodernism and all the theoretical debates that surround these fields, but I had not given the Beat writers much attention for years. Reading On the Road for this course after so many years was fascinating. Not only was I considerably older and altered in my thinking after years of literary study, but cultural attitudes toward fundamental social issues such as race and gender had changed drastically. While this reading was not the transformative experience it had once been, it was certainly no less engaging, and its interest now was both personal and, on another level, academic. The personal level provided a window onto some aspects of the young man I had once been, a matter of some importance to me perhaps but not to anyone else. More interesting though was the fact that while I had imagined myself to be uniquely individual in my neo-Beat trajectory, I was of course one among many thousands of young people exploring that terrain. Studying the novel from such a distance—temporal and academic—permitted an entirely new access to text and context, an access now shaped by an acquired sense of American history—literary and political—and of the theoretical concerns that had by then come to inform all my reading. This return to Kerouac was fascinating for what it revealed about the period, about the remarkable cultural trajectory that developed around Kerouac and the other Beats, and that then overlapped with the rise of the New Left and all the tumult that made the 1960s such a charged decade. On the Road has emerged as one of the central literary works of the postwar period. From a distance of five decades, it is hardly surprising to find that some of the attitudes articulated in the novel appear dated, even as others appear remarkably prescient. But, fifty years after its publication, while the impulse behind my own renewed interest in On the Road sprang from sources that could hardly have been more different than those that animated my original encounter, it is gratifying to find that the book still retains its ability to be interesting, thought-provoking, and pleasurable. These are, after all, some of the primary criteria of good literature. Ldg`h8^iZY Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin’s, 1978.

+

>cigdYjXi^dc

Krim, Seymour. The Beats. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Gold Medal Books, 1960. Millstein, Gilbert. “Books of the Times.” New York Times. Sept. 5, 1957: 27. Pynchon, Thomas. “Introduction.” Slow Learner. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. Stone, Robert. “American Dreamers: Melville and Kerouac.” New York Times. Dec. 7, 1997. . Accessed 30 Sept. 2006.

,

1 G:K>H>DCHD;@:GDJ68/I=:ADCED; I=:DCI=:GD69INE:H8G>EIH Matt Theado

69ZeVgijgZVcYV7Z\^cc^c\ Just after sunset on Sunday, January 21, 1951, Jack Kerouac was all set to ride in style to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. Situated in the back seat of a Cadillac limousine outside his friend Henri Cru’s apartment, Kerouac sat beside his new wife, Joan, at the outset of what promised to be a big night on the town. Cru had gotten them all tickets to a concert featuring the legendary jazz musician Duke Ellington and his orchestra. The concert, a benefit for the NAACP, marked only the second time that the Metropolitan Opera House had hosted a jazz band of any kind and would be recorded by the Voice of America radio network. In addition to performing old favorites, such as “Take the ‘A’ Train,” Ellington would debut a new piece, “Harlem,” a tone-poem commissioned for the NBC Symphony as part of a New York Suite (“Duke Ellington”; “Ellington Heard”). Cru had sprung for the tickets, at $1.50 apiece, a gesture that reached back to his days in San Francisco when he had tried to indulge Kerouac in a fine time, sharing his house, his money, his good nature—everything but his fetching girlfriend. Tonight’s foursome, including Cru’s current girlfriend, were stylishly attired; Cru had arranged the limousine and even wore a commemorative tie painted for the occasion. As the limousine pulled away from the curb to head to Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway, Neal Cassady came jogging up to the car, toting his packed bag and hoping to hop a ride to Penn Station so he could catch a train to begin his return trip to San Francisco. Less than a week earlier, Kerouac had been jubilant at his old buddy’s unexpected arrival, but this time, he offered little in the way of a greeting. Cru refused to allow Cassady to ride

-

GZk^h^dchd[@ZgdjVX

with them downtown, and Kerouac sullenly waved goodbye to his friend through the window from the back seat. This pensive moment provided the closing scene of Kerouac’s On the Road, which he would begin typing in earnest ten weeks later. The weekend had dawned as if spring were rolling into Manhattan in midwinter, with record-setting temperatures on Saturday soaring to sixtythree degrees Fahrenheit. People all across the city headed out to parks, and those in the boroughs who owned cars rolled up their garage doors and drove out into the country, instigating serious traffic jams that were exacerbated by the morning fog (“62.9 Sets Record”). Cassady returned by train from upstate on Friday evening, having spent several days wrangling with Diana Hansen, his third wife, over their future and the welfare of their son, Curtis, who had been born on November 7, and whom Cassady was seeing for the first time. Although Kerouac would write in On the Road that he did not know why Cassady-based character Dean Moriarty had made the long trip east, except to see his friend, Cassady in fact had several complicated purposes for coming, the main one being to settle issues with Diana, currently in Tarrytown, before returning to San Francisco and his second wife, Carolyn, and the children they had together. Cassady had concluded his discussions with Diana by Friday afternoon (Cassady wrote to Carolyn that “every little thing is completely & perfectly & absolutely OK—i.e. we have come to an understanding,” while Kerouac would write of Moriarty “he spent one night explaining and sweating and fighting, and she threw him out” [Cassady 274; On the Road 305]), and he rode the train back into Manhattan. He had other friends in the city besides Kerouac; in fact, Cassady wouldn’t leave town on that Sunday evening train after all, opting to spend another night in the city. However, Kerouac recognized the poignancy of the moment, and he knew intuitively that this bleak farewell with its conspicuous contrasts—one friend in a limo with his sweetheart on his way to the Metropolitan Opera House and the other bending solo to the cold road in his “motheaten overcoat” (306)—would serve to close the most important novel he ever wrote. Fittingly, the temperatures had dropped to a bracing thirty degrees by sundown on Sunday evening, and the springlike weekend ended in darkness and return to winter. There is no correspondence in Kerouac’s book to the fact that when Neal arrived, he and Joan were living at his mother’s apartment in Queens, at 94–21 134th Street, Richmond Hill. Gabrielle Kerouac’s apartment was a model of decent middle-class life, a dominion she ruled over while providing cooking, cleaning, and nurturance for her son when he was not on the road or living it up in the city. In the small living room, cushioned chairs

.

BViiI]ZVYd

were arranged around the television, and even Kerouac’s writing desk was positioned so that he could swivel his chair to see the TV. Joan was not happy, to say the least, about the living arrangements; she did not get along with Gabrielle, who spoke French with her son, and her hasty marriage was falling far short of her expectations. Within a week or two after Cassady returned to San Francisco, Joan quietly found a waitressing job at Stouffer’s restaurant and moved back into the city, renting a studio apartment in the Chelsea district at 454 West Twentieth Street without telling Kerouac. When the movers arrived with her belongings, though, Joan was taken aback to see that Kerouac had ridden along with them, bringing his writing desk (Joan Kerouac 191). He must have brought something else, too—some long sheets of paper he had found in the loft he and Joan had shared in the weeks following their wedding. This paper apparently had been the possession of Bill Cannastra, a mutual friend, who had been killed in a subway mishap in October 1950. Shortly after his death, Joan rented his loft, preserving it as a kind of shrine to his memory, and that is where she was living on November 3, when Kerouac hollered up to her windows (there was no buzzer or doorbell) and introduced himself. They were married on November 17 and shared the loft for a brief time. By leaving Cannastra’s things just as they had been, Joan conserved his personal effects that included, by some crucial fluke, a supply of paper that Kerouac happened to find one day while poking through the various cupboards. Joan later recalled that he immediately hit on the idea of rolling the paper through his typewriter so that he could write continuously without having to roll in a new sheet after filling the previous one (Joan Kerouac 141). Kerouac must have brought the paper with them to Richmond Hill, and then he must have grabbed it again as he dashed out of his mother’s apartment to hitch a ride on the moving truck. Thus it was that Kerouac, his writing desk, his typewriter, and long sheets of paper were deposited into a pleasant Chelsea neighborhood as the winter season receded and the coming spring promised to warm the tree-lined streets. Chelsea is a neighborhood steeped in literary history. Malcolm Cowley, who would later play a vital role in publishing On the Road, had lived nearby on West Twenty-second Street in the 1930s, and poet Edwin Arlington Robinson had lived on the top floor of a West Twenty-second Street tenement from 1901 to 1905. One neighborhood landmark still stands much as it did throughout the twentieth century; built in 1883, the Chelsea Hotel was New York’s tallest building until 1902. Mark Twain, O. Henry, Edgar Lee Masters, Dylan Thomas, and Tennessee Williams all spent time there. Thomas Wolfe wrote Look Homeward, Angel there, and later, Bob Dylan would write

&%

GZk^h^dchd[@ZgdjVX

“Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” there. In his Chelsea apartment, Kerouac continued an extraordinary exchange of letters with Cassady. These letters mark the genesis of Kerouac’s On the Road as readers would come to know it (Kerouac had been working for years on various versions of a book he called “On the Road”) and also contain the seeds of his later works. For a time, the newly wed couple lived the reasonably calm and harmonious life that Kerouac had long pined for and would look back on in later years with a warm reverence. Friends who rang them up at CHElsea 2–9615 or just dropped by their apartment were pleasantly surprised by the domestic tranquility (Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters: 1940–1956 314). Joan found a better waitressing job at The Brass Rail, and Kerouac supplemented their income by writing movie script synopses for Twentieth Century Fox, earning between twenty-five and thirty-five dollars per week. The main issue for him, though, was not how to support his household but how to write the novel that he had been plugging away at for years. Fueled by inspiration from Cassady’s long letters; by competition with his friend John Holmes, who had just put the final period to the first “Beat Generation” novel, Go; by his wife’s curiosity and by lifelong literary aspirations, Kerouac simply ignited. In twenty-one days in April he punched his typewriter keys onto the lengths of paper and produced a long unparagraphed strip of text that would define him as a writer and an American icon. Almost immediately, however, the actual facts of the composition were blurred by rumor, misstatement, and faulty memory, creating a nebulous chronicle that is mixed parts fact, yarn, and legend about the distinctive characteristics of the scroll typescript, the subsequent typescripts that were produced from it, and the whole journey from inception to publication of one of America’s greatest novels. The most significant of the long-lasting myths are these: that Kerouac wrote the novel while he was high on Benzedrine; that he wrote the scroll on teletype paper; that the typescript’s prose was unpunctuated; that Kerouac was unwilling to revise; that the reaction of his editor, Robert Giroux, upon seeing the scroll format caused Kerouac to withdraw the novel, refusing to change a word; and that the prose style of the scroll was significantly different from Viking’s 1957 publication. Getting the facts on the stages of On the Road’s publication is no easy matter, and the entire path may never be completely retraced. Æ6A^\]ic^c\Ine^hiÇ Even in his youth, Kerouac was an excellent typist; he possessed an almost athletic prowess for typing. Such dexterity and endurance were essential elements of a typist’s skill, though, for producing text on a typewriter

&&

BViiI]ZVYd

is a physical act, much more so than typing on a computer keypad. The typewriter’s keys have to be punched downward rather than tapped in order to imprint the page with the ink, and one frequently catches references to typists hammering at their machines. Looking back from today’s perspective of word processing, one might conclude that Kerouac’s tremendous feat in typing—some 125,000 words in twenty-one days—stands at the apex of typewriting, a climax at the intersection of typing and literature, the occasion of an artist approaching the peak of his ability while driving the available technology to its limits. Though it hailed from sputtering, clanking prototypes, the modern typewriter eventually transformed business and literature. Compared with today’s word processors, typewriters demanded more exacting discipline as they turned out an instant permanence in their pages, their product imbued with finality. Whereas earlier writers once could produce only handwritten leaves, by the 1950s even amateurs at the kitchen table cranked out pages that approximated the patina of published work. Typewritten pages provide a windfall for textual scholars: the early “drafts” of today’s word-processing authors evaporate in the airstream of recursive writing as typeovers and one-keystroke cuts remove all traces of previous wordings, while a typewriter’s drafts survive and even the mistakes often are preserved under a row of xxxxxx’s. During the period of boosterism and high hopes of the post-Depression era, the typewriter was one ticket to success, and Remington, Royal, L.C. Smith, and Underwood—among others—battled for the home-use typewriter market by promising free trials, easy monthly payments, and free typewriting courses. When Kerouac was growing up, he read boys’ adventure magazines, such as Thrilling Detective, Weird Tales, Star Western, or Doc Savage, which regularly featured advertisements aimed at the young man who wanted to gain social and financial achievement. A November 1937 issue of Dime Western, published when Kerouac was fifteen years old, displayed several typewriter ads, including this sensational ad for the Royal Portable: “The world is looking for men who can put their ideas down in clear, straight-forward type. Can you? Get our new 32-page book, Free, that gives valuable tips on getting ahead.” The ad concludes, “68% of the men who answer this ad will be on their way to success.” Hyperbole aside, by the 1950s, the typewriter was an essential tool in both business and literature. Kerouac’s father, Leo, worked first as a newspaperman, then as a printer in Lowell, before working as an itinerant linotypist in New Haven and elsewhere. Jack grew up in a world of type, galleys, and proofs; he recalled many boyhood afternoons spent in his father’s print shop (Nicosia 23–24). When his Spotlight Print shop went out of business in 1938, Leo brought his

&'

GZk^h^dchd[@ZgdjVX

typewriter home to 35 Sarah Avenue (Visions of Cody 94). Leo had written news copy, editorials, and letters on this typewriter; immediately, Jack used it for writing his own stories as well as his latest baseball fantasy league news. If his account in Visions of Cody is reliable, he later used the same typewriter to prepare his first published novel, The Town and the City (94). This typewriter from his father’s shop was probably the very typewriter that he used for On the Road. He claims that he used it after the composition of On the Road for typing up early sections of Visions of Cody. Incidentally, in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1941, Kerouac rented the typewriter he used for composing his collection of short stories, Atop an Underwood; his family had moved to New Haven, he himself had been traveling, and it is likely that his own Underwood was unavailable to him (Jack Kerouac, “Here I Am” 130–32; Vanity of Duluoz 96–97). Kerouac loved to type. He repeatedly expressed in his letters and journals the satisfaction he gained from seeing the neat lines of print on a growing stack of pages. He once wrote in a job application letter that as a teenager he had operated a “one-man typing agency” and held paying jobs for typing agencies (Jack Kerouac, “Background” 5, 65). When he was nineteen years old, Kerouac wrote, “My heart resides in a typewriter, and I don’t have a heart unless there’s a typewriter somewhere nearby, with a chair in front of it and some blank sheets of paper (“Today” 167). In 1947 Kerouac wrote to Cassady that he was enjoying “the first time at a typewriter for weeks, and you being an old typist, and you know the feeling you get, just writing anything that comes to your head, ‘scribbling away,’ etc. you just like to see the words come out on the page, small and neat and all in straight lines” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 113). Kerouac’s close friend and writing confederate John Clellon Holmes witnessed Kerouac’s typing feats and said that Kerouac “just flung it down. He could disassociate himself from his fingers, and he was simply following the movie in his head. Jack was a lightning typist” (Gifford and Lee 156). Holmes went on to describe how Kerouac could type conversation-paced dictation with complete accuracy. Kerouac reportedly could type at the rate of one hundred words per minute; at that pace he would have to stop frequently to roll fresh sheets of paper into his typewriter. His typed letters reveal that he sometimes typed right off the bottom of the page. Although Kerouac frequently wrote by hand, for him the performance of typing was one with the act of writing—to be an expert typist meant that he excelled beyond others, that he was a writer, in the way that his physical speed, strength, and recklessness defined him as a football athlete. He once pondered, “I wonder what working people think of me when they hear my typewriter clacking in the middle of the night”

&(

BViiI]ZVYd

(Visions of Cody 259–60). Kerouac valued rhythm, a syncopation that could be enacted by a jazz musician or sounded on a typewriter keyboard. This sense of rhythm then carries over into the rhythmic meters of the language, the cadences of the narrative, and the pace and flow of the story itself. At the height of Kerouac’s popularity, Truman Capote uttered the long-lasting epigram belittling Kerouac’s work: “That’s not writing . . . it’s just typing!” (Cook 95–96). The comment would be more appropriate had Capote simply said, “Now that’s typing!” 7diidbaZhh8jehd[8d[[ZZVcY:cYaZhhH]ZZihd[EVeZg As winter turned to spring in 1951, newspaper headlines recounted the recent flooding in New Jersey, the spring-training baseball games being played in Florida, and the continuing imbroglio of the Korean War. Times Square movie marquees flashed the latest Hollywood fare; for fifty cents, filmgoers could enjoy Operation Pacific, starring John Wayne and Storm Warning, featuring Ronald Reagan, Ginger Rogers, Doris Day, and Steve Cochran. Television programming offered The Gene Autry Show as well as Groucho Marx as the host of You Bet Your Life, among numerous variety shows and westerns. The year’s biggest advertising campaign might have buoyed Kerouac’s spirits as he commenced to type his novel: “See the U.S.A in Your Chevrolet.” After a near-freezing night, sunshine broke through the clouds over Manhattan on Monday morning, April 2, 1951, and temperatures rose into the fifties during the afternoon. Twenty-nine-year-old Kerouac, wearing a fresh T-shirt and a pair of sheepskin slippers, sipped from the first of many cups of coffee and rolled an eleven-foot, eight-inch strip of paper into his typewriter. Apparently the paper initially had been too wide to fit in the typewriter platen, so Kerouac trimmed the right edge with scissors; in a few places, pencil marks remain, perhaps indicating that he measured before cutting. The translucent paper is somewhat rattly or crackly (but not so much as waxed paper), with a surface that resists ink absorption so that as Kerouac adjusted the paper—it tended to slant to the right as he typed—he left some smudgy thumbprints. Kerouac set his coffee cup beside his typewriter on a large roll-top desk that he described as “an old Faulknerian desk from a Southern mansion” given to him by his sister and brother-in-law as a birthday gift in 1950. In an autobiographical novel written the following year, he noted that he preferred certain items by his side when he wrote: several erasers, pencils, a pair of reading glasses, and his father’s pipe rack (Visions of Cody 94). Like millions of college students and hard-pressed office workers, Kerouac drank coffee

&)

GZk^h^dchd[@ZgdjVX

as his drug of choice throughout his typing session. Just after he finished the novel, he recommended “COFFEE” to Cassady as the best performance enhancer for writing: “I wrote that book on COFFEE . . . remember said rule. Benny, tea, anything I KNOW none as good as coffee for real mental power kicks” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 318). “Benny” is a nickname for the drug Benzedrine, an amphetamine marketed by Smith, Kline, and French, beginning in 1928, which could be abused by people who would break open the inhaler and eat the paper strip inside. Biographer Gerald Nicosia suggests that Kerouac had first tried Benzedrine as early as his prep school days at Horace Mann. Kerouac claimed that he and his friends used the drug in order to explore heightened consciousness, and also—as did many writers and musicians—he relied on the euphoria and stimulation associated with it to boost his imagination and stamina as he wrote. For decades, in countless publications, Kerouac’s 1951 typing session has been described as “Benzedrine-fueled” and “Benzedrine-drenched” and so on. This is not likely the case. In a private letter, Kerouac corrected Ginsberg when, years later, he wrote an article for the Village Voice saying that Benzedrine boosted Kerouac’s typing feat. Kerouac told Ginsberg in definite terms that “Road was not written on benny, on coffee” (Jack Kerouac, Letter to Allen Ginsberg 184). Through his career, both before and after the composition of On the Road, he wrote many words while high on Benzedrine, but his statements to Ginsberg and Cassady indicate that he did not write On the Road while under its influence. Why is this important? Kerouac faced a troubling reception by the public and by the critics. He was popular, though “notorious” might be a better word. However, from the very beginning of his fame, he battled to maintain that he was foremost a serious writer, an artist, even as his subject matter drew him into an underground world, one that brought associations of drugs and hoodlumism. Although coffee is a drug, it is widely accepted, even celebrated, and finds a welcome place in middle-class life. An illicit stimulant such as Benzedrine, however, evokes connotations of indiscipline, seediness, and addiction. For many readers, the influence of Benzedrine may serve to disparage the artistic creation. A novel written under the influence of drugs registers that association to the detriment of discussions of serious artistry, giving birth to, for example, Capote’s derisive remark. Coffee is simply more all-American, rendering the scene of the old-fashioned, clamped-down writer at work. It is true that Sal Paradise, Kerouac’s alter ego, smokes marijuana in the novel, but he does not ingest harder drugs; rather, he presents the character as a college boy who rides the road for experience before settling down at the end of the novel.

&*

BViiI]ZVYd

Kerouac’s urgent desire to tell his story meshed with his typewriting skill as he began recounting his on-the-road life. Casting aside novelistic convention, he used his friends’ real names and located the story’s genesis in Neal Cassady’s initial appearance four years earlier. As April sun filled the windows of his Chelsea apartment, Kerouac mistyped the very first words of the scroll: “I first met met Neal not long after my father died.” But this accidental repetition of “met” was just a warm-up for the torrent of prose that he was to pour forth onto the paper, for he went on to type thousands of lines precisely and neatly and with very few errors. Kerouac’s fingers must have been a blur as he typed and typed, drinking coffee and sweating while the scroll stretched to ten, twenty, thirty feet and beyond. The style of the novel has been called “spontaneous prose,” but that is a misnomer. In later years, Kerouac perfected the method he dubbed spontaneous prose, but he wrote On the Road before he produced in that style. To be sure, On the Road’s prose is fast and energetic with a no-holds-barred rush-of-storytelling feeling, but the prose is essentially in the standard narrative style. Like many other writers, Kerouac worked from notes and other materials as he drafted this novel. For instance, numerous passages match up word-for-word with the “Rain and Rivers” journal, begun January 31, 1949. Editor Douglas Brinkley notes that “most of the trips and observations in this journal” find their way into the novel (Windblown World 283). For one example, in the section of the scroll that corresponds to pages 156 through 158 (the start of part 2, section 8) of the published first edition, Kerouac adapted the journal for his novel. This passage is from his journal: And what is the Mississippi river? It is the River we all know and see. It is where Rain tends, and Rain softly connects us all together, as we together tend as Rain to the All-River of Togetherness to the Sea. For this is mortal earth we live on, and the River of Rains is what our lives are like—a washed clod in the rainy night, a soft plopping from drooping Missouri banks, a dissolving (Ah—a learning), a spreading, a riding of the tide down the eternal waterbed, a contributing to brown, dark, watery foams; a voyaging past endless lands & trees & Immortal Levees (for the Cities refuse the Flood, the Cities build Walls against Muddy Reality, the Cities where men play golf on cultivated swards which once were watery-weedy beneath our Flood)—down we go between shores Real and Artificial— down a long by Memphis, Greenville, Eudora, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port Allen, and Port Orleans, and Port of the Deltas (by Potash, Venice, and the Night’s Gulf of Gulfs)—down along, down along, as the earth turns and day follows night again and again. . . . (Windblown 329)

&+

GZk^h^dchd[@ZgdjVX

This is the way the journal entry appears in the typescript scroll and the published novel: What is the Mississippi river?—a washed clod in the rainy night, a soft plopping from drooping Missouri banks, a dissolving, a riding of the tide down the eternal waterbed, a contribution to brown foams, a voyaging past endless vales and trees and levees, down along, down along, by Memphis, Greenville, Eudora, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port Allen, and Port Orleans and Port of the Deltas, by Potash, Venice, and the Night’s Great Gulf, and out. (On the Road 156)

This segment is typical of the way Kerouac transformed his private, evocative journal language to construct the wording of the novel. Many pages of the journal are converted in this way. Some journal sentences are inserted nearly word-for-word. The journal contains this: “Then, with the radio on to a mysterious mystery program (and as I looked out the window and saw a sign saying ‘USE COOPER’S PAINT’ and answered: ‘Allright, I will.’) . . .” (Windblown 330; On the Road 156). In the next portion of the published novel, Dean narrates his adventures in Houston with Carlo and Hassel (158). Kerouac had noted in the “Rain and Rivers” journal that their passage through Houston reminded Neal of his time there with Herbert Huncke (Windblown 331). As he typed the scroll, Kerouac sketched the scene. Then, when he retyped the scroll as a subsequent draft, Kerouac lifted the scene directly from Cassady’s letter to him from September 9, 1947, along with much of his phrasing, including the line, “Her beautiful body was matched only by her idiot mind.” Kerouac also slotted in other letters to him from Cassady (July 3, 1949, and July 16, 1949), relating adventures that correspond to pages 185 and 186. At these points, Kerouac simply included whole passages of Cassady’s letters as Dean’s dialogue. Much of the scroll’s text flowed from Kerouac’s celebrated memory; many of his friends lauded his ability to recall past events and even to recreate entire conversations. But it is evident that as Kerouac typed, he had before him various journals, notes, and letters that found their way into the novel. Close scrutiny of available material indicates that he drew from these previously written materials when he typed the scroll, and then he incorporated additional and specific details from these materials when he retyped subsequent drafts of the novel later. After filling the first long sheet with text, Kerouac installed a new typewriter ribbon. As far as the construction of the scroll goes, he probably finished typing each sheet of paper before taping them together into a continuous scroll. For one thing, there is an inch or so of blank space

&,

BViiI]ZVYd

at the end of one sheet and again at the beginning of the subsequent one. If the sheets had been taped together before typing, then Kerouac would have simply typed continuously onto the subsequent sheet. Scrutiny of the scroll also indicates that in adhering the sheets together, Kerouac stretched clear tape over words that he had already typed, further substantiating that the sheets were typed first, then taped together. Kerouac first explored the technique as a youngster when his father brought his typewriter home in 1938. Sixteen-year-old Kerouac typed up a sports page called “Jack Lewis’s Baseball Chatter Number 3,” which clearly shows he fastened two regular sheets of typing paper together to form one long sheet. It appears that in this case, Kerouac adhered the sheets together first, then typed onto them. (A photograph of the sports page is featured in the Jack Kerouac ROMnibus, a CD-ROM packaged by Penguin in 1995.) In a letter to Cassady soon after completion of the scroll, Kerouac stated that he averaged 6,000 words per day, typing 12,000 words the first day and 15,000 words on the last day, April 22 (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 315). The first sheet of paper ran out on Kerouac as he worked on what would become part 1, section 5, after he typed the words, “got me a rich thick milkshake at the roadhouse to put some freeze in my hot, tormented stomach” (36). The second sheet ran out during what would become part 1, section 11: “suddenly I realized there was [sheet ends] a great hum of activity in the usually quiet night” (65). The third sheet ends during the scene of the “Ghost of the Susquehanna” during this sentence: “’But this ain’t the road to [sheet ends] Canada . . . ’” (105). Each of the first two sheets measures eleven feet, eight inches, leading the scroll’s curator, Jim Canary, to wonder if the sheets were not originally one wide sheet, sheared down the middle by Kerouac so they would fit into the typewriter. The remaining sheets also pair up in approximate length and could feasibly have been made by cutting one wider sheet in two. Sheet Number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Sheet Length 11' 8" 11' 8" 16' 9 ½" 16' 10 ½" 15' 7" 15' 9" 15' 6 ½" 15' 7 ½"

When he finished the story by describing Dean’s lonely departure from New York the night of the Duke Ellington concert, Kerouac had produced &-

GZk^h^dchd[@ZgdjVX

a magnificent 125,000 words by his own reckoning, on a roll of paper 120 feet long. Writing to his road buddy on May 22, 1951, Kerouac announced to Cassady that he had just written a book about him on a “strip of paper 120 foot long (tracing paper that belonged to Cannastra.),” completing it on April 22 (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 316). This typescript scroll can be designated T1. Then Kerouac told Cassady something that most of his readers, fans and critics alike, did not realize for decades to come and would have been completely shocked to discover: he said that he had been “typing and revising” the novel for thirty days since the scroll’s completion (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 317). He also told Cassady that Robert Giroux, the Harcourt, Brace editor who had worked with him on The Town and the City, Kerouac’s first published novel, was still waiting to see the book (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 315). In a subsequent letter dated June 10, Kerouac tells Cassady that he is “waiting for the word from Giroux,” indicating that sometime after April 22 and before June 10, he had typed the scroll’s text onto regular pages and submitted the typescript to Harcourt, Brace (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 318). Speaking to his bibliographer and future biographer, Ann Charters, in 1966, Kerouac said that after typing the scroll version, he “typed it up double-space on the typewriter with made-up names” (Charters 5). In an interview published in 1978, John Holmes recalled that immediately after completing the scroll, Kerouac “was typing it up. Typing to Jack—in Jack’s career—meant rewriting. That’s how he rewrote. . . . So it must have been a week after that that he finished and took it to Giroux and Harcourt, Brace” (Gifford and Lee 157). These details reveal that the great literary anecdote of Kerouac unfurling the freshly written scroll across Giroux’s desk, dramatically proclaiming a great new American novel—while Giroux scoffed, demanding how such a book could be edited—is greatly overemphasized as the official submissionand-rejection. Variations abound on the basic account of Kerouac ascending triumphantly to the Harcourt, Brace offices, announcing that his new work was divinely inspired, only to storm down moments later, dejected after his cool reception. Giroux recounted his version in a 1980 article written by poet Donald Hall: Mr. Giroux looked at the manuscript, as thick as a roll of paper towels, which had come uncorrected from the typewriter. Mr. Giroux suggested that “even after you have been inspired by the Holy Ghost, you have to sit down and read your manuscript.” In outrage Kerouac swore that nobody was going to change a single word, and, denouncing Mr. Giroux as a crass idiot, he left the office. Mr. Giroux says now: “I realized later that he was floating on a cloud. It was stupid of me. I should have said, ‘My God, &.

BViiI]ZVYd

you’ve just finished a book! This is a great occasion! Put the MS. on my desk and let’s go and have a drink to celebrate.’ Instead, reacting to his ultimatum, I came out flat-footedly with the most deflating statement I could have made.”( 22)

The plausible chronology begins with this dramatic gesture, but was almost certainly followed by a more traditional submission of a customary typescript. The thirty-day stint of “typing and revising”—nine days longer than was required to type the scroll—represents Kerouac’s creation of a regular typescript on sheets of paper so that he could make a proper submission to his publisher. Clearly, Giroux had not made a decision by June 10 and apparently had not even read the novel. Kerouac may have been deflated by his editor’s reaction, but his next move was to retype the novel. Two weeks later when Harcourt, Brace declined to publish the novel, it was a regular typescript, not the scroll typescript, that was considered, and this typescript can be designated T2. ÆIne^c\VcYGZk^h^c\Ç At some point, Kerouac worked on the typescript scroll or T2 or both at Lucien Carr’s loft on West Twenty-first Street, right next door—and connected by a fire escape—to Cannastra’s loft, where the scroll paper originated. However, it is difficult to determine exactly when Kerouac worked there, and this determination may be important in determining the stages of composition of On the Road. A dog belonging to Lucien Carr chewed up the end of the scroll while Kerouac was staying with Carr in his loft, probably while Kerouac was producing T2. Potchky, the dog, bit into the Mexico scene, corresponding to the middle of page 301 in the first published edition. Potchky’s misadventure may help today’s textual scholars put together a few pieces of the puzzle. Writing thirty years after the fact, Joan claimed that Kerouac stayed with her on West Twentieth Street until June 1951; when he found out that she was pregnant and that she wanted to keep her baby, according to Joan, he moved out to Lucien Carr’s loft (Joan Kerouac 204–5). However, these dates do not jibe with the chronology outlined above. Kerouac likely worked at both the Twentieth Street apartment and Lucien’s Twenty-first Street loft intermittently, perhaps moving over to Carr’s at times so that the commotion of his typing would not keep Joan awake. To further complicate matters, Kerouac used his mother’s Queens address for his return address when he wrote to Cassady on May 22, and he also penciled this address onto the reverse side of the scroll typescript.

'%

GZk^h^dchd[@ZgdjVX

Why is it so important to know where and when Kerouac typed? Kerouac worked intensely, energetically, but professionally and with focus. After several years of grappling with his road material, he made a conscientious effort to create a prose form matching the fluidity of his road experiences, and he did so while his marriage collapsed around him and as he typed in various locations. These twenty-one days in April reveal Kerouac’s faults as well as his genius. He had expected his wife to coddle him and supply him with a cozy home environment as his mother had done. In the end, his single-minded focus on art cost him his marriage. To make matters worse, he did not receive accolades as a writer, either, and critics tended, at first, to fault his methods and work ethic—or lack thereof. Rumors and mistruths have circulated through the years about the On the Road typescript scroll that have hurt Kerouac’s reputation as a professional writer. The most damaging rumor concerns the scale of editing done in-house at Viking. Some early critics purported that since Kerouac did not possess the talent to write the book, Viking’s editors had to take over the job. Other readers have mused over the language of the scroll, believing that the Viking publication sacrificed the loose, jazzy form of the original by subjecting the text to house styling and extensive cuts. Allen Ginsberg, who was among the first people to read the scroll typescript, would later complain that On the Road “was never published in its most exciting form—its original discovery—but hacked and punctuated and broken—the rhythms of it broken—by presumptuous literary critics in publishing houses” (“Review” 3). The confusion began with Kerouac’s own purported description of the scroll in an interview conducted by Alfred Aronowitz and published in the New York Post on March 10, 1959: “[I]t took me 21 days to write ‘On the Road.’ I wrote it on one long roll of paper with no periods, no commas, no paragraphs, all single-spaced.” The interview was widely read and subsequently widely quoted. Kerouac scholar Dave Moore wondered why Kerouac would have said such a thing, since he knew it to be untrue. Yes, the scroll is unparagraphed, but the sentences are all punctuated in the conventional way, meaning that Viking would have had neither to save Kerouac’s prose from illegibility nor to emasculate its raw, jazzy texture. Kerouac’s prose was clear and grammatical when first written. Moore examined the extended version of this interview, published ten years after the Post first ran the expurgated version. In the extended version, Kerouac says, “I wrote On the Road on a roll of Cannastra’s drawing paper . . . It was all no paragraphs, single-spaced—all one big paragraph. I had to retype it so they could publish it.” If the Post had printed Kerouac’s exact words the first time around, there would have been no confusion and one less myth to contend with.

'&

BViiI]ZVYd

Another prominent interview gave life to a different myth: On November 16, 1959, Kerouac appeared on The Steve Allen Show to read from On the Road, and he told thirty million television viewers that he used teletype paper for typing his long narratives—implying that On the Road had been typed on such paper. In front of the studio audience and under the glare of the lights and live cameras, Allen shared some light banter with Kerouac, relaxing his guest for the reading that was the main event. Allen casually mentioned Kerouac’s habit of rolling long sheets of paper through his typewriter and gave his guest an opening to comment on this technique. Maybe it just seemed much simpler for Kerouac to say that he used teletype paper (which by that time he had used for composing The Dharma Bums). The misleading story received substantial corroboration in Bruce Cook’s The Beat Generation in 1971, when facts concerning the early Beat life were still tough to come by. In this popular book, Cook states that Lucien Carr, who worked for United Press in 1951, stole a roll of teletype paper from his office. Cook quotes Carr recounting that he heard Kerouac typing all day long; Carr also mentions that his dog ate the last few feet of the teletype roll, and therefore this was by necessity the only section that Kerouac retyped. Cook does not mention Joan or any location other than Lucien’s Twenty-first Street loft, neither does he refer to tracing paper nor any regular typescript. And so for years, many readers assumed that Kerouac had typed onto a teletype roll. Kerouac later wrote The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Vanity of Duluoz on teletype rolls, but he wrote nothing on such paper in regard to On the Road. T2 consists of 295 sheets of paper that are somewhat longer than standard eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch typing paper sheets; the paper may be described as resembling unlined legal-pad sheets. The typescript is double-spaced and paginated to 297, but pages 136 and 166 are skipped. Close scrutiny indicates the same typewriter that produced T1 likely produced T2. Kerouac’s claim that he had been “typing and revising” is corroborated by numerous significant differences between T1 and T2. Most immediately evident are the changes in characters’ names from the scroll. Here, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg are Dean Pomeray and Justin Moriarty, respectively. Kerouac would change these names again in the subsequent typescript, but other names would make the transition from T2 to the published version: Marylou, Tim Gray, Chad King, Tommy Snark, Roy Johnson, Roland Major, and others. Kerouac also changed the location of Neal/Dean’s reform school from Colorado to Wyoming in an effort to disguise the character. In the subsequent typescript, Kerouac had the opportunity to access his source material and work in greater detail. For example, on page 6 of T2,

''

GZk^h^dchd[@ZgdjVX

he inserted verbatim a letter Neal Cassady had written to him on March 7, 1947, describing his attempted seductions on his bus ride from New York to Denver (see Cassady 17–19). T2 contains numerous pencil emendations in Kerouac’s hand as well as black crayon excisions of words, lines, and whole passages. One cannot determine at what point in the composition process these emendations were made—they may have been made at a much later time—but it is clear that Kerouac undertook the name changes, the addition and deletion of material, and even the toning down of sexual language on his own while typing in Lucien Carr’s loft, before he ever formally submitted the novel for a publisher’s consideration. This is important to note as one traces the stages of On the Road’s composition because the second typescript represents Kerouac’s official submission to Harcourt, Brace, and thus to the professional publishing industry. Following Harcourt, Brace’s rejection, T2 then embarked on a wide-ranging voyage through the turbulent seas of New York publishers. In addition to sailing through Harcourt, Brace offices, the stack of pages also navigated Ace Books; Criterion; Bobbs Merrill; Scribner’s; Viking; Farrar Straus Young; Little, Brown; and Dutton. According to various reports, the scroll did surface at a number of these Madison Avenue publishing offices. Carl Solomon, an editor at Ace Books, recalled that Kerouac “sent us this long scroll. My uncle [A. A. Wyn] said it looked like he took it from his trunk. . . . I don’t know where he got it, but we were used to these neat manuscripts, and I thought, ‘Gee, I can’t read this’” (Tytell 55). But its emergence was most likely for show; T2 was undoubtedly the official submission for most publishing houses. Farrar Straus Young editors did not reject the book outright; they suggested revisions, and Kerouac, despite his reputation for refusing to do revisions of any kind, agreed. In fact, in July 1951, only two months after completing T2, he wrote to a friend, Frank Morley, “When I started revising it, I realized that I’d rather write the whole thing all over again, which I’m about to do; figure I’ll be finished in two months” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 226; in the volume cited, the letter to Morley is mistakenly dated July 1950, and is therefore misplaced chronologically in that collection). Whether Kerouac did in fact “write the whole thing over again” is unclear but unlikely. There is no textual evidence to support a revision in the summer of 1951. One important point here to avoid confusion: in October 1951, Kerouac did determine to write a new version of his road story based on a new style of writing that he called spontaneous prose. He fully intended the new version to replace his scroll version. The two versions were entirely discrete entities; the version that Kerouac began in October 1951 would be published

'(

BViiI]ZVYd

as Visions of Cody (1972). In a letter to Kerouac written in July 1953, Ginsberg refers to “On the Road I and II” (Ginsberg, unpublished letter). ?VX`@ZgdjVXVcYBVY^hdc6kZcjZ After Harcourt, Brace’s rejection of On the Road, John Holmes suggested that Kerouac place the book with Holmes’s agent, Rae Everitt, of MCA, which he had done by July 1951. Then, in August 1951, he spent three weeks in the veteran’s hospital in the Bronx for treatment for phlebitis in his legs. While there, apparently, he continued to write movie script synopses to earn his living while he waited for his book to sell. But something else was happening, too. As Kerouac lay in the hospital sheets, freed from any responsibility to care for himself, he had a series of long days to mull over his writing career. The accomplishment of the scroll opened a new door for him, and he began to comprehend his entire opus, to see for the first time just how he might create his whole legend in literature, how the disparate parts of his life and experience might be fitted into a master plan. He began to write to his friends of a “huge epic Road” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 490). The scroll typescript’s location in the grand scheme is unclear today, but clearly Kerouac was opening up to his life’s work, and this new stage of his literary awareness may well have doomed any chance for an early publication of On the Road. During this time, Everitt tried to place the novel with a publishing house; although she saw Kerouac as a potentially great writer, she had some reservations about his book. She had some difficulty discussing these qualms with Kerouac, though, because, interestingly, the two had developed some sexual chemistry. Their paths had entwined the previous year in the social swirl of writers and literary people in Manhattan, and Kerouac had attempted to woo her with smoldering long gazes. Everitt was not entirely unreceptive, and now that she was Kerouac’s agent, she was unsure of how best to negotiate with him. Ginsberg conveyed Everitt’s ideas to Kerouac in 1951, in an undated letter, and his language discloses a good deal about the nature of the agent’s relationship with her client and her awareness of his volatile personality: [Everitt] would like to tell you what she thinks, but afraid of your reaction; afraid you’ll start to curse her to yourself and reject her efforts without listening . . . Doesn’t want to strain relations with you by criticism or suggestions which she thinks are commercially and possibly realistically and possibly spiritually valid; somewhat upset not knowing how to deal with you, afraid to scare you off, but respects you, knows your worth, but is afraid to disagree not knowing how you’ll react; afraid you’ll think ')

GZk^h^dchd[@ZgdjVX

she’s against you when she isn’t and would (I guess) like to lay you if she could only talk to you without your acting defensive and mysterious. (unpublished letter, 1951)

As this letter makes clear, Kerouac could be a difficult person to deal with, both professionally and personally. Everitt also insisted that the typescript, which she estimated would comprise 450 standard sheets, would have to be cut by a third. In December 1951, Everitt finally convinced Ace Books to sign Kerouac to a contract for On the Road, and pay him a thousand-dollar advance. Ace would pay $250 up front and then dole out a hundred dollars per month while Kerouac worked on revisions. Unfortunately for all concerned, Kerouac had a whole different deal in mind, including a refusal to edit On the Road. He had already developed artistically beyond the scroll typescript’s prose style, and he began to minimize its literary significance in the grander design of his life’s work. Kerouac was an idealist of the purest sort; he concerned himself wholly with literary art and had no constitution for reckoning with the business realities of Madison Avenue. He kept meticulous files of all his letters, manuscripts, journals, and notes, and he devoted his life to the perfection of his art and the profession of authorship. But when it came to dealing with editors and publishing houses, Kerouac was a disaster. Kerouac once remarked that “publishers make me feel uneasy, I feel as if not publishers but Dwight D. Eisenhower of the serious countenance and manly fists is looking at me across the lunch table and it’s all going to be wash down the saturday review drain” (unpublished letter to Carolyn Cassady, May 14, 1955). His closest relationship to an editor was also his first relationship with one. Giroux and Kerouac had spent many evenings working over the typescript of The Town and the City in Harcourt, Brace offices, shirtsleeves rolled up, Chinese food in cartons on the desks. Five years later—and nearly three years after Harcourt, Brace had rejected On the Road—Kerouac wrote a touching letter to his former editor in which he expressed admiration for Giroux along with regret for the growing distance in their relationship, concluding with these lines: “What has happened to our friendship or was it just based on business? . . . I really have no interest in business and that’s why I’m confused about what happened I guess. . . . Maybe I’ve gone crazy but by God I like to remember the times we talked about Yeats and watched pigeons” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 446). During Kerouac’s turbulent negotiations with Ace Books, Everitt left MCA for reasons unrelated to Kerouac or to Ace Books, and ultimately the deal fell through. Phyllis Jackson would take over as Kerouac’s agent at MCA. Jackson did not make a convincing effort to place Kerouac’s post–On the Road material, and she soon reported '*

BViiI]ZVYd

that Kerouac had simply gone away, muttering that he did not care to be published (Jackson). In late 1953, Sterling Lord of Lord and Colbert became Kerouac’s literary agent and would represent him or his literary estate from then right up to the present day. On October 12, 1954, Lord sent an inquiry letter to Mrs. Blanch W. Knopf in Knopf’s Madison Avenue offices. Fortunately, the entire exchange of letters between Knopf’s editors and Kerouac’s agent are extant, in the archives of the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Research Center. These letters shed light on what may have been a typical dialogue between Kerouac’s agent and various publishers and may reveal the publishers’ position on Kerouac and his much-talked-about novel. Lord prefaced his pitch by noting that Malcolm Cowley, who was serving as a literary advisor at Viking, had touted Kerouac’s On the Road (which at that point was alternatively titled The Beat Generation) in an August 21 Saturday Review article. Knopf senior editor Joseph M. Fox replied to Lord’s letter, saying that he had, in fact, been trying “to track down the whereabouts of Jack Kerouac” and that he would gladly consider the manuscript. Lord sent the manuscript to him, but Fox was clearly not impressed with its condition when he received it, for he sent it right back to Lord’s office with the stipulation that it be retyped. One can only imagine the condition of the stack of pages after its journeys through as many as ten publishing houses, and through the hands of Kerouac’s Beat friends in various lofts and apartments across New York City. It is also possible that T2 already bore Kerouac’s pencil and crayon emendations. Maybe its final rejection by Knopf editors was foreshadowed by its shabby appearance on its first arrival—Kerouac was difficult to contact, first of all, and now had submitted a less-than-professional looking manuscript. 6cdi]ZgIneZhXg^ei!6cdi]ZgIg^ei]gdj\]CZlNdg`EjWa^h]^c\=djhZh Kerouac spent most of November 1954 back in his mother’s apartment in Richmond Hill, cranking the story through his typewriter for the third time—although a different typewriter than previously used. This fresh typescript on standard-sized sheets can be designated T3. As he typed the story again, Kerouac would have the opportunity for altering, deleting, and adding passages. In fact, it seems that he relied on T1 as his base text while selectively including emendations from T2. This typescript was delivered to the Knopf offices on December 2. Knopf’s office memo states that the typescript comprised 347 pages. On December 30, four weeks after it had arrived, Knopf rejected T3 and sent it by special delivery back to Sterling Lord. A few days later, Lord received Joe Fox’s assessment: “Kerouac does have enormous

'+

GZk^h^dchd[@ZgdjVX

talent of a very special kind. But this is not a well made novel, nor a saleable one nor even, I think, a good one.” In his intraoffice memo, Fox related that his reluctance to accept the novel was spurred in part by his estimation that “Kerouac personally is almost impossible to deal with—evidently he refuses to change this in any way, and it would have to be changed.” Kerouac wrote in a January 11, 1955, journal entry that he had just learned of Knopf’s rejection of The Beat Generation (he handwrote “On the Road” above this title), but his disappointment was tempered by his newly discovered Buddhist contention that the book was not one of his “enlightened” works. Even during the November typing stint, he admitted his doubts about his motivations, claiming that he no longer valued “fame and fortune” (Some of the Dharma 220, 162). On January 18 he wrote to Ginsberg that after all his late-night labors in producing a new typescript, Knopf had reject “Beat G” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 457). And so T3 embarked on a road of its own, making appearances in the offices of Knopf; Ballantine; Dodd, Mead; and then, by circuitous happenstance, Viking. Malcolm Cowley had already read the typescript (T2) when it was submitted to Viking back in 1953, when Phyllis Jackson offered the novel there; Ginsberg helped establish a relationship between Cowley and Kerouac, who met several times beginning in February of that year. Cowley expressed great interest in Kerouac’s work. However, he could not develop any enthusiasm among other Viking editors at that time: “I was surprised, impressed, and talked about it at a Tuesday editorial meeting. But others read it and turned thumbs down” (Gussow 295). Cowley was not daunted. In 1954, he submitted an excerpt from the novel to Arabelle Porter at New World Writing; her acceptance of “Jazz of the Beat Generation” marked the first professional success of On the Road and paid Kerouac $120. “Jazz of the Beat Generation” includes sixty-eight lines of prose from Kerouac’s Visions of Cody blended seamlessly into the prose from On the Road. Cowley also submitted another excerpt, titled “The Mexican Girl,” to Paris Review, where it was accepted, and a third excerpt, “A Billowy Trip in the World,” was published later in New Directions. Cowley mentioned Kerouac’s name favorably in an August 1954 Saturday Review article, “Invitation to Innovators,” explicitly pointing out the Beat Generation: “it was John Kerouac who invented the phrase, and his unpublished long narrative ‘On the Road’ is the best record of their lives.” Cowley included these lines in his Viking book, The Literary Situation. Cowley was establishing Kerouac’s reputation and paving the way for the novel’s acceptance at Viking Press. On July 12, 1955, Cowley wanted to see the book again because Viking had hired a new editor, Keith Jennison, who Cowley thought would be more re-

',

BViiI]ZVYd

ceptive. According to a July 19 letter from Kerouac to Cowley, the typescript (T3?) was currently under consideration at Dodd, Mead and would have to be returned before it could be submitted to Viking; Viking had received it by early September. Acknowledging their first encounters when he had been far less willing to revise his work to suit the demands of the marketplace, Kerouac now wrote to Cowley on September 20, “Any changes you want to make okay with me. Remember your idea in 1953 to dovetail trip No. 2 into Trip No. 3 making it one trip? I’m available to assist you in any re-arranging matters of course” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 519). He also detailed the ways that he already had changed the typescript scroll in order to avoid libelous references, by changing not only the characters’ names but also their professions and hometowns. While Cowley and Jennison worked to gain Viking’s acceptance of the novel, Kerouac exhibited a solid willingness to revise the text, but the nature of these revisions and their effect on the final novel are indeterminable. In later years, Kerouac would attack Cowley in letters and interviews for having cut the heart out of On the Road and for emasculating it by ruining the rhythms of his sentences. In response, Cowley told an interviewer that he had had no problems with the prose of the book; rather, he had wanted Kerouac to tighten the structure of the story. Even though Kerouac insisted to Cowley and to others that he did indeed “dovetail” some trips and consolidate some material, apparently he did not. Except for some fairly large cuts of adventures that were extraneous to the central narrative, the published version is the same structurally as the scroll version. Still, Cowley emphasized that these cuts were made by Kerouac’s hand, not his: “Well, Jack did something that he would never admit to later. He did a good deal of revision, and it was very good revision. Oh, he would never, never admit to that, because it was his feeling that the stuff ought to come out like toothpaste from a tube and not be changed, and that every word that passed from his typewriter was holy. On the contrary he revised, and revised well” (Gifford and Lee 206). Kerouac’s negative reaction to his experience with Viking editors (technically, Cowley was a literary advisor to Viking, not an editor) stemmed from the fact that Kerouac never saw the book in galley proofs. The text underwent several changes, including house styling, without Kerouac’s knowledge; he saw the final text for the first time when he received a box of advance copies in the summer of 1957. Helen K. Taylor, and not Cowley, was the Viking editor who oversaw the final changes. Taylor and Kerouac would battle again a year later over the text of The Dharma Bums. In any case, the story of how the text’s final changes came to pass is typical Kerouac. As one might expect from Kerouac’s peripatetic nature, the biggest

'-

GZk^h^dchd[@ZgdjVX

obstacle in working with him was often just locating him. He had corresponded with Cowley from Mexico City in the summer of 1955, and from there he went to San Francisco for a season. Cowley was booked to teach a creative writing course at Stanford University in the winter session, and so when he went west in the winter of 1955, he brought the typescript (T3?) with him. By the time he arrived, though, Kerouac had already returned east to his sister and brother-in-law’s place in North Carolina. In January 1956, Kerouac traveled from North Carolina to New York City to “see after arrangements for my manuscripts with agent,” and he wound up spending fifteen days there (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 544, 546), leading some observers to contend that Kerouac revised his typescript during this visit. In February, Kerouac complained to Carolyn Cassady that publication had been slowed by six months, because he hadn’t been there when Malcolm Cowley had come to the Bay Area intent on completing the final edit of the manuscript (Jack Kerouac, unpublished letter, February 11, 1956). He makes no mention of having edited the book in New York City, and it is not likely that he could have done so, if Cowley had been in fact in California with the typescript. The possibility of the January editing job is even less likely considering what happened next. In March, Kerouac came up with a great idea: he decided to meet Cowley at Stanford University after all. Kerouac would return to California, work with Cowley, and spend time with friends before beginning a summer-long fire-watching job high up in the Cascade Mountains of Washington. Together, Kerouac and Cowley would go over the typescript and add whatever finishing touches would be needed, bringing back memories of the fine times that Kerouac had shared with Robert Giroux as they pored over the thousand-plus-page typescript of The Town and the City. The idea of working with Cowley in sunny California brought joy and optimism into Kerouac’s life, and he hitchhiked out of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, on March 17, bound for the West Coast. The concept was fabulous. Less than a week after his thirty-fourth birthday, Kerouac was hitchhiking west across the United States so he could work with a legendary literary adviser to the eminently respectable Viking Press and his novel—the great book about hitchhiking and life on the road—would be polished into its final form. Kerouac was proud of the setup he had arranged: “It was my own idea, it’s at my own expense, I’m borrowing money from my mother, but the time has come to get that thing on the presses” (Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters: 1940–1956 571). The gleaming coast promised acceptance, money, and the literary recognition he had longed for during six years of steady writing without publication. But there was one crucial detail that Kerouac

'.

BViiI]ZVYd

had overlooked; Stanford operated on a trimester academic calendar, and when Kerouac arrived, the school session was ended and Cowley had already returned to New York. He was crushed. That summer, Kerouac went up into the Cascade Mountains for twelve weeks, then returned to spend a week in San Francisco (where the picture that would become the author’s photo on Viking’s first edition of On the Road was taken by Mademoiselle magazine) before heading back to Mexico City. So Kerouac and Cowley apparently never did get together to polish On the Road, and meanwhile, Viking still had not accepted the novel for publication. Now Viking’s big concern was over the possibility of libel; Kerouac’s characters could be recognized as real people who might decide to sue Viking over their depictions. Viking worked with Nathaniel Whitehorn, of Hays, Sklar, Epstein and Herzberg, who determined that the changes that Kerouac had made on his own were not enough, and he would have to further disguise the characters’ real identities. Justin Brierly is the character whose presence fades the most from scroll typescript to published novel because he is the most publicly recognizable person characterized in the novel and, according to Viking’s lawyer, a respectable citizen whose portrayal might lead him to pursue a defamation lawsuit. The scroll typescript introduces him thus: “Then Justin W. Brierly, a tremendous local character who all his life had specialized in developing the potentialities of young people, had in fact been tutor to Shirley Temple for MGM in the thirties, and was now a lawyer, a realtor, a director of the Central City Opera Festival and also an English teacher in a Denver high school, discovered Neal” (On the Road: The Original Scroll 140). Several funny scenes—Brierly meeting Neal, Brierly meeting Jack, Brierly meeting Allen—did not make it into On the Road. Instead, Denver D. Doll appears rather suddenly, without much introduction, and exits without explanation. Kerouac altered Brierly’s identity without prompting from Viking’s legal advisors when he typed T2 and changed it further when he typed T3. As he wrote to Cowley in September 1955, “I changed all his titles and professions and so legally it isn’t Justin W. Brierly but the fictitious Doll” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 518). Nonetheless, further cuts would have to be made. It is uncertain when these additional Brierly cuts were made, but it is highly likely that Kerouac did the excision himself. Other significant cuts from the scroll include a reference to Ginsberg’s (Carlo Marx) homosexuality, as well as a homosexual scene involving Cassady (Dean Moriarty). Several lengthy scenes were cut probably because they were extraneous to the action and interrupted the pace of the novel. These included a description of Cassady and Ginsberg visiting William Burroughs

(%

GZk^h^dchd[@ZgdjVX

(Bull Lee) in Texas, for which the narrator was not present; a big party scene in the desert near Tuscan at Allen Harrington’s home; and scenes in which Kerouac (Sal Paradise) and Cassady visit Kerouac’s first wife, Edie, in Detroit. A delightful scene in which Dean and Sal describe themselves and their Beat friends in terms of Wild West characters did not make it into the published novel. On the other hand, some phrases and short passages were added during revisions, in some cases to help introduce characters and to flesh out descriptions. For example, the scroll describes Louanne (Marylou) simply as “pretty” (Original Scroll 110), while the published novel continues the line this way: “with immense ringlets of hair like a sea of golden tresses; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her hands hanging in her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a wide stare because she was in an evil gray New York pad that she’d heard about back West, and waiting like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman in a serious room” (2). In another instance, Kerouac added a sentence of dialogue, an early speech made by Cassady: “In other words we’ve got to get on the ball, darling, what I’m saying, otherwise it’ll be fluctuating and lack of true knowledge or crystallization of our plans” (3). Kerouac lifted much of this phrase from a letter Cassady had sent him in 1947 (Cassady 55). All in all, the novel is not significantly shorter than the scroll typescript, follows the original structure, and is not stylistically different from the way that Kerouac first put it on paper. I]Z;^cVa9gV[i Kerouac completed the revision job in Orlando, Florida, where his sister had moved, during the final days of 1956. In all likelihood he worked on T3, and in later years he affixed a note that may be taken to indicate that it was the editors’ setting copy. He then rode a Greyhound bus from Orlando to New York and, on January 8, 1957, carried his typescript of On the Road into the Viking offices. Kerouac later told a friend that he chugged a pint of bourbon on his way up the elevator (Selected Letters: 1957–1969 4). This time, Kerouac and Cowley were together in the same room, making the arrangements for Kerouac’s contract, which he signed on January 11, 1957. Viking’s lawyers released the book for printing on February 8 and doublechecked the galleys on March 22. The book was put on sale on September 5, 1957, and Kerouac was suddenly famous. In the years that followed, the scroll went from curiosity to legend to literary artifact. At first the scroll was unfurled at On the Road publicity parties and bandied about as an oddity. As the flash of promotion died down, Keith Jennison wound up in possession of the scroll. Not being a collector,

(&

BViiI]ZVYd

he impulsively sent the scroll to his son, Chris, who was attending Rutgers University and living in a fraternity house. Chris and his friend unrolled the typescript down the longest hall they could find in the frat house and “pored over it religiously.” When Chris worried about its safety and preservation, Keith suggested that Chris donate the scroll to the Rutgers library; he offered it, but the librarian’s acceptance letter contained several spelling errors that were hand-corrected, so Chris decided that the library did not care enough to deserve it. He returned it to his father, who stashed the scroll in a filing cabinet in his Viking office (Jennison). In the mid-1960s, Kerouac was largely a forgotten figure. His books (eighteen were published during his lifetime) no longer sold well, and many of them were not being reprinted. As a cultural figure, he seemed out of his element in the midst of the hippies and peaceniks, whom many observers credited him with spawning. He moved many times, never realizing the income he had dreamed would come from his writing. For the most part, he lived with his mother. In March 1965, Jennison attempted to donate the scroll to the Morgan Library, located on Madison Avenue in New York City. Sterling Lord figured that Kerouac would earn a tax deduction for such a donation, and initially Kerouac agreed. The plan never materialized, and in December of 1968, a year before he died, Kerouac wrote to Jennison, demanding that the scroll be returned to him. He had apparently changed his mind concerning the library donation; Kerouac hoped that the artifact would help tide him over financially in his old age. The scroll remained in a safe in Sterling Lord’s office for decades. On May 22, 2001, Christie’s Auction House sold the On the Road typescript scroll for $2.2 million. Inclusion of the buyer’s fee and required sales tax brought the total price to $2.43 million, making Kerouac’s typescript the highest-priced literary document ever sold, going for roughly $20,250 per foot. Scholars and fans who feared for the scroll’s future may have been assuaged by winning bidder James Irsay’s first words: “I look at it as stewardship. I don’t believe that you own anything in this world. It’s dust to dust. It’s something that I take as a responsibility” (Irsay). True to his word, Irsay has allowed the scroll to be exhibited in numerous locations around the United States and overseas. The scroll is, in fact, on the road. 6WWgZk^Vi^dch T1: Typescript scroll, prepared at 454 West Twentieth Street and Lucien Carr’s loft on West Twenty-first Street in New York City, April 2–April 22, 1951 (owned by James Irsay, owner of the NFL Indianapolis Colts) T2: Paginated to 297, with some pages skipped; prepared from T1, at 454 West Twentieth Street and Lucien Carr’s loft on West Twenty-first Street in New ('

GZk^h^dchd[@ZgdjVX

York City, April 22–May 22, 1951. Revised in black crayon and pencil by Kerouac and Viking editors, presumably Malcolm Cowley and Helen Taylor. (Special Collection, New York Public Library) T3: 347 pages; prepared from T1 and T2, retyped at the request of Knopf editor Joseph Fox, at 94–21 134th Street, Richmond Hill, Queens, November 1954. (Special Collection, New York Public Library)

Ldg`h8^iZY Cassady, Neal. Collected Letters, 1944–1967. Ed. Dave Moore. New York: Penguin, 2004. Charters, Ann. A Bibliography of Works by Jack Kerouac. New York: Phoenix Book Shop, 1967. Cook, Bruce. The Beat Generation. New York: Scribner’s, 1971. “Duke Ellington and His Orchestra.” Duke Ellington concert program and flyer. Smithsonian Museum of Natural History Archives. “Ellington Heard at Metropolitan.” New York Times. Jan. 22, 1951: 13. Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Penguin, 1979. Ginsberg, Allen. Letter to Jack Kerouac. [month and day unknown] 1951. Reprinted with permission of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, and the Ginsberg Trust. ———. Letter to Jack Kerouac. July 1953. Reprinted with permission of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, and the Ginsberg Trust. ———. “Review of The Dharma Bums.” Village Voice. Nov. 12, 1958: 3–5. Gussow, Adam. “Bohemia Revisited: Malcolm Cowley, Jack Kerouac, and On the Road.” Georgia Review 38.2 (Summer 1984): 298–311. Hall, Donald. “Robert Giroux: Looking for Masterpieces.” New York Times Book Review. Jan. 6, 1980: 22. Irsay, James. Press conference at Christie’s Auction House following sale of On the Road scroll manuscript, May 22, 2001. Jackson, Phyllis. Letter to Malcolm Cowley. May 12, 1953. Malcolm Cowley Papers. Reprinted with permission of the Newberry Library, University of Chicago. Jennison, Chris. Email to author, Sept. 5, 2006. Kerouac, Jack. “Background.” Atop an Underwood. Ed. Paul Marion. New York: Viking, 1999. ———. “Here I Am at Last with a Typewriter.” Atop an Underwood. Ed. Paul Marion. New York: Viking, 1999. 130–32. ———. Letter to Allen Ginsberg. November 19, 1958. The Beats: A Literary Reference. Ed. Matt Theado. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003. 184. ———. Letter to Carolyn Cassady. May 14, 1955. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Reprinted with permission of the estate of Stella Kerouac. Copyright 2008 by John Sampas, literary representative, estate of Stella Kerouac. ((

BViiI]ZVYd

———. Letter to Carolyn Cassady. February 11, 1956. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. ———. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 2005. ———. On the Road: The Original Scroll. Ed. Howard Cunnell. New York: Viking, 2007. ———. Selected Letters: 1940–1956. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking, 1995. ———. Selected Letters: 1957–1969. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking, 1999. ———. Some of the Dharma. New York: Viking, 1997. ———. “Today.” Atop an Underwood. Ed. Paul Marion. New York: Viking, 1999. ———. Vanity of the Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935–46. New York: Putnam, 1968. ———. Visions of Cody, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. ———. Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947–1954. Ed. Douglas Brinkley. New York: Viking, 2004. Kerouac, Joan. Nobody’s Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of the Beats. Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1990. Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Grove, 1983. “62.9 Sets Record, But Cold Is on Way.” New York Times. Jan. 22, 1951. Tytell, John. “Interview with Carl Solomon.” Rpt. The Beats: A Literary Reference. Ed. Matt Theado. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003. 51–56.

()

2 ;G::L6NH6C9HIG6>CI:GHI6I:H D;H6AE6G69>H:6C9&.*%H6B:G>86 Lars Erik Larson >hcÉii]ZYZhi^cnd[6bZg^XVca^iZgVijgZi]Vid[Xgdhh^c\a^b^ihVcY[gdci^Zgh!XVjh^c\YZiZgg^id" g^Va^oZYÓdlhd[YZh^gZidX^gXjaViZ!WjiVahdValVnhbV`^c\i]ZhZÓdlhigVchedgi[VhX^h^o^c\! bdgVa^o^c\!Ejg^iVc!VcY[Vb^a^Va^hiiZgg^idg^Va^i^Zh4 Å6 Robert Holton ÆI]^h^hVbVc!VcYi]ViÉh]^hXVhiaZ#Ç=Zed^ciZYjeVii]ZiZcZbZci# Å9ZVcBdg^Vgin^cDci]ZGdVY

The Beat Generation seemed to erupt into postwar American consciousness almost out of nowhere with the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). While these texts articulated the impulses of a sensibility new to the culture of postwar America, the positions occupied by Kerouac and the Beats can be located in terms of debates that arose more than a century earlier, when Parisian bohemians emerged from the tumult of the French Revolution brimming with artistic imagination, radical ideas, and oppositional attitudes. Generally impoverished and uninterested in conventional careers, they clustered among that era’s urban poor and dissolute in the only neighborhoods they could afford, and the social formations that ensued, then as in postwar America, were variously celebrated and deplored. A crucial aspect of this phenomenon is the social category known as the lumpenproletariat, a heterogeneous group related to bohemians from the early days of Parisian bohemia to the Beat Generation and beyond. This lumpen-bohemian heterogeneity is a defining characteristic of the Beats, and, in On the Road and elsewhere, it provided a sense of marginal possibility in an American modernity that seemed increasingly homogeneous. Kerouac was, he admitted in Desolation Angels, unfit “for this modern America of crew cuts and sullen faces in Pontiacs” (257): “I really look like an escaped mental patient with enough physical strength and innate dog-sense to manage outside an institution to feed myself and go from place to place in a world growing gradually narrower in its views about eccentricity every day” (255).

+%

I]ZIZcZbZci8VhiaZ

At a time when political resistance was felt to be both dangerous and futile–in postrevolution Paris as well as in postwar America—bohemianism rose to prominence by offering the subcultural possibility that, if modern capitalism’s cultural homogeneity could not be overturned or reversed, it might at least be evaded. This peculiar space, the anarchic meeting ground of “mental patients” and artists, students and criminals, the decadent and the devout, substance abusers and sexual adventurers, scum and refuse, provided the site for a centrifugal cultural space in the midst of a centripetal cultural moment. While the Beat Generation appeared to be a very new phenomenon, some of its underlying impulses—such as the imaginative capacity to transform the squalor of a tenement into the privilege of a castle—go back much further. In the volatile year of 1848, Karl Marx announced in The Communist Manifesto that “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism” (481). By a curious coincidence, another spectre was announced that same year—the spectre of bohemianism. Henri Murger’s tales of Parisian bohemian life, published as Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, were based loosely on his own experiences, and they enshrined the free-spirited bohemians in modern cultural iconography.1 Like the spectre of communism, the spectre of bohemianism continued to haunt Europe and America for many decades. Despite their obvious differences, both of these texts (and the social movements associated with them) respond to a peculiarly modern condition, both are intensely concerned with money and the constraints that money imposes on the search for a good life in a capitalist economy, and both articulate positions of radical dissent from the cultural mainstream. While communism maintained a belief in the possibility that collective political action, following a dialectical historical process, could lead to a resolution to the contradictions of capitalist modernity, bohemianism moved in another direction, cultivating almost as an end in itself a degree of heterogeneity and eccentricity that conflicted with the interests of communism and capitalism alike. In doing so, the bohemians became allied with the lumpenproletariat, one of the social groups least trusted by Marxists. Although he was their first major chronicler, Murger did not invent bohemians. Their presence in Paris in the years following the French Revolution was already well established, and the movement flourished in the ensuing decades of political upheaval. Marx was well aware of their existence, and, at one point in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he uses the term almost as a synonym for the lumpenproletariat, an unwieldy rubric designating a very particular category of people—one that seems largely to escape categorization and thus poses a challenge to analysts such as Marx

+&

GdWZgi=daidc

who attempt to construct orderly social and historical categories. While the proletariat and the bourgeoisie refer to clearly defined economic groups, and the aristocracy refers to a group clearly defined by birth and social status, the lumpens resist any such simple taxonomy. By contrast, they comprise a group of people who have, willingly or otherwise, more or less slipped out of the ordered class system. Usually poor, they nonetheless exist outside the economic structures of labor that constitute the industrial working classes. In a famous passage, Marx attempts to list the members of this group: Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni [disreputable street people], pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème. (149)

In Marx’s work, notions of class typically possess a certain conceptual stability, but the lumpenproletariat, by contrast, seems to resist definition. An “indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither” is a difficult entity to get hold of. Indeed, the lumpens are, in a sense, defined less by their claim to any standard class identity than by their very distance from it: they are instead, Marx writes, the “scum, offal, refuse of all classes” (149). In remaining outside the normative structures of social ontology, the lumpens, as Jeffrey Mehlman has pointed out, stand as the sign of an unassimilable heterogeneity (13). In the context of the more and more systematized social structures of modernity—the world growing narrower every day, as Kerouac puts it—the heterogeneity articulated in this passage, according to Mehlman, registers an “exhilaration,” an “almost Rabelaisian verve, ” and a “certain proliferating energy” that suggests an ambivalence even in Marx. The category of the lumpen-bohemian is “the site where that heterogeneity, in its unassimilability to every dialectical totalization, is affirmed” despite the fact that such affirmation runs counter to Marx’s own doctrine. Perhaps in response to this ambivalence, as the quotation from Marx demonstrates, there seems to arise a compulsion to make lists as an attempt to contain the anarchic energy and heterogeneity that threatens taxonomic order. This containment strategy itself signals that the sublime diversity of individuals represented here can neither be finally subsumed under the unity of an abstract category nor controlled by the homogenizing forces of modernity. Like Marx, Murger attempts to list those considered bohemian,

+'

I]ZIZcZbZci8VhiaZ

including, as well as a variety of artists, pickpockets, murderers, “bear-leaders, sword-eaters, vendors of key-rings, inventors of ‘infallible systems,’ stockbrokers of doubtful antecedents and the followers of the thousand and one vague and mysterious callings in which the principle occupation is to have none whatever and to be ready at any time to do anything save that which is right” (xvii). A few pages later, he asserts again that “it may be worthwhile to enumerate and classify” the bohemians for those who “cannot have too many dots on the i’s of definition (xxiv), but the task inevitably remains incomplete. Pierre Bourdieu’s assessment over a century later echoes earlier statements: “An ambiguous reality, bohemia inspires ambivalent feelings, even among its most passionate defenders,” he writes, and a central reason for this is that “it defies classification” (56). Bourdieu’s catalogue is not uncharacteristic; he mentions sexual transgressives and destitute but cultured individuals who tend toward “audacities of dress, culinary fantasies, mercenary loves and refined leisure,” as well as “proletariod intellectuals, . . . delinquent or downgraded bourgeois . . . poor relations . . . aristocrats ruined or in decline, foreigners and members of stigmatized minorities. . . . penniless bourgeois” (57). These two categories, lumpen and bohemian, seem inextricably linked, and if they have long shared a conceptual space, they have often coexisted in the same urban spaces as well. While the bohemians, Bourdieu notes, “share[d] their misery” with the poor (56), they cultivated an art of living distinctly their own. With their sublimely unclassifiable diversity and their apparent resistance both to definition and to honest labor, the eccentric lumpen-bohemians were a source of great frustration for Marx, who saw their political potential, to the degree that they had any, mobilized in the service of reactionary causes. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, which contains much discussion of the lumpens, Marx also refers to Hegel’s claim that history repeats itself every hundred years, adding that it occurs first as tragedy, then as farce (103). In 1948, exactly a century after The Communist Manifesto and Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, Jack Kerouac coined the term “Beat Generation” to refer to his lumpen-bohemian subculture and wrote the first draft of the narrative that would become On the Road. The frenetic trip to California he took with Neal Cassady that same year was eventually incorporated as a central part of the novel, which became an overnight sensation ten years later. The evocative term “beat” was one he picked up from Herbert Huncke, a petty criminal, drug addict, and hustler who had been raised in a middle-class family but veered sharply from that path. Huncke’s autobiography, Guilty of Everything, relates the descent from his bourgeois beginnings to his arrival

+(

GdWZgi=daidc

in New York’s most disreputable crime-infested neighborhood. “It was the first place I’d found where I felt secure,” he recalls without apparent irony. “I felt as though I blended in, in some way” (41). Kerouac met Huncke through William Burroughs, himself the product of a well-to-do family who had attended Harvard before adopting the dissolute life of the lumpen homosexual drug addict in a homophobic culture.2 In short, along with figures such as Cassady, who was raised by an alcoholic father on Denver’s skid row, these were perfect personifications of the lumpen-bohemian “scum” and “refuse” that, as Marx observed, emerge from every social level and mingle in that peculiar and unsavory social space with little regard for conventional class distinction. Figures of downward mobility such as Huncke and Burroughs resist both capitalist and Marxist social logics, and their prominence in the Beat pantheon–as well as the widespread and intense attention the Beats attracted–is indicative of the resonance that this centrifugal and heterogeneous note created in the postwar cultural imagination. Of course Kerouac too has a few things to say about scum and refuse and its relation to “la bohème.” At one point in On the Road, Sal Paradise dozes through a B-movie double bill in a slummy Detroit theater. The audience with him was, he writes, “the end,” a hipster expression articulating a sense of ultimacy, of a terminal state distant from the superficial comforts and distractions of the mainstream. Like Marx and Murger before him, Kerouac too provides a lumpen list: they were Beat Negroes who’d come up from Alabama to work in car factories on a rumor; old white bums; young longhaired hipsters who’d reached the end of the road and were drinking wine; whores, ordinary couples and housewives with nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody to believe in. If you sifted all Detroit in a wire basket the beater solid core of dregs couldn’t be better gathered. (245)

Dregs, scum, refuse, the end: this merging of the literal garbage with the heterogeneous social dregs leads to a surreal lumpen fantasy as the theater’s cleaners move through the aisles “with their night’s total of swept-up rubbish and created a huge dusty pile that reached my nose as I snored head down—till they almost swept me away too” (246). From there, things only get worse: All the cigarette butts, the bottles, the matchbooks, the come and the gone were swept up in this pile. Had they taken me with it, Dean would never have seen me again. He would have had to roam the entire United States and look in every garbage pail from coast to coast before he found me embryonically convoluted among the rubbishes of my life, his life, and +)

I]ZIZcZbZci8VhiaZ

the life of everybody concerned and not concerned. What would I have said to him from my rubbish womb? “Don’t bother me, man, I’m happy where I am. . . . What right have you to come and disturb my reverie in this pukish can?” (246)

This vision of “the end” is followed immediately with another anecdote of abjection about passing out in the restroom of a filthy bar, wrapped around the toilet bowl, and waking up hours later “unrecognizably caked” in actual scum, which he tactfully refers to as the “debouchments” of those who used that toilet during the night (246). As in Marx, the language of filth and garbage overlaps from the literal to the social here and elsewhere in descriptions of those who keep to no specific class but gather together on the lumpen social margins. Marx’s description of an “indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither,” and Kerouac’s fantasy of being thrown out with the garbage evoke a literal sense of abjection—that is, the condition of being cast off or thrown away. Unlike Marx, however, Kerouac finds elements of explicit regeneration in this realm of abjection. The sense of self as garbage articulated in this passage constitutes an abandonment of conventional forms of symbolic capital, a social pathology paradoxically offset by the images of birth, womb, and embryo woven into this curious combination of fundamental hope and utter despair. As Julia Kristeva has observed, it is not only “the lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect border, positions, rules” (4). In scenes such as these, with Sal swept up in the garbage or passed out by the toilet, On the Road foregrounds a pattern of images of precisely such disturbances and violations of fundamental cultural borders and rules, a pattern that reinforces the tendency of the heterogeneous lumpen-bohemians to disturb and violate the regularities and norms of social order. Questions might be raised, however, concerning the impulse to resort to such extreme images, the conditions that would allow such a narrative to attain a remarkable level of acceptance and popularity, and the nature of the regeneration that might arise from this peculiar lumpen-bohemian disturbance. For many postwar Americans, conformism had emerged as a major social issue, and the problem was identified with a sense of modernity as a set of fundamentally confining and homogenizing structures leading to a sense of dehumanization. Literary works such as On the Road, which opens with a sense of being “miserably weary” and a feeling “that everything was dead” (1) explored this condition in detail, but the anxieties it generated were widely registered in other public discourses as well. This issue was urgently debated in studies such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd; +*

GdWZgi=daidc

C. Wright Mills’s White Collar; Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd; and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, to mention only a few. While the cold war defense of “freedom” that was a mainstay of the period’s public rhetoric principally referred outward in opposition to communism, it also resonated inward for those concerned with America’s conformist condition and the structures of history that, by mid-twentieth century, seemed capable of eroding the sublime diversity of individuals and imposing a level of homogeneity that threatened traditional notions of humanity. In 1951, for example, the eminent American historian Henry Steele Commager argued that the recent defeat of Germany and Japan could be attributed to these regimes’ “insistence upon acquiescence and conformity,” and he warned against the rise of similar attitudes in America. The remedy was clear: “only if we put a premium on non-conformity, can we hope to solve the enormously complex problems that confront us.” Much was hanging in the balance, it seemed: “Our responsibility here is immense. Upon it rests, to a large degree, the future of Western civilization” (19–22). Such dire warnings were frequently heard. In 1954, in between his two bids for the American presidency, Adlai Stevenson delivered a speech at Columbia University in which he concurred, declaring that “we are not in danger of becoming slaves anymore, but of becoming robots” (Fromm, Escape 102). And in 1957, theologian Paul Tillich pleaded with students to “preserve the power to say ‘no’ when the patterns prescribed by society will try to conquer them. We hope for nonconformists among you,” he urged, “for your sake, for the sake of the nation, for the sake of humanity” (O’Neill 94). One unanticipated consequence of these urgent calls for nonconformism was the emergence of widespread public fascination with heterogeneous groups such as the Beats.3 Such lumpen-bohemians neither played a productive role in capitalism nor contributed any revolutionary potential to socialism, but they also appeared unswayed by the homogenizing tendencies of modern America. Some postwar North Americans, alienated from cold war politics, resistant to the emerging structures of modernity whether right or left, and attracted by the energy and heterogeneity that Mehlman identifies even in Marx’s description, became interested in the possibilities of precisely this disengaged lumpen-bohemian zone of refuse and refusal. If, as Herbert Marcuse maintained in One-Dimensional Man, the very possibility of critique was being compromised by the homogeneity of modern culture, then the existence of bohemian (Murger), lumpen (Marx), or beat (Kerouac) spaces appeared to provide rare dimensions in which alternative thoughts and behaviors could persist.4 Marcuse argues that while “the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted

++

I]ZIZcZbZci8VhiaZ

of other races and other colours, the unemployed and the unemployable” (256) is at best politically unstable, this lumpen refuse nonetheless “exist[s] outside” and “violates the rules.” The distance between the leftist agenda for the lumpens and the bohemian position becomes clear in Marcuse’s observation that “their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not” (256). The possibility that lumpen alienation might eventually turn to revolutionary consciousness was an important concern for some radical groups in the 1960s, 5 but for the Beats, who entertained no revolutionary ambitions, the fact of lumpen consciousness, however romanticized at times, was itself sufficiently inviting. The term lumpen itself is a German word meaning rag, and the lumpens are often pictured as raggedy, as ragpickers; and rags themselves are a kind of garbage. References to rags and raggedy people abound in On the Road as Sal Paradise pursues his quest for the “ragged promised land” (83). The ragged condition of Dean Moriarty, a second-generation lumpen of skid-row origins, educated at a Denver reform school, is integral to his exemplary position in the novel, and it is precisely his uncontainable energy that gives On the Road its focus. He is described as wearing “greasy wino pants with a frayed fur-lined jacket and beat shoes that flap. . . . dirty workclothes [that] clung to him so gracefully, as though you couldn’t buy a better fit from a custom tailor but only earn it from the Natural Tailor of Natural Joy” (7). Later, with a ragged bandage hanging from his broken thumb (and his personal life in tatters), Dean is transformed into the “HOLY GOOF” (194), a lumpen canonization that confirms his stature in Kerouac’s Beat mythology. Standing in uncharacteristic silence, “ragged and broken and idiotic . . . his bony face covered with sweat and throbbing veins,” it appears “as though tremendous revelations were pouring into him all the time now. . . . He was BEAT—the root and soul of Beatific.” In this elevated state of lumpen consciousness, he confronts “the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being” (195). There is no evidence that Kerouac was familiar with the etymology of the term lumpen, but his repetition of the term ragged, here and throughout the novel, is nonetheless remarkable. Released from the constraints of middleclass behavior, Dean exhibits an astonishing energy, a character trait that recalls the sense of “proliferating energy” that, according to Mehlman (13), even the disapproving Marx tacitly acknowledges as a defining quality of the lumpens: He had become absolutely mad in his movements; he seemed to be doing everything at the same time. It was a shaking of the head, up and down, sideways; jerky, vigorous hands; quick walking, sitting, crossing the

+,

GdWZgi=daidc

legs, uncrossing, getting up, rubbing the hands, rubbing his fly, hitching his pants, looking up and saying “Am,” and sudden slitting of the eyes to see everywhere; and all the time he was grabbing me by the ribs and talking, talking. (114)

The clear suggestion here is that while elevated experience is unavailable within the homogeneous spaces of a bland and superficial mainstream culture, it remained available to the lumpens, who had managed to evade the stultification of American modernity. The novel registers this initially in the way Dean’s wild lumpen energy allows Sal to escape the feeling of death that opens the narrative. As Michel de Certeau has argued, “There has to be something somewhere that does not deceive,” and the “positioning of the subject under the sign of refuse is the point where ‘true’ discourse is imprinted” (39–40). The lumpens, as the point of intersection for the “refuse of all classes” (Marx), took on the aspect of truth in the eyes of those alienated from mainstream culture, and, in this context, the appearance of truth was charged with an energy that resonated widely. It was not so much that they had a blueprint for any positive social action, as that by their very existence they seemed to expose what Paul Goodman disparaged as the fraudulent and contemptible nature of an ignoble conformist system (ix, 14). And with that set of delusions dismantled, that obstruction to truth removed, it was thought, a new vision and a new energy might yet arise. When Sal imagines his arrival in Denver, for example, he imagines his lumpen (ragged) state as a necessary condition for the delivery of truth in a fallen world: “I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word” (35).6 The relation this suggests, between the lumpen condition and religious experience, constitutes one of the novel’s basic refrains. Observing that “no society has ever been so standardized as this one, and that the stream of human, social, and historical temporality has never flowed quite so homogeneously,” Fredric Jameson queries where the nonhomogeneous might continue to exist in the modern world. One traditional location involves the transformative power of spirituality: “Historically,” he points out, “the adventures of homogeneous and heterogeneous space have most often been told in terms of the quotient of the sacred and of the folds in which it is unevenly invested” (22). Mississippi Gene presents another clear—if romanticized—instance of an unassimilable lumpen existence tinged with the aura of the sacred. A “thirty-year old hobo but with a youthful look,” Gene sat “crosslegged, looking out over the fields without saying anything for hundreds of miles” (23). Not long before, during the Great Depression, his wanderings might have been ascribed to the quest for work that kept so many +-

I]ZIZcZbZci8VhiaZ

Americans riding the highways and the rails. After the war, however, when the economy was back to high gear and jobs were available, this indigence could not be so excused. An exemplary case of social refuse, Mississippi Gene refuses the logic of both capitalism and socialism: he simply does not want to work, and with neither fixed address nor family ties, he exists in the nonproductive and heterogeneous lumpen space. Kerouac characterizes this as a space not of tragic homelessness, as we might today, but of transcendental freedom. Gene wears “hobo rags . . . old clothes that had been turned black by the soot of the railroads and the dirt of the boxcars and sleeping on the ground” (23) —hardly a positive description from the point of view either of socialist reformism or enterprising capitalism. But here, it is precisely in evading the contending modern systems of commodity production and consumption that freedom—albeit a peculiar form of freedom—seems to lie. “Although Gene was white, there was something of the wise and tired old Negro in him, and something very much like Elmer Hassel, the New York dope addict, in him . . . crossing and recrossing the country . . . because there was nowhere to go but everywhere” (26). While it is clearly paradoxical at one level that transcendence is characterized here in terms of poverty, racial segregation, and drug addiction, it is the manifest heterogeneity of all these that, for Kerouac, constituted the possibility of an exit from the homogeneous and mundane order of conformist postwar America. The image of ragged Gene, already inhabiting a “ragged promised land” (83) of his own, looking out over the land, cross-legged and deep in a “Buddhistic trance” (28), contrasts sharply with the obnoxious businessmen dressed up in ostentatious western-style clothes that Sal next encounters in disappointingly modern, bourgeois Cheyenne. The American story, at least in one influential version, was supposed to be a story of upward, not downward, mobility, of rags to riches, not the other way around. Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” the 1883 poem mounted on the Statue of Liberty itself, etched the idealized social trajectory deeply in the American imagination: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. (233)

America here represents a space of deliverance for the huddled and homeless who, through hard work, were to transform themselves from “wretched refuse” into prosperous citizens enjoying the bounty and freedom offered +.

GdWZgi=daidc

by the new world. According to postwar analysts such as David Riesman and C. Wright Mills, the outcome was rather different. America’s mid-century masses were no longer huddled—unless around their TVs or in their Chevrolets—yet this gain was offset by the fact that they were apparently no longer yearning to breathe free, either. Whole new industries had sprung up based around the emergent conformist masses, finding productive and efficient ways to move them around in mass transit, to entertain and inform them through mass media, to supply them with needs and desires through mass marketing, and to fulfill those needs and desires through mass production. With the calling into question of that way of life, with the rising concern that its bounty could be reduced to bland mass consumerism and its freedom reduced to mass conformism, Beat discourse contemplated a reversed trajectory of liberation leading from (relative) riches back to lumpen rags. The experience of life might be fuller and the desire to breathe free might be better explored, it seemed to some disenchanted Americans, through a downward mobility, and this led back to a curiosity about the inassimilable lumpen state of homeless refuse. “We wandered around,” Kerouac writes, “carrying our bundles of rags in the narrow romantic streets” (170). The rags proclaimed (even etymologically) a lumpen identity; the wandering established a sense of freedom from the ordered efficiency demanded by modernity; and the narrow streets remained available to those romantics willing to abandon the standardized freeways and suburban subdivisions of the postwar world. Modernity seemed not only to homogenize the social diversity of individuals, it seemed to reduce the range of experience available to those individuals. The heterogeneity of the lumpen-bohemians, whether the vagabond vision attributed to Mississippi Gene or the bohemian delirium of Sal himself, famished and “frozen with ecstasy” on the streets of San Francisco (172), appeared to counteract this tendency. The exploration of the spaces of skid row, of addiction and perversion, criminality, lunacy and vagrancy, became sources of a desperate sense of possibility in a white middle-class modernity that had begun to seem synonymous with dead-end mass culture, a space of potential individuality and freedom in the land of what C. Wright Mills called the “cheerful robots” (233). If, as many social critics charged, the cheerful robots of postwar America functioned as efficient cogs in the wheels of modern production, the antithesis would lie in a calculated inefficiency. The original French bohemians arose in the context of a postrevolutionary disillusionment with political solutions; their postwar American counterparts, in the wake of two world wars and a global economic depression, in the grip of the cold

,%

I]ZIZcZbZci8VhiaZ

war’s threat of nuclear holocaust, developed a similar estrangement. In the absence of any sense that progressive social change is an option, then, uselessness itself can become a kind of virtue, and dysfunctionality a badge of countercultural courage. Nonproductivity is a hallmark of the lumpens and bohemians, whose activities may include poetry, petty crime, or wandering ragged through narrow romantic streets, but whose proclivities do not extend to productive labor in the industrial or bureaucratic model. As Jameson puts it, “To be unique or grotesque, a cartoon figure, an obsessive, is also . . . not to be usable in efficient or instrumental ways” (101). The adoption of strategies of un-usability potentially opens the door to a freer space, to “a Utopia of misfits and oddballs, in which the constraints for uniformization and conformity have been removed, and human beings grow wild like plants in a state of nature” (99). Coincidentally, Sal comments at one point that Dean’s “madness . . . had bloomed into a weird flower” (112). Social scum and refuse appeared to threaten the coherence of both Marxist and capitalist taxonomic order, both of which depend on the efficient control of productive labor. The nonproductive nature of the lumpen-bohemians is one of their defining traits, and Georges Bataille associates this directly with unassimilable heterogeneity: the heterogeneous world includes everything resulting from unproductive expenditure (sacred things themselves form part of this whole). This consists of everything rejected by homogeneous society as waste. . . . the waste products of the human body and certain analogous matter . . . the numerous elements or social forms that homogeneous society is powerless to assimilate . . . those who refuse the rule. (142)

When Sal Paradise, whose names both allude directly to a sense of the sacred, states that “we were making our appalling studies of the night” (132), he affirms that a descent into the heterogeneous dimensions of the lumpen abject is at some level desirable, even necessary, and that there exists a narrative framework, perhaps as yet obscure, in terms of which this state of being is not only acceptable, but leads to new possibility. The scene in the all-night Detroit theater leading from the rubbish heap to images of womb and embryo anticipates the sense of promise that seemed to lie on abjection’s other side. In the same way, what Sal characterizes as “the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road” (254) appears also to be the route—albeit a circuitous one—to “the ragged promised land, the fantastic end of America” (83). These images of finality and closure are never actually realized in the novel, however, as the narrative (with its own ragged contours) refuses both

,&

GdWZgi=daidc

the overall cohesive movement of a structured plot and the satisfactions of orderly closure. The repeated echoes of the sacred that arise in the text and in related discussions of lumpen heterogeneity and the abject suggest a movement not only away from modern culture, but away from history itself. As he speeds along the wintry highways, Dean resembles “a monk peering into the manuscripts of the snow” (112), and the revelation he seeks is not in history, it seems, but in the transcendent moment. Both Marxism and capitalism are animated by a narrative of history as progress, yet Dean’s lumpen intensity has a place in neither. Just as their heterogeneity played havoc with the orderly taxonomies of Marxism, the lumpen-bohemians also threaten these historical narratives. Indeed, as Peter Stallybrass concludes, the category itself seems “to emerge as the very negation of historicity” (84) and thereby threatens to “undo the imagined progress of history and the historical dialectics that [Marx] himself had proposed as the privileged means of understanding history” (79). The lumpen-bohemians appeared to live as far from the currents of modern history as from the channels of efficient productivity. If modern history appeared to have led to the dead-end of cold war militarism, suburban consumerism, and cultural homogeneity, the lumpen alternative seemed to offer an almost ahistorical social space at once heterogeneous, unassimilable, and generally removed from such concerns. It follows, then, that the sense of futurity registered in the novel does not follow any progressive historical dialectic but instead emerges as apocalyptic. Sal’s vision of being “embryonically convoluted” in a “rubbish womb” (246) suggests an ultimate rebirth whose precise details are never provided. His account of the encounter with the Indians of Mexico includes an allusion to the possibility of nuclear war, an eventuality that would bring modernity to an end and usher in a return to the condition of the “fellahin,” a term Kerouac borrowed from Spengler and which may provide an indication of the rebirth Kerouac had in mind. The “fellahin,” according to Spengler, occupy a marginal social space not unlike the lumpenproletariat. Their lives are experienced as “a planless happening without goal or cadenced march in time” and as a result, like the lives of the lumpens, are “devoid of [historical] significance” (II 170–71). In yet another manifestation of the tendency to characterize this group in terms of garbage, a tendency evident in Marx and Kerouac both, Spengler refers to these rootless denizens of the late stages of civilization as “inefficients” and “waste-products,” and the result is a “historyless mass” (II 185). The end result, for Kerouac, is the abolition of history itself, “when destruction comes to the world of ‘history’ and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before,

,'

I]ZIZcZbZci8VhiaZ

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” (280). The search for “the ragged promised land” (83) is, in a sense, ultimately a search for a space on history’s other side. This position on the outside, in poverty and rags and running on pure energy, inevitably takes its toll, and despite his sentimental attachment, Murger saw stark endings for those who remained too long in lumpenbohemian territory. This tenuous way of life could not easily be prolonged, he observed, but led in many cases to “the Hospital or the Morgue” (xxiv). Despite its heterogeneous lumpen energy, On the Road is not lacking in expressions of sadness and abjection. “The one by whom the abject exists,” Kristeva argues, is “a stray. He is on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding” (8), and when we last see Dean, lumpen- bohemian extraordinaire, famous for his energy, wit, and loquacity, he seems exhausted. He “couldn’t talk anymore and said nothing,” remarks Sal. On a freezing New York street, “ragged in a motheaten coat,” he pleads with Sal and Remi for a ride but is refused, leaving him to walk away alone on “a cold winter night” (306). Some readers find that Sal’s actions here constitute a symbolic and final rejection of Dean and the lumpen condition he stands for, but here too it is precisely the radical heterogeneity of the lumpenbohemian category that allows Sal to be in a limousine driven by a bookie and heading to a Duke Ellington concert at the Metropolitan Opera on one page and sitting on a “broken-down river pier” the next (307). The logic of all this defies normal class boundaries, and it is precisely this illogic that so frustrated both Marx and his followers, who depended on the predictability of stable class behaviors for the success of revolutionary politics. The novel’s last image of Sal leaves him neither gloating from the plush seat of a limousine nor celebrating the joys of domestic life with his most recent partner, Laura. Instead, like Dean, who walks off into the night alone, he is staring into the night, contemplating the only certainty in a lumpen world, “the forlorn rags of growing old” (307). CdiZh 1. This novel appeared first in installments in the journal Corsaire, and Murger also published it as a play, which was produced successfully in 1849. The book has been translated into English under various titles, including The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter (1898), Bohemian Life (1899), The Latin Quarter (1908), La Boheme (1920), Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (1924), Love in the Latin Quarter (1948). This continuing interest in the book can be attributed in large part to the fact that it provides the basis for Puccini’s La Bohème, one the most popular operas ever.

,(

GdWZgi=daidc

2. Huncke is referred to in On the Road as Elmer Hassel. William Burroughs appears as Bull Lee. 3. In other circumstances, the Beats might have remained an obscure subculture. Given the apparent need for a group to occupy the space of nonconformist rebellion, they were vaulted to unlikely celebrity. The peculiarity of this is suggested in the title of a Life magazine article that helped make them a media sensation: “The Only Rebellion Around.” 4. Similarly, in The Lonely Crowd, Riesman saw a high degree of other-directed conformity as the fate of most Americans, though he does allow some exceptions to this network of increasing social homogeneity, one of which is a nebulous category he refers to as the anomics. This group includes all the misfits, the maladjusted, those who can’t fit in and those who won’t fit in, that assortment of individuals existing beyond—or perhaps beneath—the reach of conformity: drug addicts, homosexuals, criminals, lunatics, and so on. Noting the “ruleless, ungoverned” nature of these people and their overlap with “those whom Marx called the ‘Lumpenproletariat,’” Riesman concludes that “Taken all together, the anomics—ranging from overt outlaws to catatonic types who lack even the spark for living, let alone for rebellion—constitute a sizable number in America” (287–90). While Riesman largely dismisses the significance of the anomics, the Beats responded quite differently, finding that the space of social waste, the wretched refuse of all classes, could paradoxically be transformed into an outside space of freedom and strange hope, a site of irredeemable heterogeneity in a repressively homogeneous cultural landscape. 5. The Black Panthers, for example, seeking to expand their base of support among marginalized African Americans, conducted an extensive debate concerning the political potential of the lumpens. 6. The disturbance brought about by the abject condition, Kristeva notes, can also contain within itself a kind of possibility: “The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth” (9). The repeated linking in Beat writing of the ragged lumpen condition with religious discourse is in keeping with Fredric Jameson’s observation that the sacred and the heterogeneous are inextricably tied (22). Bataille continues: “Violence, excess, delirium, madness characterize heterogeneous elements to varying degrees: active, as persons or mobs, they result from breaking the laws of social homogeneity” (142). And this: “the lowest strata of society can equally be described as heterogeneous, those who generally provoke repulsion and can in no case be assimilated” (144).

Ldg`h8^iZY Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939. Ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996.

,)

I]ZIZcZbZci8VhiaZ

Certeau, Michel de. Heterologies, Discourse on the Other. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985. Commager, Henry Steele. “The Pragmatic Necessity for Freedom.” Civil Liberties Under Attack. Ed. Claire Wilcox. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1951. 1–22. Draper, Hal. “The Concept of the ‘Lumpenproletariat’ in Marx and Engels.” Économies et Sociétés 6.12 (Dec. 1972): 2285–312. Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1941. ———. The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart, 1955. Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems 1947–1980. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. Goodman, Paul. Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society. New York: Vintage, 1960. Huncke, Herbert. Guilty of Everything: The Autobiography of Herbert Huncke. St. Paul, Minn: Paragon, 1990. Jameson, Fredric. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Kerouac, Jack. Desolation Angels. New York: Riverhead, 1995. ———. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 2005. ———. Selected Letters: 1940–1956. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Penguin, 1995. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Lazarus, Emma. Selected Poems and Other Writings. Ed. Gregory Eiselein. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Literary Texts, 2002. Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon, 1964. Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works. Volume 11. New York: International Publishers, 1963. 99–197. Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works. Volume 6. New York: International Publishers, 1976. 476–519. Mehlman, Jeffrey. Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977. Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford UP, 1956. Murger, Henri. The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2004. O’Neill, Paul. “Arise Ye Silent Class of 57.” Life June 17, 1957: 94. Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven: Yale UP, 1950. Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992. Sontag, Susan. “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution.” The Uptight Society: A Book of Readings. Ed. Howard Gadlin and Bertram E. Garskof. Belmont, Calif.: Brooks/Cole Publishing, 1970. 186–94.

,*

GdWZgi=daidc

Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. 2 vols. Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: Knopf, 1926. Stallybrass, Peter. “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat.” Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 69–95. Thoburn, Nicholas. “Difference in Marx: The Lumpenproletariat and the Proletarian Unnamable.” Economy and Society 31.3 (August 2002): 434–60. Wilson, Elizabeth. Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000.

,+

4 Æ69K:CIJG:H>C6JID":GDI>8>HBÇ/:8DCDB>:H D;IG6K:A>CC>IN>CDCI=:GD696C9 I=:;>GHII=>G9 Mary Paniccia Carden

Describing his youthful “adventures in auto-eroticism,” or his ability to take and control cars and girls, Beat icon Neal Cassady puns on the word “auto,” making it mean both “car” and “self.” He merges the two into a vehicle for performance of an alternative masculine identity, a site where male sexual virility, male freedom, and male power converge. Cassady’s play on words may be humorous, but it also reflects and expresses the larger mythos of the Beat generation within the United States. Beats who stand out most vividly in American popular culture are men, and the freedom they enjoyed—a geographical independence combined with creative and sexual autonomy—has been understood as a particularly male kind of freedom. In their autobiographical writing, Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac both foster and undermine this view of travel as synonymous with a resistant and iconoclastic male freedom.1 The two men intimately link freedom of movement to masculine independence and integrity, which they imagine in simultaneously revolutionary and conservative terms. Kerouac’s autobiographical novel On the Road and Cassady’s collection of autobiographical narratives, entitled The First Third and Other Writings, imagine a traveling American masculinity that transcends the patriarchy associated with bourgeois society but retains its claim to power and authority. They attempt to replace the model of manhood dominant in capitalist America with a model of manhood rooted in foundational American ideals of conquest and self-discovery. Although Kerouac and Cassady disavow masculinities shaped and enacted through capitalist competition and

,,

BVgnEVc^XX^V8VgYZc

consumption, I will argue that their alternatives remain deeply invested in marketplace models of identity.2 On the Road and The First Third construct economies of masculinity in which male travelers negotiate and trade the markers of manhood encoded in Cassady’s “auto-erotic” ideal. These forms of exchange, however, ultimately serve to destabilize connections that Kerouac and Cassady want and need to make between mobility, masculinity, and power in post–World War II America. Eric Leed has observed that travel “has long been a means of changing selves, a method of altering social status, of acquiring fame, fortune, and honor” (263). He suggests that the “social transformations of travel are closely connected to the origins of identity, the ways in which a person’s selves are defined and made visible” (263). Travel, he further observes, has also “long been the medium of peculiarly male fantasies of transformation and self-realization” (275). The agency to invite and survive change, the self-sufficiency to disengage from familiar contexts, and the hardiness to endure deprivation and dislocation—components closely associated with successful travel—have historically been represented as male properties. Georges Van den Abbeele notes that “while there is nothing inherently or essentially masculine about travel . . . Western ideas about travel and the concomitant corpus of voyage literature have generally . . . transmitted, inculcated, and reinforced patriarchal values and ideology from one male generation to the next,” often through “journeying conceived as the rite of passage to manhood” (xxv–xxvi). While women obviously do travel, popular Anglo-European notions of journeying tend to come structured in maleoriented tropes of exploration, conquest, and sexual adventure. From Grand Tours and exotic safaris to scientific and surveying expeditions, travel has been conceptualized as an extended and heightened experience of (white) male mastery and privilege.3 In America, a nation constructed by movement into and beyond flexible frontiers, the journey into the unknown has served to define national history and identity. Casey Blanton notes that “both American fiction and the American travel narratives that influenced it share a response to the idea of travel as a symbolic act, heavy with promises of new life, progress, and the thrill of escape” (18). From Pilgrims to frontier explorers, from John Smith and Lewis and Clark to Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett, American heroes have been travelers. In American origin stories, freedom of movement models a corresponding freedom of identity, illustrated in the “deeply romantic” promise that “in this new land, untrammeled by history and social accident, a person will be able to achieve complete self-definition,” that here “individuals come before society, that they exist in some meaningful sense

,-

Æ6YkZcijgZh^c6jid":gdi^X^hbÇ

prior to, and apart from, societies in which they happen to find themselves” (Baym 71). This promise of authentic and unimpeded self-determination remains a deeply resonant and highly influential foundational trope, which provokes both nostalgia and anxiety in American men living (what appear to be) more bounded lives.4 Cassady and Kerouac tap into the mythology that conflates the male-identified dynamics of travel—the “imperial eye” of the self-contained adventurer, the bracing challenge of the unknown, the empowering erotics of discovery and conquest—with the male-identified dynamics of American origin stories—exploration, self-determination, and, of course, conquest.5 While many commentators have celebrated Cassady’s and Kerouac’s connection to “an earlier American spirit (the American Adam, the American innocent)” (Stephenson 158), they do not, for the most part, explore the ways in which such nostalgia glorifies performances of masculinity based in an uncomplicated opposition to and exploitation of feminized spaces, resources, and subjects. In On the Road and The First Third, Kerouac and Cassady take pains to separate themselves from men who have settled into the ordered and secure patterns of life in postwar America, men whose lives are circumscribed by their path from home to office, by their participation in “capitalist modes of circulation that unsettle all modes of collective, stable identity except those based on the nuclear family and specialized skills in the corporate workplace” (Leverenz 27). While Kerouac and Cassady see travel as rejection of gender-role expectations based in social conformity, they reserve such resistance to men; they gender travel and its desirable outcomes male by invoking the old association of women and society.6 Reassigning disempowering elements of patriarchy to female keeping, they attempt to substitute male brotherhood for nuclear family and to replace the ladder of success with the freedom of the road as primary measures of male identity.7 Kerouac and Cassady construct economies of manhood in which they devalue one aspect of American patriarchy (the need and desire for capitalist success) by investing in another (the need and desire for independent self-determination). Van den Abbeele argues that “the exchange of objects that defines commercial activity implies by its back-and-forth movement some kind of travel. . . . If there is a great investment in travel, it is perhaps because travel models the structure of investment itself, the transfer of assets that institutes an economy, be it political or libidinal, ‘restricted’ or ‘general’” (xvi–xvii). An economy reflects and enforces balances of power, determining direction and control of capital as well as of social value and status. For Kerouac and Cassady, the value or property at stake in travel is

,.

BVgnEVc^XX^V8VgYZc

their claim to an unconventional yet authoritative masculinity, to an “autoerotic” freedom and dominance. In their work, trading on models of male identity offers returns of increased power, pleasure, and fulfillment but also puts these outcomes at risk and produces unstable identities prone to unpredictable fluctuations. In The First Third, Neal Cassady separates himself from cultural structures that he associates with women and transfers power from stationary men to traveling men. True masculinity, for Cassady, resides outside the social hierarchies and familial restrictions represented by the bourgeois woman. His refusal of a male identity rooted in class status and enforced by women, however, depends on and reinforces conventional relations of gender, power, and capitalist modes of consumption. While he insists that real American men must be resistant men, he posits that resistance in the terms of value current in class-driven ideologies of American manhood. The First Third and Other Writings contains The First Third: A Partial Autobiography, composed of a prologue and three chapters. Narrated in the third person, the prologue traces Cassady’s father’s life as a traveling man and his marriage to Cassady’s mother, until the point he and his young son strike out on their own. The First Third then moves into first person to narrate Neal Cassady Jr.’s adventures with his father (characterized by movement, freedom, and sexuality) and trials with his mother (misunderstanding, regimentation, and oppression), ending with the punishment he suffered at age eight, having been labeled “a runaway” and caught fulfilling his “carnal desire” with the daughter of his mother’s friend (Cassady 137). The “partial autobiography” is followed by two sections: “Letters,” addressed to Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey, and “Fragments,” brief autobiographical essays, reflections, and stories. These final sections represent Cassady’s life in terms of his movement—by car and train—and his appetite for sex. They include much of the material that helped establish him as a “mythic macho intellectual outlaw” (Amburn 107) and “muse of the Beat Generation” (Plummer 7). The prologue to The First Third establishes a tradition of wandering for men out of place in traditional family structures and positions Cassady as his traveling father’s heir. As a teenager, Neal Sr. “flee[s] the house of . . . hardened and uncommonly bitter men” to his sister Eva, his “only refuge” (Cassady 5). But Eva has been effectively absorbed into her husband’s family and is unable to support him. He ends up at the boarding house of “Mother Anne” Stubbins, which “as houses go, was as big as its owner, as women go. The female had two hundred and fifty-some pounds; the house had twenty and more rooms” (7). To Anne, “the house and herself were inseparable”

-%

Æ6YkZcijgZh^c6jid":gdi^X^hbÇ

(8). Neal Sr. leaves this mother to take on the role of son-substitute to a man named Roolfe Schwartz, who keeps him innocent and naïve “with the selfish wisdom of a domineering, patient mother” (11). He escapes Schwartz and lives for a time at the house of a rich widow. In her house, the gaze of upperclass people “again made him feel the long-dormant emotions of inferiority and helpless rage he had first known in his youth” (18). In Cassady’s prologue, mother figures remove their support, like Eva, or are neurotically bound to houses, like Anne. They are selfish and devouring, like Roolfe, or facilitate emasculating class hierarchies, like the widow. Cassady’s account of his father’s wandering serves to establish a complex of restrictive associations linking women, mothers, families, and society. As Neal Sr. settles into a stationary job as a barber, this “normal way of life,” Cassady explains, “naturally turned him toward a yearning for feminine companionship” (26). Neal Sr. meets and courts Maude, a respectable middle-class widow. But her marriage to Neal Sr. interferes with her class status and security within a normative family; he cannot support his wife and son, and the “‘home’ [he] provided was really a depression dilly” (45). Her husband’s “drink-caused poverty made Maude turn more and more to her sons for financial help” (43). Cassady’s half-brothers act as men because they act as “breadwinners” (95). Although they are bootleggers, they nevertheless perform the crucial masculine role of provider. Their hypocritical respectability reaffirms Cassady’s view of society as a crumbling facade set over degrading violence, presided over by would-be bourgeois women. When Cassady moves with his father “into the lowest slums of Denver,” he becomes, he says, “the unnatural son of a few score beaten men” (46–47). In this alternate family he “gains[s] certain unorthodox freedoms not ordinarily to be had by American boys” (49), most especially his unsupervised wanderings through the city. These freedoms help to compensate for Neal Sr.’s inability to protect him from a society that denigrates him for his poverty and lack of status. But this unique existence with his father is interrupted when his half-brothers, acting as agents of their mother, intrude into the community of bums and attack Neal Sr. in “pretend[ed] horrified self-righteousness” at the lifestyle he provides for Neal Jr. (96). They deliver Neal Jr. to his mother, who “was simply too much harassed . . . to show [him] her affection adequately” (106). Much of The First Third is structured by Cassady’s oscillation between the humiliation inflicted on him in the domain of mother/society and the abjectness of his father’s outsider position. Suspended between his brothers and his father, Neal Jr.’s options for masculine identity seem equally untenable: both his brothers’ violence and his father’s drunken gentleness shame him by forcing him into powerless positions.

-&

BVgnEVc^XX^V8VgYZc

Neal Sr.’s travel is the result of his lack of power, his failures to perform the dominant male role, his abject position within American culture. Neal Jr., on the other hand, reframes the relationship of travel to masculinity and makes travel commensurate with male freedom and conquest. Feeling the “constant challenge to conquer a new tree or building” (132), he devotes himself to his travels around the city. His explorations of the city that has become his “playground” (83) evolve into scavenging expeditions, and he quickly becomes a more skilled hunter than any of the adults. Later, he takes this skill on the road and provides for his father and his fellow travelers in hobo jungles and railroad yards throughout the west. At “every chance,” he remembers, “bums asked [his] father for [his] presence on hunting trips” (85). In this sense, Cassady’s source of power is identical to his brothers’ and to the bourgeois businessman’s: his status coincides with his role as breadwinner. But Cassady’s most salient claim to male power appears in the long segments of The First Third and Other Writings that address his sexual prowess. He recounts his “first involvement with sex,” which occurs on a trip with his father, where he “thrill[s] chiefly to tiny girls and limitless play” (95). Upon his return to his mother’s home he is “beaten often by [his] legal guardian, brother Jack, because, great though [his] fear of him was, in the excitement of games, [he] would completely forget the dictated time to be home” (95). For Cassady, sex and travel converge as a site for play outside the laws of a brutalizing society. Identifying himself in opposition to these laws, he creates himself as a traveling sex machine and measures his masculinity in terms of cars stolen and women “had.” Cassady describes “auto-eroticism” as “the virgin emotion one builds when first stealing an auto”—the risky excitement of feeling for control of an unfamiliar car, coupled with the thrill of joyriding—in combination with the risky excitement of “exploring the anatomy of the school girl picked up in it” (70–1). Stealing cars, he transfers power to himself by disrupting the breadwinners’ hold on status-conveying material property—cars—and on status-conveying sexual property—women. Cassady’s car-stealing habit did, however, produce some less desirable outcomes. William Plummer reports that “by his late teens Cassady had been arrested by the police ten times, convicted six times, and had served a year and some months in jail” (21). In The First Third and Other Writings, Cassady makes reference to his time in prison but does not discuss or explore its potentially disempowering effects. Instead, he uses his ability to appropriate, use, and discard cars and women—other men’s property—to undermine the authority society vests in bourgeois men. His “adventures in auto-eroticism” (170) draw together an

-'

Æ6YkZcijgZh^c6jid":gdi^X^hbÇ

illicit freedom of movement with the unsanctioned eroticism of a sexuality projected outside the structures of normative family and beyond the control of the dominant social order. Cassady’s association of eroticism with travel is, of course, not limited to cars. In a letter to Jack Kerouac, which Kerouac dubbed “the Great Sex Letter” (Nicosia 183), he describes two bus seductions. The first, involving a girl named Patricia, leads her to swear “eternal love, complete subjectivity to me & immediate satisfaction” (Cassady 190). But her “dominating sister” (191) removes her from the bus terminal before she fulfills this promise. Cassady is left angry and alone, but soon meets a “young . . . completely passive (my meat) virgin” (191, emphasis Cassady’s). She accompanies him to a park where he “screwed as never before; all my pent up emotion finding release in this young virgin . . . who is, by the by, a school teacher!” (191, emphasis Cassady’s). He loses Patricia to her “terror and slave-feeling” (190) for her sister, representative of family obligation; he succeeds, however, in overcoming the elements of society and conformity embodied in the unnamed school teacher. In these exchanges and others like them, Cassady both rejects and exemplifies what David Gartman has identified as the anxiety of consumerism. “American desires for autonomy and community,” Gartman argues, “have been channeled into privatized, reified commodity consumption. And because such substitutes were inherently unsatisfying, they were compulsively repeated in a frenzy of futile and limitless consumption” (139). Rather than working to establish male power through buying power, Cassady glories in his unlimited and unsanctioned consumption of the ultimate icons of a capitalist economy based in male dominance—cars and women. For him, the free exercise of masculinity means consumption without cost. If women stand in for society as representatives of the bourgeois household—the center of capitalist consumption—then in conquering women Cassady overcomes the society that has humiliated and punished him. If women love and want him, want “it” from him, love “it” from him (152), then in a way society wants him, too, and indirectly validates the masculinity he understands as resistant. Cassady repeatedly insists that male power lies in unconstrained sexuality. In what remains of his famous “Joan Anderson letter,” he breaks off his narrative of sexual adventure to remark, in a facetious aside: (let this be a lesson to you, men, never become separated from your clothes, at least keep your trousers handy, when doing this sort of thing in a strange house—oops, my goodness, I forgot for a second that some

-(

BVgnEVc^XX^V8VgYZc

of you are out of circulation and certainly not in any need of “Lord Chesterfield’s” counseling—don’t show this to your wives, or tell them that I only offer this advice to pass on to your sons, or, if that’s too harsh, to your dilettante friends, whew!, got out of that) (154)

As “Lord Chesterfield,” Cassady acts as a locus of sexual knowing and adventurous masculinity unfettered by the conventional heterosexual arrangements that proscribe the free exercise of virility. He opposes his circulating virility with the performance of masculinity possible within the structure of the traditional couple and deems himself more free and more masculine than men who have submitted to societal containment. 8 In his long descriptions of his prodigious sexual activity with the underage daughter of rich parents, he flaunts his rejection of social mores but also lays claim to the social space of Denver, which they “cover” with “pecker-tracks” (153); his traveling virility enables him to simultaneously escape and make his mark on dominant culture. Traveling men not only resist the deadly grip of a feminized society but bond through manipulating women—going to meet women, introducing each other to women, exchanging women. Cassady’s letters to Jack Kerouac center on his efforts to “make” (189) women, offer advice on making women, and request that Kerouac make women for him: “if you love me, you’ll do all in your power to find a girl” (197). All this frenetic motion and frantic sex seem as driven and anxiety-ridden as more conventional forms of consumption, and like other, capitalist, forms, provide returns in elevated status. In a sense, Cassady’s “auto-erotic” consumption functions as an attempt to recoup his father’s losses of personal power and cultural authority. Cassady’s unspoken desire for recognition by the society he disdains emerges in “Joe Hanns,” one of the more polished pieces in The First Third and Other Writings. This short story describes a race car driver who has become a new American mythic figure, “America’s number one idol, hero, perfected one” (177). Through his “faculty for instantly acting on thought” (179), he coincides with himself.9 This heroic traveler’s name, Cassady writes, has entered “all current colloquial dictionaries: anything perfect was performed ‘Hanns down’” (178–79). Feted by powerful men and greeted by adoring crowds wherever he goes, he is desired by “envious, worshipping” youths and encounters “sly maid[s]’ seductive” eyes (177). Here, travel becomes a tradeable commodity that promises sexual fulfillment and cultural status. The wish-fulfillment evident in Cassady’s story about a driving superman encodes his desire for social validation, suggesting the difficulty and perhaps the undesirability of detaching a resistant, traveling form of manhood from signifiers of a more conventional masculinity.

-)

Æ6YkZcijgZh^c6jid":gdi^X^hbÇ

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s editor’s note, which serves as the introduction to The First Third, seems to respond to this desire by providing readers with explicit instructions for approaching the text through a specifically masculine heroic tradition. Using the images and vocabulary of American narratives of origin, Ferlinghetti validates Cassady’s resistant masculinity and likens his autobiography to “letters from pioneers in wagon-trains trekking Westward two hundred years ago” (n.p.). Cassady’s “wandering existence,” he writes, is like “source material for that old myth of the Wild West, as if Cassady were of the last generation of folk heroes” (n.p.). Comparing Cassady to Paul Bunyan and to Paul Newman’s character in The Hustler, Ferlinghetti describes “his hustling voice,” the voice of the con man operating on the margins of American culture, as the voice of the true American man (n.p.). He compares Cassady with “an early prototype of the urban cowboy who a hundred years before might have been an outlaw on the range” and asserts that “as such Kerouac saw him in On the Road” (n.p.). But, as we will see, Jack Kerouac’s development of Cassady’s theme of traveling virility and unencumbered male potency takes some unexpected turns and moves in directions that call the consociation of movement and manhood into question. In On The Road, Kerouac’s autobiographical novel, Dean Moriarty, a thinly disguised Neal Cassady, initiates Sal Paradise (Kerouac) into the traveling life. The novel records the events of a number of Kerouac’s journeys, collapsed together “for the sake of focus” (Tytell 158). Earlier versions made no attempt to conceal markers of time and location, not to mention the identities of friends and acquaintances. Names of places and people were changed at the insistence of Kerouac’s publisher, who feared exposure to libel suits. Malcolm Cowley, Kerouac’s editor, worried that “the novel posed horrendous legal issues because it was not a work of fiction, in [his] estimation, but a documentary journal” (Amburn 221). On the Road began to emerge in its present incarnation when Kerouac “decided to write the novel as if he were answering [his wife’s] questions” about his experiences with Cassady: “What did you and Neal really do?” (Nicosia 343). Cassady, who Kerouac seems to have seen as “a phallic totem” (Tytell 62), is in many ways the center and focus of the novel, source of its energy and drive. As a “phallic totem,” he acts as model and measure of the traveling economy of male identity.10 The novel begins with a pointed contrast between Cassady/Dean’s joyous freedom and Kerouac/Sal’s stultifying life in New York, his “miserably weary split-up” with his wife, and his “feeling that everything was dead” (Kerouac 1).11 Dean appears free from such burdens, a “holy con man” (5),

-*

BVgnEVc^XX^V8VgYZc

whose ‘criminality’ was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for joy rides). Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love” (7). Dean is a “sideburned hero of the snowy West” (2), and Sal interprets his “wild yea-saying overburst of American joy” as a recreation of American origins; the (re)new(ed) American man overcomes bourgeois-controlled culture not by negating it, but by racing beyond its grasp. Dean promises escape from settled spaces and deliverance from a life structured by the breadwinner imperative, offering brotherhood as an alternative to the malaise of marriage. In Dean, Sal can “hear a new call and see a new horizon” (8). For him, Dean embodies the freedom of a manhood enacted through travel, a manhood Sal seeks for himself. Movement toward the new horizon represented by Dean situates Sal on the margins of culture, and his new vantage point transforms jaded vision into fresh vision. With his “innocent road-eyes” Sal recognizes “the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream—grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying” (107). He finds that “the purity of the road” allows him to leave “confusion and nonsense behind” (134), to free himself from the frantic grasping for a buck that has become the “mad” American dream of capitalist competition and consumption. Travel recreates Sal as “strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was ‘Wow’” (35). A strange prophet, Sal brings the new word, which he hopes will rewrite “the story of America” (68). Traveling men, Dean assures him, “know America, we’re at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it’s the same in every corner” (121). America is “like an oyster for [them] to open” (138). Dean posits male-dominant sexuality as a metaphor not only for travel but for truth, assuring Sal, “‘We’ve passed through all forms. . . . Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can’t make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It’s all this!’ He wrapped his finger in his fist; the car hugged the line straight and true” (120). Here, the conjunction of symbolically enacted sex and unswervingly “straight” travel suggests that Beat men encounter the real in a traveling heterosexual scene. Their refusal of settled, conventional models of manhood and routes

-+

Æ6YkZcijgZh^c6jid":gdi^X^hbÇ

to knowledge enables them to arrive at truth: “‘we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE’” (209). But in On the Road, Dean and Sal reach “IT” not through heterosexual practice but through the intensely voluble talk of their homosocial bond,12 an interaction that transcends traditional measures of truth and logic and defies conventional laws of narration, an intercourse that rocks their car as they “swayed to the rhythm of the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank traced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives” (209). The energy of their eroticized bonding culminates in an ecstatic coming to truth; for them, travel is not about an external destination, but rather about arriving at an internal truth. Travel is the expression—between men—of authentic or essential male selves. Although Sal remarks that he “‘want[s] to marry a girl . . . so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old’” and insists that “‘this can’t go on all the time—all this franticness and jumping around’” (117), he interrupts heterosexual relationships to travel either with or toward Dean. Kerouac often uses sexualized language to describe bonds between men, but On the Road represses homosexual practices and dilutes erotically charged relationships within the Beat traveling community. He feared his own (and others’) homosexual desires, denied (at least publicly) the sexual component in his relations with other men, and “somehow managed to convince himself that he could dip deeply and regularly into homoeroticism and still be a part of society’s heterosexual tyranny” (Amburn 103).13 Eliding the “potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual” (Sedgwick 1), Kerouac preserves traveling virility as a homosocial property that serves to intensify male access to traditional heterosexual signifiers of male power, most visibly manifested in dominance of women. But “the Beats’ model of heterosexuality,” Catharine R. Stimpson has argued, “regulated more than the women whom brotherhood had marginalized. Exemplifying the sheer reach of cultural legacies, it shaped their homosexuality as well. Men wanted other men, as well as women, to submit to them, and assume a feminine role” (380). In Kerouac’s novel, the ambiguity of traveling power relations produces confusion and contradiction within the traveling economy’s balance of homosocial brotherhood and heterosexual dominance, leading to losses of male capital that complicate the freedom and control of “auto-eroticism” and suggest the difficulties of being mobile and powerful at the same time. “IT” appears as a homosocial property established through men’s ability to represent themselves to each other completely and absolutely; On the Road defines women precisely through their inability to represent themselves. For

-,

BVgnEVc^XX^V8VgYZc

example, Sal describes Rita Bettencourt as “a nice little girl, simple and true” (57), but focuses on her fear of sex and inability to articulate independent or authentic desires. When he asks her what she “want[s] out of life,” the question he “used to ask . . . all the time of girls,” she replies: “‘I don’t know. . . . Just wait on tables and try to get along.’ She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together; saying that, and planning to leave . . . in two days. She turned away wearily” (57–58). Rita’s stasis and unimaginative view of life serve to rationalize Sal’s failure to show her the truth about sex and his intention to continue on the homosocial road. Kerouac, like Cassady, imagines women as the social/sexual objects whose fixity provides the ground that enables men to perceive movement as empowering. But women occasionally manage to introduce a kind of static into the traveling economy that interferes with men’s satisfactions in sex and travel. Sal initially describes Dean’s first wife, Marylou, as a “pretty blonde with immense ringlets of hair,” “her hands hanging in her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a wide stare” (2). He adds, however, that “outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things” (2). The textual view of Marylou fluctuates between her attractiveness as a passive, aestheticized dumb object and her dangerous capacity for “horrible things” that disrupt male security and brotherhood. In New York, she leaves Dean and causes him problems with “some false trumped-up hysterical crazy charge” (3). Later, on a cross-country journey, she watches him “with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet.” To Sal, her love for Dean seems infused with “sinister envy” (163). While the novel focuses on Marylou’s desire to possess Dean, to hide and hoard him, it also records her resistance to Dean’s desire to own her and her refusal of her position within his auto-erotic economy. She evinces serene love of Dean while making love and promises to Sal. A “whore” and a “pathological liar” (163), neither her sex nor her voice are true or trustworthy to purposes of male empowerment. She creates her own economy of power in which she defies and leaves Dean and deploys her sexuality to manipulate other men, including Sal. Dean’s failure to retain control over their relationship corresponds with his decline. He strikes her, but his “thumb only deflected off her brow and she didn’t even have a bruise and in fact laughed, but [his] thumb broke above the wrist” and becomes infected (183). Finally, the tip of the thumb must be amputated, and that constantly infected thumb, protruding in the air, soiled bandages flapping, becomes “the symbol of Dean’s final development” (188). “The devil himself,” Sal ob-

--

Æ6YkZcijgZh^c6jid":gdi^X^hbÇ

serves, “had never fallen farther; in idiocy, with infected thumb, surrounded by the battered suitcases of his motherless feverish life across America and back numberless times, an undone bird” (189). Dean’s various wives and ex-wives form a kind of nationwide support group to exchange information and advice. In San Francisco, women band together, comprising a “sewing circle” that holds Dean “responsible” for his use of them (193). Galatea Dunkel, the woman Dean convinced Ed Dunkel to marry for the money to finance a trip across the country and then dump, confronts Dean: You have absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself and your damned kicks. All you think about is what’s hanging between your legs and how much money or fun you can get out of people and then you just throw them aside. Not only that but you’re silly about it. It never occurs to you that life is serious and there are people trying to make something decent out of it instead of just goofing all the time. (194)

Translating Galatea’s unflattering interpretation of auto-erotic traveling virility into the mystic language of traveling men, Sal concludes that Dean’s un-serious use of women makes him “the HOLY GOOF” (194). He transforms female protest into the envy that reinforces the traveling man’s power, reducing the “sewing-circle’s” version of the road economy to jealousy of his “position at [Dean’s] side, defending him and drinking him in as they once tried to do” (195). Sal does not acknowledge that in his competition with women for possession of Dean, he assumes the feminized role of worshipper and supplicant. In his proposition that Dean accompany him back east and in his offer to support him, Sal finds himself negotiating not only the terms of a homosocial/sexual bond, but the gendered positions of power encoded in breadwinning, heterosexual arrangements, as well. In Dean’s appraising gaze, he reads the complexities of their relationship: “I’d never committed myself before with regard to his burdensome existence, and that look was the look of a man weighing his chances at the last minute before the bet. There were triumph and insolence in his eyes, a devilish look, and he never took his eyes off mine for a long time. I looked back at him and blushed” (189). This “commitment” is rife with potential meanings in terms of the novel’s erotic economy of traveling masculinity. It represents, on one level, a milestone in the novel’s homosocial plot line, as Sal offers to deliver Dean from domesticity and open new frontiers for traveling adventure in a return to male brotherhood. As a “commitment,” however, it also suggests the promises made in the context of love relations and thus the possibility

-.

BVgnEVc^XX^V8VgYZc

of homosexual partnership. It is unclear, however, who would “submit” to whom and “assume a feminine role” (Stimpson 380) in this relationship. Sal proposes, which might give him the male-dominant position, but Dean’s roguish demeanor seems to shift the power to him. To further complicate matters, Sal is able to make the offer because he has money, and, as the partner with money, his position in their relationship could easily come to mimic the heterosexually traditional male-dominant role as “breadwinner.” But as the partner with money, Sal also risks sliding into a feminized role, becoming a kind of Galatea Dunkel figure, assured of the traveling man’s love only to be used and discarded. Dean’s gaze of “triumph and insolence” provokes Sal’s blush, perhaps indicative of his discomfort with an intimacy infused with a bewildering complex of homosocial, homosexual, and heterosexual undertones of power, dominance, and vulnerability. After some negotiation, Sal and Dean resolve to “stick together and be buddies till we died” (191), an agreement resolved in a homosocial context but also a partnership resonant with the metaphors of the heterosexual marriage contract. Feeling “perplexed and uncertain,” they cement their pact while watching a Greek wedding party (190). Later, Sal’s anxiety about these confused and contested gender-role associations emerges in his suspicion that Dean may be conning him, placing him in company with a homosexual man from whom he attempts to con money. This man, who owns the car in which they are traveling east, invites them to his hotel room and tells them he liked young men like us . . . he really didn’t like girls and had recently concluded an affair with a man in Frisco in which he had taken the male role and the man the female role. Dean plied him with businesslike questions and nodded eagerly. The fag said he would like nothing better than to know what Dean thought about all this. Warning him first that he had once been a hustler in his youth, Dean asked him how much money he had. I was in the bathroom. The fag became extremely sullen and I think suspicious of Dean’s final motives, turned over no money, and made vague promises for Denver. He kept counting his money and checking on his wallet. (210)

According to his biographers, Kerouac waited in the bathroom while Cassady had sex with this man, but the version that appears in On the Road conveys only the suggestion of a possible trade of love for money, a suggestion that never materializes textually. Sal notes only that Dean “had sufficiently conquered the owner of the Plymouth to take over the wheel without remonstrance, and now we really traveled” (210). From his position

.%

Æ6YkZcijgZh^c6jid":gdi^X^hbÇ

of power in the driver’s seat, Dean “ball[s] right across the desert” (211), and none of the passengers dare to complain. After this episode, while in another bathroom with Dean, Sal steps away from the urinal “before [he] was finished and resumed at another urinal, and said to Dean, ‘Dig this trick.’” Dean observes, “It’s a very good trick but awful on your kidneys and because you’re getting a little older now every time you do this eventually years of misery in your old age, awful kidney miseries for the days when you sit in parks.” Sal responds, “I’m no old fag like that fag, you don’t have to warn me about my kidneys” (213). His sudden, snappish defense of his ability to control his body—specifically and especially his penis, signifier of his status as a man in the traveling community—suggests his fear of being placed in a weakened position, rendered less manly or less powerful than Dean. It also gestures toward the uncomfortably close correspondence between Dean and Sal’s economy of exchange and Dean’s near-contract/contact with “the fag.” Sal quickly retreats from his attack on his “brother,” “holy con-man” Dean, attributing his suspicion to his lack of experience with “close relationships” (214). But his unspoken fear that Dean is using him is realized as their “marriage” follows the trajectory of all Dean’s marriages: Dean proves himself a “rat” when he abandons Sal in Mexico City because Sal is too ill to travel (302). Like Dean’s wives, Sal is left behind when he restricts Dean’s freedom of movement. Sal, however, does not articulate the connections between himself and Dean’s wives or discuss their implications for traveling male identity, resolving “Okay, old Dean, I’ll say nothing” (302). Silenced, Sal occupies a reduced position, ironically less powerful than the “sewing circle,” whose members voiced and protested their role in Dean’s economy. Sal’s decision to say nothing demonstrates reluctance to acknowledge his reduction, together with continued dependency on Dean as privileged model of male identity. The contradictions of the homosocial/heterosexual traveling economy converge in Sal’s predicament as an abandoned partner. Gregory Stephenson observes that Dean’s “treatment of people often parallels his treatment of cars; using them, breaking them under the strains of his demands, and then abandoning them” (157). If, as Stephenson and Galatea Dunkel argue, Dean is an insatiable consumer who wrings the “kicks” out of others before discarding them, then Sal risks being consumed, emptied of value. Because travel encodes a personal economics of gendered identity, Sal reckons the effects of travel by “figur[ing] the losses and . . . the gain that I knew was in there somewhere too” (107). He observes that he “was beginning to cross and recross towns in America as though I were a traveling salesman—raggedy travelings, bad stock, rotten beans in

.&

BVgnEVc^XX^V8VgYZc

the bottom of my bag of tricks, nobody buying” (247). Travel both inflates and endangers Sal’s investment in the model of male identity that he both shares with and loses to Dean. Likening himself to a salesman with nothing to sell, Sal draws on a metaphor of capitalist depletion to describe this dilemma of traveling manhood. Sal’s experience often reflects a loss of forms of power constitutive of the models of manhood informing both hegemonic and Beat economies of identity. As a hitchhiker, Sal finds himself at the mercy of people who own cars; he must travel at their paces and adjust to their temperaments. As a man who is uncomfortable driving, he is at the mercy of Dean, the masterdriver, whose driving skills are often described in overtly sexual terms. At one point, frightened by “mad Ahab” Dean’s driving, Sal retreats to the back to sleep, but “when I closed my eyes all I could see was the road unwinding into me. . . . There was no escaping it. I resigned myself to all” (235–36). Finding that travel subsumes the traveler rather than allowing him to consume, own, know the road, Sal gives himself up to Dean, “the Angel of Terror” (235), and lapses into an eerie state of disconnection from the self. At a number of moments in the novel, Sal finds that as a traveler he lacks a firm ground for identity. During his first trip west, he experiences “the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room . . . and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost” (15). Noting that this experience of dislocation occurs “halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future,” he suggests that “maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon” (15). But sensations of ghostliness and haunting persist throughout the text. Sal repeatedly describes himself as ghostly and perceives other travelers as phantomlike. He has a troubling dream of “the 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” (124). Although he interprets the dream as “the mere simple longing for pure death” (124), it seems more likely that the “strange Arabian” figure who pursues and overtakes him represents his fear of unredeemed alien-ness, of an alterity he later ascribes to Dean when he envisions him “pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me”: I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with

.'

Æ6YkZcijgZh^c6jid":gdi^X^hbÇ

thousands of sparking flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again. . . . Everything was up, the jig and all. Behind him charred ruins smoked. He rushed westward over the groaning and awful continent again, and soon he would arrive. We made hasty preparations for Dean. News was that he was going to drive me to Mexico. (259)

Sal compares waiting for Dean to anticipating “the imminent arrival of Gargantua; preparations had to be made to widen the gutters of Denver and foreshorten certain laws to fit his suffering bulk and bursting ecstasies” (259). Here, Dean occupies the ultimate outsider position, representing an otherness that cannot be accommodated by any established structure; as the Shrouded Traveler, a Gargantua who does not fit in culture, Dean’s irreversible alien-ness borders on the insane, inhuman, monstrous. Sal awaits him, apparently with no control over where Dean will drive him. Because Dean embodies traveling manhood and because travel alternately intensifies and endangers culturally intelligible signifiers of masculinity, Sal’s perceptions of Dean shift as he accumulates conflicting associations of power and powerlessness. Finally, Sal works to regain the control he has ceded to Dean by distancing himself from the confusing possibilities Dean has come to represent. As the novel concludes, Dean cannot “talk anymore” (304), and IT ceases to signify. His legendary driving abilities have passed from skillful to self-destructively reckless, and at the end, he is a rider rather than a driver. Sal loses sight of him when his social-climbing companions refuse to give his “idiot friend” Dean a ride. Sal sits “in the back of the Cadillac and wave[s] at him. . . . Dean, ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again” (307). At the end, Kerouac transfers the frightful possibilities of resistant masculinity—alien-ness, weakness, insanity—to the figure of Dean as a meaningless traveler, stripped of his power. But it is as a symbol of lost possibilities that Dean represents an idealized American identity: So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it . . . the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims

.(

BVgnEVc^XX^V8VgYZc

on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. (307)

The novel’s conclusion expresses nostalgic desire for Dean’s original promise: the possibility of “something new,” a “long-prophesied” reconnection with a free and authentic American manhood. Its elegiac tone encodes a sense of loss that finally materializes in the ending oscillation between Dean—the lost figure of lost possibilities—and his father—a lost traveler who could not be found. An abject and absent wanderer, Old Dean Moriarty signifies the diminished outcomes of resistant manhood and the invisibility and ineffectualness of destinationless travelers in American culture, a legacy no son wants to inherit. This ending emphasis on a traveling son’s fatal relation to a lost and powerless father recasts the trope of travel as a “rite of passage to manhood” (Van den Abbeele xxvi) by offering an empty line of male identifications, a missing patrilineal connection that fails to convey dominance and authority. Romanticizing the lost traveling man from a safe distance, Sal simultaneously valorizes an impossible male identity and retreats from the consequences of its ambivalent and ambiguous associations of gender, power, and class. Cassady’s pun on “auto-eroticism” conflates self and travel as sites of an independent and resistant eroticism. But Kerouac finds the erotics of the free man at large in America bound up in a complex and sometimes reductive imbrication of homosocial community and heterosexual dominance, in a not-so-clearly delineated economy of gained and lost signifiers of masculinity. Cassady and Kerouac challenge models of American manhood based in post–World War II capitalist comfort and cultural satisfaction but also run up against the limits of such resistance. Their simultaneous rejection of and dependence on conventional markers of masculinity suggest that the concept of unlimited travel is antithetical to the concept of identity. The freedom and detachment of travel easily slide into weakness and fragmentation: disconnection from the solidness, control, and dominance traditionally assumed as the unshakable center of male identity. Complete freedom dismantles the structures that construct and protect identity—a consistent or at least recognizable “I”—and that allow comfortable or at least tolerable relations in and to culture. Because the various “social transformations” that travelers undergo in different cultural spaces and in different forms and circumstances of travel “are closely connected to the origins of identity” .)

Æ6YkZcijgZh^c6jid":gdi^X^hbÇ

(Leed 263), they erode certainty about the solidness of those origins and throw foundational assumptions about identity into jeopardy. Travelers cannot necessarily choose what elements of their lives or aspects of their personalities that traveling will free them from, and we all carry things with us that we cannot afford to lose. CdiZh An earlier version of this essay was published as “‘Adventures in Auto-Eroticism’: Traveling Masculinity in Autobiographical Writing by Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady,” Journeys 7.1 (2006): 1–25. 1. For more on the meanings attached to Beatness and on Kerouac and Cassady’s positions within the Beat Movement, see Ellis Amburn, Ann Charters, Dennis McNally, Barry Miles, Gerald Nicosia, William Plummer, Gregory Stephenson, and John Tytell. 2. “Model of identity” is Paul John Eakin’s term. In Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography, he argues that when it comes to self . . . autobiography is doubly structured, doubly mediated, a textual metaphor for what is already a metaphor for the subjective reality of consciousness. The peculiar complexity of autobiography as a record of the role of models of identity in the relation between self and culture resides in this fact: ontogenetically considered, the self is already constructed in interaction with the others of its culture before it begins self-consciously in maturity (and specifically in autobiography—where it exists) to think in terms of models of identity. This is what I mean when I say that the self of an autobiographical text is a construct of a construct, and that culture has exerted a decisive part, through the instrumentality of models of identity, in the process of identity formation, whether literary or psychological. (102) 3. See Sidonie Smith’s Moving Lives for an overview of women’s travel narratives and identities as travelers, as well as for discussion of contemporary women travelers’ processes of “self-locating” (27). 4. For in-depth discussion of the frontier in the American imagination, see Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard Slotkin. 5. See Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes for an incisive articulation of the politics of race and gender in travel literature. Also, note that Patricia Nelson Limerick defines the American west as “a place undergoing conquest and never fully escaping its consequences” (26). 6. The association of women with society and also with nature is well-represented in American literature and has been extensively discussed by literary critics. See, for example, the work of Nina Baym and Annette Kolodny. 7. In her article “The Beat Generation and the Trials of Homosexual Liberation,” Catharine R. Stimpson argues that .*

BVgnEVc^XX^V8VgYZc

the Beats reconstructed erotic culture more ably for themselves, and others like themselves, than for people much unlike themselves. In language and action, they sought freedom, mobility and a state in which transformation and transcendence were viable. They were far slower to recognize that others might deserve and desire all this, too. (391) 8. Not only did Cassady reinforce a model for powerful male identity with this letter, he also proposed a model for powerful writing, for a “virile” prose (Plummer 87). Ellis Amburn calls the Joan Anderson letter “the most famous document in Beat history and the work that shaped all of Kerouac’s future writing.” Kerouac called “Neal’s prose ‘kickwriting’—first person singular arias composed in fits of soul-bearing frenzy”—and used it as a model for his own writing (Amburn 161). According to Barry Miles, the letter, a “confessional, a heart outpouring with no attempt to hold back or shape the material into something more acceptable,” “amazed” Kerouac, who later remarked that “I got the idea for the spontaneous style of On the Road from seeing how good old Neal Cassady wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious” (147). Most of the letter is lost now. 9. In her Afterword to The First Third, Caroline Cassady suggests a connection between Cassady and Joe Hanns. She writes that Cassady “reveled in the game of continuing a sentence as long as he could before resorting to a period. (Rather like his favorite feat of driving a car as far as possible before applying the brakes)” (140). 10. Other commentators agree that Cassady-as-symbol is central to Kerouac’s writing and worldview. Nicosia, for example, writes that Kerouac saw Cassady as “some kind of hero” and as “a myth figure” (178, 250). Kerouac’s biographers also agree that he identified Cassady as “a fantasy substitute” (Miles 131) for his brother Gerard, who died at the age of nine. 11. Kerouac’s discomfort may also have had to do with his failure to perform as a breadwinner for his mother and now ex-wife. His father’s “last words were, ‘Take care of your mother whatever you do. Promise me’” (Nicosia 163). Kerouac promised, but as William Plummer observes, his father’s exhortation may have been “a largely formal request, since [his mother] always took care of Jack. She handled his finances and—depending on how one sees it—either gave him the emotional purchase that enabled his itinerancy, or encumbered him with an attachment that prevented his ever becoming fully adult” (59). In the novel, his mother becomes his aunt, a woman who takes “one look at Dean and decided that he was a madman” (Kerouac 7). Sal consistently returns to her, to renew and repair himself in domestic spaces, over the course of the text. 12. Eve Sedgwick discusses male homosocial desire as “a pattern of male friendship, mentorship, entitlement, rivalry, and hetero- and homosexuality . . . in an intimate and shifting relation to class.” It is, she observes,

.+

Æ6YkZcijgZh^c6jid":gdi^X^hbÇ

a kind of oxymoron. “Homosocial” is a word occasionally used in history and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds between persons of the same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by an analogy with “homosexual,” and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from “homosexual.” . . . To draw the “homosocial” back into the orbit of “desire,” of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual—a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted. (1–2) 13. For in-depth discussion of Kerouac’s conflicted love relationships with men and women, see Amburn, especially.

Ldg`h8^iZY Amburn, Ellis. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Baym, Nina. “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors.” The New Feminist Criticism. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 63–80. Blanton, Casey. Travel Writing: The Self and the World. New York: Twayne, 1997. Cassady, Neal. The First Third and Other Writings. San Francisco: City Lights, 1971. Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Biography. New York: Warner, 1974. Eakin, Paul John. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Gartman, David. Auto Opium. New York: Routledge, 1994. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 2005. Kolodny, Annette. The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984. ———. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975. Leed, Eric. The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Leverenz, David. “The Last Real Man in America: From Natty Bumppo to Batman.” Fictions of Masculinity. Ed. Peter F. Murphy. New York: New York UP, 1994. 21–53. Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: Norton, 1987. McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. New York: Random House, 1979. Miles, Barry. Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats: A Portrait. New York: Holt, 1998. Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.

.,

BVgnEVc^XX^V8VgYZc

Plummer, William. The Holy Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady. New York: Paragon, 1981. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890. New York: Atheneum, 1985. ———. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Atheneum, 1992. Smith, Sidonie. Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. Stephenson, Gregory. The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990. Stimpson, Catharine R. “The Beat Generation and the Trials of Homosexual Liberation.” Salmagundi 58–59 (1982–3): 373–92. Tytell, John. Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation. New York: McGraw Hill, 1977. Van den Abbeele, Georges. Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992.

.-

5 E6G6AA:A9:HI>C>:H>CI=:7:AA?6G6C9 DCI=:GD69 Hilary Holladay

There is no evidence that Jack Kerouac and Sylvia Plath, those two archetypes of the confessional urge, ever met. But if they had been introduced in the fall of 1957, when Kerouac had just published On the Road and Plath was at Smith College (her alma mater) teaching freshman English, they would have had plenty to talk about. They might have discussed Joyce, Lawrence, and Dostoyevsky, authors they both greatly admired. They might have talked about what it was like growing up in Massachusetts, Kerouac in working-class Lowell and Plath in Wellesley, an idyllic college town. As the high-achieving offspring of immigrants—Plath’s heritage was German and Austrian; Kerouac’s, French Canadian—they could have compared the ways their ethnic origins shaped their identities and ambitions. Other commonalities would have also beckoned. Plath was so strongly affected by the death of her father, Otto, when she was eight years old that she would have been curious about Kerouac’s relationship with his father, Leo, who died in 1946 when Jack was twenty-four. Since she was at the time deeply in love with Ted Hughes, the English poet whom she had married in 1956, she would not have been romantically interested in Kerouac, but the sensualist in her would have appreciated his blue eyes and brooding intensity. And if she had heard him read his own work aloud, she would have surely admired the musical rhythms of his voice as well as his innate feel for language. For his part, though he was not in the habit of treating women as equals, Kerouac would not have been able to look down on Plath, literally or intellectually. At 5 feet, 9 inches, she was as tall as he was, and she had

..

=^aVgn=daaVYVn

an intensity of her own, which Hughes later uncharitably called her “particular death-ray quality” (qtd. in Ennis and Kukil 50). Kerouac’s aborted stint at Columbia College would have paled in comparison to her degrees from Smith College and Cambridge University, which she had attended on a Fulbright scholarship after graduating from Smith. And though she had not yet taken cross-country road trips the way he had, she had lived in England and traveled in Europe.1 Ten years his junior and in the late 1950s not yet producing her most celebrated work, Plath was nevertheless more worldly in many ways than Kerouac was. Alternately bumptious and shy, he might have seen a flicker of disdain cross Plath’s animated face if they had met not long after the publication of On the Road. That such a meeting never took place does not mean, of course, that these two were oblivious to one another’s existence. Although Kerouac may have overlooked the author of the definitive confessional poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” since she was just becoming posthumously famous in the United States during the last, difficult years of his life, 2 Plath could not escape some knowledge of Kerouac and the Beat Generation. Ted Hughes’s personal library, now owned by Emory University, contains a copy of On the Road, a 1961 Pan Books paperback edition printed in London. It has no marks indicating that Plath read it, and Hughes may have acquired it after he and Plath separated in 1962, but Plath likely knew of the novel and had possibly read her husband’s copy of it.3 We can say with much greater certainty that she knew of Kerouac several years before he published On the Road, because one of her early publications indicates that was the case. In 1953, the year after John Clellon Holmes had published his essay “This Is the Beat Generation” in The New York Times Magazine, Plath was chosen for Mademoiselle magazine’s college board. As guest managing editor, she wrote in an introduction to the August 1953 issue, “Focusing our telescope on college news around the globe, we debate and deliberate. Issues illuminated: academic freedom, the sorority controversy, our much labeled (and libeled) generation” ( “Mlle’s Last Word” 235). The last item refers to “The Labeled Generation,” a lighthearted essay by Joel Raphaelson, identified in his biographical note as a twenty-four-year-old Harvard graduate. Writing for Mademoiselle’s audience of young women in their teens and early twenties, Raphaelson tries to determine the most accurate moniker for their generation. He describes Holmes as “the talented young author of a book with the spirited title of Go [who] said moodily that we’re the Beat Generation. Right away I remembered that we had been called the Silent Generation by Time” (264). The word “beat” inevitably leads him to Kerouac: “Beat wasn’t even Mr. Clellon Holmes’s own word. A few years

&%%

EVgVaaZa9Zhi^c^Zh

ago Mr. John Kerouac, still another talented young novelist, had made a significant remark to Mr. Clellon Holmes. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘this is really a beat generation.’ So I tried to get in touch with Mr. John Kerouac, but his publisher said he was out of town” (355).4 The notion of a Beat Generation, though not yet a Beat Movement, had entered the national consciousness in the early 1950s and was of particular interest to young writers like Raphaelson and Plath who did not want to be typecast before they had their own say. But Plath already had a Beat sensibility that was edging into public view; her villanelle “Mad Girl’s Love Song” appeared in the same issue of Mademoiselle that she helped edit. Like Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, she was open to the possibility that madness (with all of its visionary associations) was a precondition for revelation. With lines like “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead,” the poem could well be titled “Beat Girl’s Love Song.” In her journals, moreover, she was fully capable of writing “with a bebop sense of fifties hip we normally associate with Kerouac and company” (McManamy).5 But it is The Bell Jar (1963), Plath’s only published novel, that is especially compatible with On the Road. Because Plath did not associate with the Beat writers and did not take an active interest in them or their writings, she could not know that the novel she would base on her first psychological breakdown and suicide attempt would prove to be so consistent with the emerging ethos of the Beat Generation—an ethos that combined profound disaffection with a yearning for spiritual consolation. Yet both Plath and her autobiographically inspired narrator, Esther Greenwood, can be seen in Holmes’s 1952 essay: The origins of the word “beat” are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than mere weariness, it implies the feeing of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of oneself.

... [F]or today’s young people there is not as yet a single external pivot around which they can, as a generation, group their observations and their aspirations. There is no single philosophy, no single party, no single attitude. The failure of most orthodox moral and social concepts to reflect fully the life they have known is probably the reason for this, but because of it each person becomes a walking, self-contained unit, compelled to meet, or at least endure, the problem of being young in a seemingly helpless world in his own way. (223, 227)

&%&

=^aVgn=daaVYVn

Although the twenty-year-old Plath, who would try to kill herself not long after her summer job at Mademoiselle ended, may not have given much credence to the “Beat Generation” label, the thirty-year-old who published The Bell Jar in England just a few weeks before ending her life had helped document its existence. It is not much of a stretch, after all, to include Plath among the brilliant minds Ginsberg commemorates in “Howl.”6 And Plath, sorting through ideas for a novel (though not necessarily for The Bell Jar) in July of 1957, was prescient enough to realize—just as Kerouac had—that she could draw on her life experience to create a protagonist who would speak to and for her peers: “Make her enigmatic: who is that blond girl: she is a bitch: she is the white goddess. Make her a statement of the generation. Which is you” (Unabridged Journals 289). Yet it is precisely because The Bell Jar pays no notice to the Beat Generation or the coterie of male Beat writers that it is able to meet On the Road, the Beat Generation’s defining prose work, on equal terms. By comparing the two novels, we can see that Esther Greenwood has much in common with Kerouac’s Sal Paradise. Both of these protagonists are preoccupied with death and dying; both yearn for understanding and connection while remaining at odds with the world in which they live. But while Sal Paradise feels some fleeting kinship with “a new beat generation that I was slowly joining” (On the Road 54), Esther portrays herself as an anomaly without any group to call her own. Though Plath had wanted to create a female character who would be “a statement of the generation,” Esther is a starkly isolated figure. That is the distinguishing truth and tragedy of her story. The Bell Jar begins in New York City in the summer of 1953, with the nineteen-year-old Esther Greenwood, a student at a prestigious women’s college, working as a guest editor for a fashion magazine. Ambitious and status conscious, she is worried because this glamorous summer job is not making her feel the way she imagines other people think that she should. Rather than enjoying her puff literary assignments and the parties that go with the turf, she obsesses over Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Jewish couple who will soon be electrocuted as communist spies. Much to her own discomfiture, she finds herself identifying with these doomed outsiders: “I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves” (1). Her preoccupation with the Rosenbergs not only foreshadows her traumatic experience with electroshock therapy but also allies her with Kerouac’s Sal Paradise, who likewise identifies with the marginalized and dispossessed. Like Paradise, moreover, she is never able to reconcile this identification with an innate sense of upwardly mobile entitlement—what Kerouac’s

&%'

EVgVaaZa9Zhi^c^Zh

narrator calls “white ambitions” (180). A walking embodiment of the cold war conflict, Esther hears so much about the Rosenbergs that “I couldn’t get them out of my mind” (1), while simultaneously tormenting herself with the knowledge that she is “supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me all over America who wanted nothing more than to be tripping about in those same size-seven patent leather shoes I’d bought in Bloomingdale’s one lunch hour” (2). Beside herself with frustration, she continues to spin out the fantasy she imagines other people have for her: “Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some outof-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car” (2). This is, of course, her fantasy, a fantasy rooted in the “white ambitions” that caused her to pursue the New York job in the first place. Her automotive metaphor calls to mind Dean Moriarty, the recreational car thief and socially marginalized hero of On the Road who spends all of his (and his wife’s) money on a 1949 Hudson. For both Dean and Esther, the car is the ultimate American status symbol, a capitalist means to an escapist end. Ironically and tellingly, Dean destroys the Hudson with his rough handling of it and ends up on the last pages of On the Road begging Sal for a ride to Penn Station. As a true outsider, he has not been able to buy or steal his way into mainstream society; he must depend on private charity or public transportation to get from one point to the next on his circular, never ascending path. Something similar is true for Esther. As she prepares to leave the mental institution where she has endured electroshock therapy, insulin treatments, and unpleasant company, she has this to say: “There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road” (244). Still clinging to the car metaphor, she imagines herself as a retread—a significant comedown from “steering New York like her own private car.” Though she may look as good as new to the doctors whose approval she needs in order to reenter society, she knows, just as they do, that she will be more vulnerable than most to the hazards of the road ahead. The groundwork for her imperilment is laid early in the novel. While maintaining the arch tone of someone seeking to amuse the dominant class, Esther reveals that her depression is rooted in her slightly threadbare, middle-class home life. When she returns home from New York, her mother picks her up at a suburban Boston train station. A widow with two collegeaged children, Mrs. Greenwood supports the family by teaching secretarial classes at a university in Boston. A bit of a martyr figure, she seems intent

&%(

=^aVgn=daaVYVn

on responding to Esther’s every need. From Esther’s perspective, however, her mother only makes things worse. The book is filled with examples of Mrs. Greenwood’s well-meaning but obtuse reactions to her daughter’s woes. After Esther’s suicide attempt, for instance, Mrs. Greenwood tells Esther that she “should be grateful” that Philomena Guinea, the romance writer turned philanthropist providing her college scholarship, will pay for her care at a private hospital (185). And later, when Esther seems to have recovered from her suicidal depression, Mrs. Greenwood declares that they can look back on everything that has happened in recent months as if it were “a bad dream” (237). Such comments infuriate Esther, who at one point blurts out to her psychiatrist that she hates her mother (203). It is not that Mrs. Greenwood says or does anything that is truly terrible. It is just that mother and daughter do not live in the same reality. Her attempts to shield her daughter from sorrow and suffering—most prominently a long-ago decision not to take the nine-year-old Esther to her father’s funeral—have backfired. Now, as a young woman, Esther courts trauma as a way to make up for her perceived deficit of experience: “If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I’d stop and look so hard I never forgot it. I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that’s the way I knew things were all the time” (13). Sheltered and naïve, she treats human suffering like another college course that requires hard studying. She is not so much educating herself, however, as she is doing violence to herself. By pretending that the morbid and the macabre do not faze her, she denies her own feelings, her core humanity. That she does this to herself is not her mother’s fault. Instead, it is evidence of Esther’s essentially beat condition. Opting not to disclose her private suffering, she is, to return to John Clellon Holmes’s description, “a walking, self-contained unit, compelled to meet, or at least endure, the problem of being young in a seemingly helpless world in [her] own way.” By suppressing her honest reactions to the scenes and situations that shock her, she imperils the very self she is trying to protect. The more she relies on masks to hide her feelings, the more unrecognizable she becomes to herself. We see the impact of this virulent form of self-denial when she repeatedly likens herself to inanimate objects or alienated minorities. Describing the early days of her depression in New York, she writes, “I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo” (3). She reports that her faded suntan makes her look “yellow as a Chinaman” (8), and

&%)

EVgVaaZa9Zhi^c^Zh

whenever she is on a date with a man inconveniently shorter than she is, she feels “gawky and morbid as somebody in a sideshow” (9; the image of the sideshow freak also appears in Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”). Standing beside her self-confident friend and fellow guest editor Doreen at a bar, she melts “into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my life” (10). Watching Doreen and the disc jockey Lenny Shepherd dance at Lenny’s apartment, she feels herself “shrinking to a small black dot against all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling. I felt like a hole in the ground” (16). Back at the ironically named Amazon hotel, where she and all the other guest editors are staying, she boards the elevator and glimpses “a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face. It was only me, of course” (18). On her way home from New York, “The face in the mirror looked like a sick Indian” (112). Again and again, Esther sees herself as a repellant Other. As the eye of a tornado, a photographic negative, a black dot, or a hole in the ground, she registers herself as a dark abstraction, an absence without independent meaning or value. Her racial shorthand builds on this notion, revealing that she has become her own state enemy. As a sick Indian (no gender specified), yellow Chinaman, or smudgy-eyed Chinese woman, she imagines herself as alien, repellant, weird—a far cry from the smart, successful, and alluring young white woman that she thinks she is supposed to be. In all of these instances, which build on her preoccupation with the Rosenbergs, we can see Edward Said’s concept of a pejoratively defined orientalism at work. Esther simultaneously identifies with and rejects the very groups that a politically and socially defensive white U.S. society cannot countenance—the disenfranchised Indians, the communist Chinese, the Jewish communists. Although she neither satirizes herself for taking this untenable stance nor satirizes the national climate, we can still glimpse something of Ginsberg’s “America” (1956) in her. Like Ginsberg’s narrator, who says he “used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry,” only to declare later, “Asia is rising against me” (40, 41), Plath’s protagonist seems to personify the major political clashes of her era. One might say, after Whitman, that she contains multitudes, but there is no Whitmanian joy or Ginsbergian laughter for Esther in her own multiplicity of identity. Because the society she lives in does not like or trust women who stray from the conventional script, she sees no obvious way to reconcile the competing desires—the competing selves—struggling to cohere within her. Her tiresome boyfriend Buddy Willard has often quoted his mother’s fake pearl of wisdom: “What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from” (72). Esther knows in

&%*

=^aVgn=daaVYVn

her heart that “The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket” (83).7 Like Sal Paradise, she wants to make a gaudy mark on the world. Her vividly expressed passion for a life fully lived irresistibly calls to mind those “mad ones” who captivate Sal—“desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars” (6). That is just the sort of person Esther wants to be, and be with, but she never encounters anyone remotely like Dean or Sal. Unable to “shoot off in all directions” and ultimately afraid of what might happen if she did, Esther remains alarmed by the alien entities that seem poised to take over her very soul. She is the walking embodiment of a very dangerous cold war that is simultaneously personal and political. 8 Her sense of profound dissociation does not end with her suicide attempt. She wakes up in a hospital, bruised and battered as a result of a sleeping-pill overdose in a basement crawl space, and discovers that she is not blind, as she is erroneously informed. Even though she can see, she is nonetheless unrecognizable to herself. Handed a mirror, she mistakes it for “a picture”: You couldn’t tell whether the person in the picture was a man or a woman, because their hair was shaved off and sprouted in bristly, chicken-feather tufts all over their head. One side of the person’s face was purple, and bulged out in a shapeless way, shading to green along the edges, and then to a sallow yellow. The person’s mouth was pale brown, with a rose-colored sore at either corner. (174)

She has now become the sideshow freak that she felt like earlier in her story. Upon smiling at the “picture” and seeing her wounded, sexless image smile back, Esther throws down the mirror, smashing it to bits. For once she does not try to tamp down her horror. It is both sad and extremely revealing that the image that finally provokes a spontaneously visceral response from her is not “a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar” but her own ravaged face. Her transformation into a monstrous Other is complete—and she is both the cause and the most horrified witness of the spectacle. Esther’s dual roles—as victim and perpetrator, object and subject, colored suspect and white woman of the world—make her a hard character to pin down. She is simultaneously fragile and thick-skinned, naïve and perceptive, purposeless and driven. Given all of these contradictions, it should come as no surprise that her story resists definitive interpretation. So much of

&%+

EVgVaaZa9Zhi^c^Zh

what happens to her can be taken in more than one way. As Ted Hughes has observed, “[I]n each episode of the novel [a] deeper pattern contradicts the ritual on the upper level; everything on the upper level, every step of the ritual dance that is trying to compel ‘the good things to happen,’ acquires a tragic shadow” (10). In keeping with this formulation, we can see Esther’s destruction of the mirror as either the first step in her painstaking reconstruction of a viable identity for herself or one in a long line of symbolic acts of self-denial manifested as self-violation. The unsettling pattern that Hughes discerns is especially noticeable in the last two chapters of the novel. Although formulaic convention dictates that Esther should be on the mend, spiritually and physically, she nearly dies from hemorrhaging upon losing her virginity to an unattractive young math professor. Shortly thereafter, her lesbian admirer and doppelganger Joan Gilling, who had taken her to the emergency room the night of her hemorrhaging, hangs herself in the woods near the mental institution where they have both been patients. Although Joan’s suicide may seem like a necessary sacrifice so that Esther can emerge as the sole survivor, the episode can also be read as a ghastly commentary on Esther’s sexual initiation and as an indication that her own prognosis is far from optimistic. Buddy Willard underscores both possibilities when he implies, at the end of the novel, that Esther may never marry. Although the recuperating Buddy still resides at a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients, he does not seem worried about his own prospects. No, it is Esther, who has endured a punishing one-night stand (unbeknownst to Buddy) and logged time at a mental institution, who risks the perception of damaged goods. As she prepares to return to the seeming normalcy of college and society at large, she is reminded that her inner resources are her only real defense against a world full of passiveaggressive “Buddys.” Though his story follows a different arc from Esther’s, Sal Paradise is caught in a bind similar to hers. In his mid-twenties, at loose ends, and with a failed marriage behind him, he, too, is looking for ways to shake off a depression. The arrival in New York of the “young jailkid” Dean Moriarty presents him with a much-needed diversion (On the Road 1). When he decides to take a trip west, it is out of a desire not only to catch up with Dean, who has returned to his hometown of Denver, but also to see the country Dean has seen. Knowing that Dean is out there somewhere, excitedly observing everything around him and making the most of his ragtag life, inspires Sal no end. With Dean as both catalyst and destination, Sal is able to imagine and then embark on a new phase in his own life.

&%,

=^aVgn=daaVYVn

But first he has to get out of his aunt’s house. Her maternal presence suggests that Sal still needs looking after. Like Esther’s mother, she is endlessly accommodating, even as her opinion subtly infantilizes the would-be adult: “My aunt was all in accord with my trip to the West; she said it would do me good, I’d been working so hard all winter and staying in too much; she even didn’t complain when I told her I’d have to hitchhike some. All she wanted was for me to come back in one piece” (9). One gets the feeling that she worries about Sal, just as Mrs. Greenwood worries about Esther. And there is reason to worry, since Sal confesses to a “feeling that everything was dead” in the book’s opening paragraph (1). As the novel progresses, we see that he never entirely escapes this melancholy feeling. Like Esther, Sal is an ambiguous character on an ambiguous journey. We can’t say precisely how, or even if, he has changed by the end of his story, though we know that he has gotten the material he needed for the book we are reading. He has in this respect accomplished an important goal, just as Esther has. But in other respects—such as knowing himself and being comfortable inside his own skin—Sal is very much a work in progress. Like Esther, he relies on comparisons to limn his identity or lack thereof. Sometimes he imagines himself as a ghost; other times, he wishes he were a black man or a Mexican. His comparisons are not inherently self-degrading, however, the way Esther’s are. They express, instead, feelings of yearning and penitence that grow out of a preoccupation with death. In these instances, we see that Sal is far from having conquered the sorrows troubling him before his narrative begins. From the outset, he wrestles with an identity crisis. After stopping at an inexpensive hotel in Des Moines, Iowa, on his first trip west, he awakens in the afternoon after a long sleep: “I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel. . . . I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost” (15). If he were merely at a symbolic crossroads, “halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future” (15), as he seems to hope, then he could expect to evolve into a happier, more mature version of his old self. But the ghost metaphor is a tenacious one, and Sal repeatedly imagines himself as a shade of the living. Being alone in a strange location always heightens his anxieties. Arriving in San Francisco for the first time, he writes, “I was rudely jolted in the bus station at Market and Fourth into the memory of the fact that I was three thousand two hundred miles from my aunt’s house in Paterson, New Jersey.

&%-

EVgVaaZa9Zhi^c^Zh

I wandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was, Frisco—long, bleak streets with trolley wires all shrouded in fog and whiteness” (60). Later, when he fears that his new girlfriend, Terry, is setting him up for a robbery, he repeats his earlier description of himself: “I was like a haggard ghost, suspicioning every move she made, thinking she was stalling for time” (83). A ghost has known both life and death and carries the burden of that duality when revisiting the world of the living. The trouble for the “haggard ghost” is not that the sorrows and suspicions of the world are foreign to him; it is that they are all too familiar. As much as Sal had wanted a fresh start once he hit the road, his initial “feeling that everything was dead” has consigned him to a post mortem perspective on his every move. Sal is not the only ghost in the book. He dwells at some length on “the Ghost of the Susquehanna,” a “poor little madman” he meets along the river near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (104, 105). After he escapes the company of the directionally challenged hobo, he muses, “I thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me different” (105). Despite all of his years roaming the country, the Ghost of the Susquehanna has no idea which road leads where. It is therefore not just the wilderness of the east that he shows to Sal; it is the willful confusion of a perpetually lost old man. Given his own problems getting from place to place, Sal can’t help but take the old man’s plight personally. After leaving the Ghost of the Susquehanna behind, he sinks into another apparitional depression: “Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life. I stumbled haggardly out of the station; I had no more control” (106). Comparing himself to a “gruesome grieving ghost,” Sal is much worse off than the Ghost of the Susquehanna. He is lost not in the Pennsylvania woods but in the forest of his “nightmare life.” Ironically, it is this self-damning logic that keeps Sal among the living. He is caught in an endlessly repeating death cycle much like Plath’s Lady Lazarus, for whom “Dying / Is an art” (Collected Poems 245). Instead of one climactic scene in which Paradise tries to annihilate himself and thus end his own suffering, there will be several unbidden death scenes (starting with his identity crisis in Des Moines). We see him metaphorically dying when he is alone in San Francisco, broke, and nearly starving after Dean has abandoned him and Marylou has lost interest in him. In the midst of a vision triggered by the sight of a restaurant proprietress he imagines to be his “mother of about two hundred years ago in England” (172), he experiences

&%.

=^aVgn=daaVYVn

a moment of ecstasy in which he feels “the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on” (173). Reflecting Kerouac’s emergent interest in Buddhism and reincarnation in the early 1950s, Sal continues, “I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it” (173). In this state of “sweet, swinging bliss” (173), he fully expects that he will die any minute, but he says that he does not. Returning to the earthly moment at hand, he scrounges cigarette butts from the street and returns to Marylou’s room to fill his pipe with discarded tobacco. Because this is just the sort of thing a skid row bum would do, it seems possible that Sal has been reborn—as a bum—and simply hasn’t realized it yet. After all, he himself admits, “I was too young to know what had happened” (173). Another metaphorical death scene occurs once Sal has settled down in Denver. Alone, and lonely for Dean and Marylou, he wanders the city at night “wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. . . . I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a ‘white man’ disillusioned. All my life I’d had white ambitions; that was why I’d abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley” (179–80). Unlike Esther Greenwood, who shrinks away in horror from the reflections of herself that conjure ethnic minorities, Sal yearns to walk in the shoes of an Other. To be reborn into the life of an ethnic minority would enable him, he thinks, to escape the sorrows and difficulties of his white man’s existence. Significantly, he puts “white man” in quotes, as if he were a man passing as white rather than an actual white man, and this raises questions about his true racial identification. As an ostensibly Italian American character standing in for an author of French Canadian ancestry, Sal Paradise is not a member of the ruling class of WASP Americans. His “white ambitions” can be read as his desire to be white rather than as a set of racially inscribed choices he has already made. His haphazard adventures suggest that these ambitions are no more or less likely to be fulfilled than his naïve and patronizing desire to “exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America” (180). Interpreted this way, Sal seems racially confused rather than merely racist. The case for this is strengthened by his earlier description of himself as “[s]ighing like an old Negro cotton-picker” after a day at work in the California cotton fields and his conviction that the “Okies” in his migrant camp think he is a Mexican, “and in a way I am”

&&%

EVgVaaZa9Zhi^c^Zh

(97, 98). Like a chameleon, he assumes one ethnicity after another, never identifying for long with any one of them. Put another way, whiteness is not the base station to which he inevitably returns but rather one of several platforms (each with its own advantages and disadvantages) that he considers mounting. Without any fixed ethnicity to call his own, and momentarily mistaken for someone else by a dark-skinned woman who calls him “Joe,” Sal continues on his ghostly walk in Denver. In his description of “strange young heroes of all kinds, white, colored, Mexican, pure Indian” playing softball (180), the athletes of different ethnicities are all at an equal remove from him in his state of panicky yearning. Once again, the grieving, haggard ghost of Sal Paradise speaks to us from the void: “It was the Denver Night; all I did was die” (180). “How I died! I walked away from there” (181). Sal’s mortal sorrows shadow him all across the country, even during episodes that bring him pleasure. At the beginning of his brief but relatively idyllic love affair with the young Mexican woman named Terry, for instance, he feels miserable as he contemplates the slums of Los Angeles: “I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities” (86). After Galatea Dunkel quite rightly tells off Dean in San Francisco, Sal observes, “It was the saddest night. I felt as if I was with strange brothers and sisters in a pitiful dream” (195). His tumultuous trip back to New York with Dean provides excitement and distraction but does not assuage his pain in any lasting way. Preparing to say goodbye to Dean in New York, he looks at photos their mutual friend Ed Dunkel took of Dean’s young family: “I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road” (253–54). These bleak meditations, which are just as real as Sal’s exclamations of joy, contribute to the novel’s complex emotional texture. As Ben Giamo has pointed out, [T]he road of life entails certain sadness paired with exuberant joy. . . . The oscillation between ecstasy and suffering—elation and dejection—appears to be the maxim of the novel. It simply goes with the territory, as if a physical law of motion—“our one and noble function of the time.” This oscillation, in which characters and events both expand and contract, results in an uncanny state of equilibrium whereby the states of creation and annihilation balance out. (20)

&&&

=^aVgn=daaVYVn

It is hard to say, however, whether sadness and joy truly balance out in On the Road as Giamo suggests. The verdict seems to depend, to an unusual degree, on one’s individual willingness to acknowledge and accept the novel’s duality of vision—a duality that is also present in The Bell Jar. Paradise’s interludes of happiness have come to define the novel for many readers who prefer not to dwell on the suffering strewn all along his road. For them, Sal’s story seems to have become part of the self-affirming myth of their own youth and boundless potential. On a visit to Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, for instance, the Italian journalist Massimo Pacifico summed up the novel’s primary appeal: “Kerouac represents the sense of freedom all the young men have. It is the myth of travel without a target, without a goal. It has a big sense of liberation that still attracts young people to this. Every young man wants this” (Perry 14). It is a testament to the novel’s almost insidious charm—as well as its lack of resolution—that it continues to accommodate such a blithely subjective response. Sal is admittedly very appealing when he is caught up in the moment, without time or inclination to dwell on either the past or the future. In these rare instances, he is able to connect with the people around him and the landscape he inhabits. We see him in this flattering light when he joins a motley fraternity of hobos and teenaged boys riding west on a flatbed truck. To his great satisfaction, he is finally making good time as he speeds toward Denver and Dean Moriarty: “How that truck disposed of the Nebraska nub—the nub that sticks out over Colorado! . . . I yelled for joy. We passed the bottle. The great blazing stars came out, the far-receding sand hills got dim. I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way” (25). With his whole life ahead of him, Sal is the “arrow” Esther Greenwood longs to be. The young writer traveling west in pursuit of adventure is not just a free spirit; he is a freed one, and his explosive release in this scene helps account for the novel’s transformative impact on readers. Who wouldn’t want to be in Sal Paradise’s huaraches—which he cheerfully calls “the silliest shoes in America” (27)—as he launches himself into the starry western night? On this occasion Sal seems to know “IT” (127)—as Dean calls the experience of completely surrendering to the joy of life—all by himself. But even this early scene hints at the shaded depths, the beatness, of Paradise’s soul. Kerouac himself believed that “self-realization or highest perfect wisdom . . . can only be achieved in solitude, poverty, and contemplation—and in a gathering of homeless brothers” (Selected Letters 447). Seen from this perspective, Sal’s transcendent joy alongside his fellow hitchhikers—his “homeless brothers”—is all of a piece with his solitary death visions in San Francisco and Denver. As they pass around that bottle of cheap booze,

&&'

EVgVaaZa9Zhi^c^Zh

the home they have made out of homelessness is what illuminates the sky above them. Whereas Sal experiences occasional moments of supreme self-awareness that stem from his beat condition, Dean is his consciously crafted vision of the truly beaten down yet spiritually transcendent—what we might call Beat with a capital B. As such, he is Sal’s one enduring love interest, his “HOLY GOOF” (194). Approaching but never quite becoming a gay romance, their intense relationship occupies a gray area somewhere between platonic friendship and explicit homosexual desire. After Sal has returned to New York and fallen in love with “the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long” (304), he writes to Dean in San Francisco. He has decided that he and his new love interest should live near Dean. Despite Dean’s callous desertion of him in Mexico City, Sal clings to the relationship. It is only when Dean shows up unexpectedly in New York, before Sal and Laura are ready to move out west, that Sal is finally able to let him go. When Remi Boncoeur declines to give Dean a ride to the train station, Sal does not try to overrule the decision. He yields to convention and rides off with Laura and Remi even though his heart aches for Moriarty. In our last sighting of him, Dean is a lonely, seemingly helpless figure. In the book’s final pages, he has made only one truly lucid pronouncement: “I wanted to see your sweet girl and you—glad of you—love you as ever” (305). Sal does not reveal his response to this declaration of love, the first of its kind between them. But he knows that Moriarty will never be free of “his wives and woes” (302), and they cannot easily run off together this time. A novel that begins in longing for an attractive but elusive new friend thus ends in essentially the same place, with Sal declaiming, “I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty” (307). Significantly, the first part of the Irish name Moriarty is very close to the Latin “morior”—“to die.”9 Paradise’s last words, then, are not only a sort of elegiac prayer for his beloved friend and his friend’s father but also a punning acknowledgement of his continuing preoccupation with death.10 Seen through the religious lens that Kerouac’s narrators always insist on, the two main characters—let’s call them Death and Paradise—are truly codependent, the meaning of the one inseparable from the meaning of the other. Both Sal Paradise and Esther Greenwood go through a great deal but ultimately change very little. They are solipsistic dreamers whose forays into relationships only lead them back to themselves. Though he has the benefit of many friends, most notably Dean Moriarty, and an amicable relationship

&&(

=^aVgn=daaVYVn

with his aunt, Sal is no less a loner than Esther. His tortured spirituality grows out of an unquenched, and perhaps unquenchable, desire to know himself, that ghostly specter that is equally “mad to live” and mad to die (5). As for Esther, her story ends with her on the brink of a future that is virtually indistinguishable from her recent past: Pausing, for a brief breath, on the threshold, I saw the silver-haired doctor who had told me about the rivers and the Pilgrims on my first day, and the pocked, cadaverous face of Miss Huey, and eyes I thought I recognized over white masks. The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room. (244)

Like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the novel Esther had planned to analyze in her college thesis, The Bell Jar has an elliptical quality to it. The uncertain ending leads us back to the uncertain beginning, when Esther confesses to her preoccupation with the Rosenbergs. Since Esther herself has asked, “How did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?” (241), we are not fully convinced that our more mature narrator, who briefly alludes to her baby in the novel’s opening pages (3), is truly cured. Esther’s internal cold war seems far from over, and of course it is hard to ignore the extratextual evidence of Sylvia Plath’s own suicide. It is safe to say that neither Plath nor her fictional protagonist would have been saved by a Beat Generation, had either one cared to acknowledge that such a thing existed. But in turning a blind eye in her life and her art to a cultural phenomenon that actually spoke to her condition, Plath helps us see that the Beat Generation, as Holmes and Kerouac conceived of it, really did exist. For Plath in her last, terrible days can surely be seen as one of Kerouac’s “solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization” (“Aftermath” 47). Both she and Esther Greenwood personify Holmes’s notion of “a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness” and the concomitant feeling that one has been “pushed up against the wall of oneself.” Such exigencies do not afflict groups or generations but only isolated individuals. That is what Plath was—and what her Esther Greenwood chooses to be. The irony is that both Plath and Kerouac, Esther and Sal, have spoken to the experiences of so many. Nearly everyone has an inner Bartleby or an inner Beat, it seems. Though maybe the Beat Generation “was really just an idea in our minds,” as Kerouac candidly admitted (“Aftermath” 47), it is an idea that gives viable definition to Esther Greenwood’s plight and helps us see Sylvia Plath in a revealing new context. Though their paths on

&&)

EVgVaaZa9Zhi^c^Zh

earth apparently never crossed, Plath and Kerouac were both arrows into a future world that they seemed to know in their hearts would look back on them with astonishment and gratitude. CdiZh 1. In the summer of 1959, Plath and Hughes made a cross-country trip to visit Plath’s aunt and uncle in Pasadena, California. Their drive took them through parts of Canada as well as across the United States. 2. Harper and Row published the American edition of Plath’s Ariel in June 1966; Faber and Faber published a new edition of The Bell Jar, listing Plath as author (instead of her pseudonym Victoria Lucas), in England in September 1966. The first American edition of The Bell Jar appeared in April 1971, nearly two years after Kerouac’s death in October of 1969 (Middlebrook 227, 239). 3. According to David Faulds, Rare Book Librarian at Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library, On the Road is the only book by Kerouac catalogued to date in the Hughes library. Faulds noted, however, that the cataloguing of the Hughes library is not yet complete (Faulds email to author, Oct. 11, 2006). 4. Kerouac was on the move for much of 1953. He began the year at his mother’s home in Richmond Hill, New York.; in February visited with his sister and her family in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.; in the spring moved to California to work for the Southern Pacific railroad; and then in the summer got a job aboard the S. S. William Carruth. He ended the year back home with his mother in Richmond Hill (Selected Letters 395–404). 5. As an example of her Beat sensibility, McManamy cites Plath’s description of a student party in Cambridge, England. It was at this memorable party that Plath first met Ted Hughes, whom she would marry less than four months later. Dated February 26, 1956, the entry reads, in part, Falcon’s Yard, and the syncopated strut of a piano upstairs, and oh it was very Bohemian, with boys in turtle-neck sweaters and girls being blueeye-lidded or elegant in black. Derrek was there, with guitar, and Bert was looking shining and proud as if he had just delivered five babies, said something obvious about having drunk a lot, and began talking about how Luke was satanic after we had run through the poetry in St. Botolph’s and yelled about it. . . . By this time I had spilled one drink, partly into my mouth, partly over my hands and the floor, and the jazz was beginning to get under my skin, and I started dancing with Luke and knew I was very bad, having crossed the river and banged into the trees, yelling about the poems, and he only smiling with that far-off look of a cretin satan. (Unabridged Journals 210–11) 6. Note the way that Plath’s Esther Greenwood describes her visit to her father’s grave: “I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my loss into the cold salt rain” (167).

&&*

=^aVgn=daaVYVn

7. Plath returned to the image of the arrow in “Ariel,” in which she writes, And I Am the arrow, The dew that flies Suicidal, at one with the drive Into the red Eye, the cauldron of morning. (Collected Poems 239–40) 8. In regard to the cold war context in which Plath was writing, Robin Peel observes, The change in title, from the original ‘Diary of a Suicide’ to The Bell Jar is indicative of a shift in perception and focus. The first title suggests that the subject is the self: the second the influence of something beyond the individual on that self. A bell jar is a vessel used in a physics and chemistry lab for experiments in which the enclosed material is denied oxygen and condemned to extinction. That definition provides echoes of the effect on the atmosphere of surface nuclear tests, which scientists and governments made possible. (66–67) 9. I am grateful to Christian Singer, a student in my course in literature of the Beat Movement at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, during the fall of 2006, for pointing out the Latin root embedded in the name Moriarty. 10. As another of Kerouac’s autobiographically based narrators declares, “Death is the only decent subject, since it marks the end of illusion and delusion” (Visions of Gerard 103).

Ldg`h8^iZY Faulds, David. Email to author, Oct. 11, 2006. Giamo, Ben. Kerouac, The Word and the Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000. Ginsberg, Allen. “America.” Howl and Other Poems. 1956. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2000. 39–43. Holmes, John Clellon. “This Is the Beat Generation.” 1952. Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation? Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Penguin, 2001. 222–28. Hughes, Ted. “On Sylvia Plath.” Raritan 14.2 (Fall 1994): 1–10. Kerouac, Jack. “Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation.” 1958. Good Blonde and Others. Ed. Donald Allen. San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1993. 47–50.

&&+

EVgVaaZa9Zhi^c^Zh

———. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 2005. ———. Selected Letters: 1940–1956. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking, 1995. ———. Visions of Gerard. New York: Penguin, 1963. McManamy, John. “Sylvia Plath—In Her Own Words.” McMan’s Depression and Bipolar Web. <www.mcmanweb.com/article-77.htm.> Accessed Oct. 1, 2006. Middlebrook, Diane. Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath—A Marriage. New York: Penguin, 2003. Peel, Robin. Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2002. Perry, David. “Italians Keep the Beat Strong: Journalists Tour Kerouac Sites during Lowell Visit.” Lowell Sun Oct. 8, 2006: 1, 14. Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. 1963. New York: Harper-Collins Perennial Classics, 1999. ———. “Ariel.” The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Perennial, 1980. 239–40. ———. “Lady Lazarus.” The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Perennial, 1980. 244–47. ———. Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–63. 1975. Ed. Aurelia Schober Plath. New York: Bantam, 1977. ———. “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” Mademoiselle 37.4 (Aug. 1953): 358. ———. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962. Ed. Karen V. Kukil. New York: Anchor, 2000. Raphaelson, Joel. “The Labeled Generation.” Mademoiselle. 37.4 (Aug. 1953): 264+. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

&&,

6 Æ9:9>86I:9ID6B:G>86!L=6I:K:GI=6I>HÇ/ @:GDJ68ÉHK:GH>DCHD;DCI=:GD69 R. J. Ellis

The marking of the fiftieth anniversary of On the Road in 2007 raised some complex questions, revolving around which anniversary, of exactly which On the Road, should be celebrated? Of course, different On the Roads will exist in different readers’ cultural imaginaries. But these differences are complicated in the case of On the Road by different degrees of knowledge about the novel. Does the reader know much, if anything, about the Beats, or the Beat Generation, or the novel’s complex prepublication, compositional history? For example, does the reader know about the famous composition of an early draft of On the Road in a three-week period in 1951 (on a 140-foot long scroll of eight pieces of paper, taped together), and if so, has the reader studied the scroll version, published only in 2007? Does the reader know that Kerouac a few weeks later retyped the scroll on regular paper or that, after constantly reworking, revising, and adding to his manuscript, Kerouac, toward the end of the process, returned to the 1951 scroll and a 1952 retyping of the scroll on bond, set aside most of the intervening rewriting, and only then produced the 1957 version? If not, some fairly foolish conclusions can be jumped to, as when the editor of the London Observer bemoaned the fact that the “new” edition of On the Road, as he understood it, changed the names of Sal and Dean to Jack and Neal—failing to understand just how much difference existed between the scroll version of On the Road and the version that was finally published. How many readers, like the Observer’s editor, might see such name “changes” being akin to a new edition of Moby Dick with the opening words, “Call me Bob.”1 All these questions inevitably complicate any response to Road—not least because Kerouac was working for such a long period on the novel that &&-

Æ9ZY^XViZYid6bZg^XV!L]ViZkZgI]Vi>hÇ

he himself became aware, self-reflexively, of the ways in which markedly different Roads were coming into being—not only because of his constant rewriting, but also because of what others in his circle and beyond learned of these. Kerouac widely broadcast amongst his acquaintances the fact that he had composed the novel in a three-week rush of writing. He also later gave an interview with Alfred Aronowitz published in the New York Post on March 10, 1959, which quoted him as claiming that it “took me 21 days to write . . . on one long roll of paper with no periods, no commas, no paragraphs, all single-spaced.” This interview is frequently cited at face value, even though the Road scroll is well punctuated. Yet in the extended version of this interview, published in 1970, eleven years after the Post first ran its story, what Kerouac said in 1959 is revealed to be significantly different: “I wrote On the Road on a roll of Cannastra’s drawing paper . . . It was . . . all one big paragraph. I had to retype it so they could publish it. . . . that’s the way to tell a story—just tell it!”2 There is no mention here of missing punctuation, but in 1959 a myth of spontaneous outpouring is born. The novel was composed in a three-week rush, but not in the way that popular versions of the process would have it. Kerouac also widely complained about his publisher’s comment that a continuous scroll would be difficult to revise—something he did not want to do (particularly because he believed his first novel, The Town and the City [1950], had suffered from his publisher’s revision demands). Soon he was widely discussing how he was, after all, rewriting On the Road. 3 Alongside this confusing self-publicity, the Beats as a loosely affiliated group were gaining attention, especially by participating in a 1955 reading at San Francisco’s 6 Gallery. Such publicity contributed to the novel’s growing fame. By August 1957 San Francisco Chronicle journalist William Hogan was noting the enormous amount of prepublication attention Road was receiving (28). Yet also, between 1951 and 1957 (especially at first), the writing Kerouac was producing for Road was often markedly more experimental than that found in either the scroll or final version of the novel. John Clellon Holmes recalls how Kerouac at the time was “writing long, intricate . . . astonishing sentences obsessed with simultaneously describing the crumb on the plate, the plate on the table, the table in the house, the house in the world” (78) in the process of trying to capture a line of thought: [Cody was] estimating how he himself got there, not only the world but the bench, not only the bench but the part of the bench he filled out. Not only that but how he got there to be aware of the saliva and the part of the bench his ass filled out, and so on in the way the mind has; at all of which now because it wasn’t his best idea of what to do in a poolhall . . . even in the &&.

G#?#:aa^h

roaring noise and even though among all these Saturday feet he couldn’t quite see the exact spot he had studied, though he knew there were new cigarette butts and spit on the spot now. . . . (Kerouac, Visions 39–40)

This huge sentence unrolls for another seven lines. Kerouac wrote so much material in this sort of experimental mode that he was finally compelled to separate much of it off, incorporating it into another book, Visions of Cody—largely completed in 1952 but published only in excerpted form in 1959 and not in full until 1972. Visions, made up of other writing about Kerouac and Cassady, was composed in parallel with work upon Road and even includes a few out-takes from Road—specifically the 1950 depiction of a fictionalized Cassady turning up in a Denver poolhall, quoted in part above (Visions 29ff.; [Excerpts from] Visions 57ff.).4 How much does Road’s reader know about this paratext? If, for example, Visions’s long tape-transcript sections, recorded by Kerouac with Neal Cassady in (drug-fuelled) conversation and transcribed more-or-less faithfully, are set to one side (along with the ”Imitations of the Tape” section), on the basis that these sections are the least intimately connected with the evershifting versions of Road, then a much shorter Visions of Cody remains (245 pages, not 398). This rump now conspicuously ends with a revamped, compressed, helter-skelter version of many of the travels of Kerouac and Cassady (Visions 338–98) also making up the core of Road.5 As Kerouac (narrating as Jack Duluoz) explains in Visions: “The thing to do is . . . The telling of the voyages again . . . told each in one breath” (337). Furthermore, if these helter-skelter road pages of Visions are also set aside (along with the tape transcripts and the imitation of the tape) then the surviving 192 pages are almost the self-same ones found (with a few omissions) in the much-shortened 120 page version of [Excerpts from] Visions of Cody edited by Jack Kerouac and James Laughlin during 1959.6 Laughlin is described as “helping” make the 1959 “selection” in Kerouac’s untitled preface to the 1959 [Excerpts from] Visions (6). What this assistance amounted to is less clear,7 yet this 1959 version is generally dismissed as very much a second-best, bowdlerized text, not worth much attention. 8 Kerouac, however, carefully signed every single issue of the 1959 print run of 750 copies. This surely suggests some degree of investment on the part of the author, and the text deserves much more notice than it usually receives. Attending to this 1959 Visions—printed soon after Road appeared and composed mostly during the three or four years bracketing the composition of Road’s 1951 scroll version—leads to a very different kind of anniversary celebration. It becomes an anniversary attending to both what was excised from On the Road and what was written around about it during Kerouac’s &'%

Æ9ZY^XViZYid6bZg^XV!L]ViZkZgI]Vi>hÇ

constant recompositions—in part rescued in 1959—and then rereading the 1957 On the Road in the light of these. Indeed, the 1959 Visions even claims that it itself offers the “complete Cody” (11). The background to Cody/Dean Moriarty is extensively explored (almost as extensively as in the full 398 page version published in 1972). Furthermore, the 1959 Excerpts displays Kerouac writing at his best. The most interesting segments of the tape transcripts, in which Duluoz and Cody discuss the loss of spontaneity that inevitably occurs in the process of transcribing/writing, for example, still feature in the Excerpts (95–108), alongside much of the “Visions of Neal” notebooks Kerouac wrote in 1951–52.9 Yet another way of redefining On the Road results from next attending to the full 398-page 1972 version of Visions—again, like the 1959 version, largely completed in the three or four years surrounding the composition of the Road scroll. In the 1972 Visions, the homosocial dimension to Sal Paradise’s attraction to Dean—or, in this instance, Duluoz’s attraction to Cody—becomes much more apparent, famously in the “fag Plymouth” scene (On the Road 209) shared by both books (though not, instructively, by the 1959 Excerpts). In the 1957 On the Road, the Plymouth driver is portrayed, in highly negative stereotyping, as a timid, skinny homosexual. Cassady unsuccessfully seeks to manipulate this homosexual to his pecuniary advantage but without offering anything other than an ambiguous commitment readily reneged upon if the homosexual’s money is not forthcoming. The 1972 Visions takes things much further, depicting Cody as subjecting the homosexual to vigorous anal intercourse, and by doing this takes us back to the 1951 typescript: The fag began by saying he was very glad we had come along because he liked young men like us, and would we believe it, but he really didn’t like girls and had recently concluded an affair with a man in Frisco in which he had take the male role and the man the female role. . . . The fag said he would like nothing better but to know what Neal thought about all this. Warning him first that he had once been a hustler in his youth, Neal proceeded to handle the fag like a woman, tipping him over legs in the air and all and gave him a monstrous huge banging. I was so non-plussed all I could do was sit and stare in my corner. And after all that the fag turned over no money to us, tho he made vague promises for Denver, and on top of that he became extremely sullen and I think suspicious of Neal’s final motives. He kept counting his money and checking on his wallet. Neal threw up his hands and gave up. “You see, man, it’s better not to bother. Give them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.” (Scroll 1951 [2007] 307) &'&

G#?#:aa^h

The fag began by saying he was very glad we had come along because he liked young men like us, and would we believe it, but he really didn’t like girls and had recently concluded an affair with a man in Frisco in which he had taken the male role and the man the female role. . . . The fag said he would like nothing better than to know what Dean thought about all this. Warning him first that he had once been a hustler in his youth, Dean asked him how much money he had. I was in the bathroom. The fag became extremely sullen and I think suspicious of Dean’s final motives, turned over no money and made vague promises for Denver. He kept counting his money and checking on his wallet. Dean threw up his hands and gave up. “You see, man, it’s better not to bother. Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.” (On the Road 209) That night the gangbelly broke loose between Cody and the skinny skeleton, sick: Cody thrashed him on rugs in the dark, monstrous huge fuck, Olympian perversities, slambanging big sodomies that made me sick, subsided with him for money; the money never came. He’d treated the boy like a girl! “You can’t trust these people when you give them (exactly) what they want.” I sat in the castrated toilet listening and peeking, at one point Cody has thrown him over legs in the air like a dead hen . . . (Visions of Cody 358–59)

The shift in what could be acceptably published has plainly played a part in creating this pronounced difference (the 1965 trial of Naked Lunch, just to take one dramatic example, had occurred).10 Yet, subsequent readings of Road—and even of the 1959 Visions—become retrospectively tinted when the reader becomes aware of such explicitness. For example, take the “Vision of Cody” on page 109: Cody . . . loves to mimic women and wishes he was a sweet young cunt of 16 so he could feel himself squishy and nice and squirm all over when some man had to look and all he had to do was sit and feel the soft shape of his or her ass in a silk dress and that squishy all over feeling . . . and finger himself and wait for hubby who has one sixteen inches long. (Excerpts 109–10)

It becomes crystal clear just how tightly buttoned-down yet incipiently homosexual the homosocial attraction between Sal and Dean is in the 1957 Road. Recognizing this queer subtext, made quite clear in the scroll version (1951) and deliberately foregrounded in Visions, in turn casts in a new light the almost unrelenting, near-misogynistic sexism saturating the attitude

&''

Æ9ZY^XViZYid6bZg^XV!L]ViZkZgI]Vi>hÇ

to women of Dean and a conscience-stricken Sal in Road. This, in turn, is made all the clearer by recalling Jack’s assertion in Visions that “As far as young women are concerned, I can’t look at them unless I tear off their clothes. . . . This is almost all I can say about almost all girls and any further refinement is their cunts and will do” (23). A startling sexual politics emerges from behind the published version. Such extrapolations from On the Road to the later two Visions are legitimated by the way in which the latter two are so inextricably related to Road. All three were composed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and all treat a society still coping with the return of World War II veterans. This helps account for the books’ unstable sexual politics. Millions of Americans had been mobilized. Sixteen million had joined the armed services; others entered wartime industries.11 On their return from abroad, or after being laid off from war-time industries, some joined a relatively footloose community of young adults, “the hoboes of the 1940’s and 1950’s . . . manifestations of a movement of wholesale rejection of contemporary values” (Feied 58), as described in the 1957 version of On the Road (91), but more often they were drawn to the large metropolitan areas of the East or West Coast. There, some were eligible for college by way of the GI Bill of Rights (again as mentioned in Road [109]).12 As both On the Road and Visions of Cody make clear, when these servicemen and women returned from abroad to the United States—ten million served in the armed forces overseas—they often brought back with them altered perspectives on what was acceptable (Zinn 398). It would be easy to overstate this alteration (prewar America had been no reservoir of innocence), but one arena in which perspectives shifted was the terrain of sexuality. In particular, many of the young men and (to a lesser extent) young women who joined the armed services during the war experienced life in largely single-sex, homosocial communities and subcommunities.13 It had been more difficult to establish monogamous heterosexual relationships with regular sexual contact (because of postings and redeployments). The institution of marriage was positioned differently. Some rushed into marriage; others delayed. Marriage rates rose, but so did divorce rates and, more quickly than both, so did birth rates (Wynn 16). Socio-sexual mores consequently altered. Lesbianism was, contradictorily, both tolerated and persecuted in the armed services; service women suffered from being caricatured as promiscuous; whilst in civilian life prosecutions for female vagrancy and prostitution doubled during the war, and casual, albeit often also intense, liaisons became more common.14 For males, homosexual coupling became more available, if still risky. Though

&'(

G#?#:aa^h

the military’s predominantly homosocial culture was homophobic—homosexuality was, after all, illegal—nevertheless a more cohesive sense of community and a higher public profile developed for some gays (Sherry 104). This helped render sublimated homoerotic interactions more acceptable after the war than before it, as, for example, when buddy relationships were foregrounded in popular cultural forms (Westerns, war movies, and some “screwball” comedies). Sal and Dean’s relationship in Road draws upon such cultural trends and the way these broadened the public’s range of expectations. Ironically, these altered expectations were also accompanied on the one hand by anxieties about increased female autonomy and on the other by the development of a medical model of homosexuality as pathological—laying the grounds for postwar 1950s punitive intolerance (D’Emilio and Freedman 287–89). As the war receded, the pressures that generated all these disturbances slackened: many men and women returned to their hometowns; many turned to child-raising, creating a postwar “baby boom” (Sherry 294). Home-buying was rapidly mass-commodified in the suburb developments, often in large “Levittown” estates (Rosenberg 141–42). But disruptions persisted: a substantial minority did not assume their ascribed gender roles, home-building stereotypes, or sexual identities. This left them adrift in what was often a repressive climate, compelled to congregate where “deviant” behavior survived, especially in larger cities. The field of sexuality in this postwar period was complex and contradictory, and this is the context in which to view its representation in the early versions of Visions and Road. Yet such fluidity was short-lived. As the birthrate rose and as more passed through college, benefiting from the GI Bill of Rights, what the dominant culture represented as “traditional” norms broadly reasserted themselves. This shift towards a greater moral conservatism becomes quite apparent when comparing Road’s 1951 scroll version and 1957 published version. Allen was queer in those days, experimenting with himself to the hilt, and Neal saw that, and a former boyhood hustler himself in the Denver night . . . the first thing you know he was attacking Allen with a great amorous soul such as only a conman can have. . . . I heard them across the darkness and . . . said to myself “Hmm, now something’s started, but I don’t want anything to do with it.” (Scroll 1951 [2007] 113)15 Their energies met head-on . . . I couldn’t keep up with them . . . Wanting dearly to learn to write like Carlo, the first thing you know, Dean was attacking him with a great amorous soul such as only a con-man can have. “Now Carlo, let me speak—here’s what I’m saying . . .” I didn’t see them &')

Æ9ZY^XViZYid6bZg^XV!L]ViZkZgI]Vi>hÇ

for about two weeks, during which time they cemented their relationship to fiendish allday-allnight-talk proportions. (On the Road, 1957 8)

Dean’s and Carlo’s homosexual bond, made clear in 1951, is only intimated subtextually in 1957 as “fiendish allday-allnight-talk.” For similar reasons, the complex exploration of Dean/Cody found in the Visions writing bracketing the scroll Road’s composition were only thinly incorporated into Road’s 1957 version. Dean/Cody, a footloose working-class young man chaotically indulging in a string of extra- and intra-marital relationships and prepared to embrace homosexuality whilst ever-keen to marry, is very much a febrile sign of his particular times. This at least can explain how Dean/Cody can paradoxically represent himself as “normal”: I was just normal kid . . . Well, I mean, you know, normal-seeming, I’d go to work, and go home, go and try to get a girl or somethin, only thing was, these cars, and naturally all young guys in America they’ll tell you, they’ll—anybody you want to meet about . . . Saturday night fights or somethin, or . . . this or that happening, it’s all the same thing, everybody’s that way . . . you know . . . (Visions of Cody 108)

Cody’s attempt at an explanation—as always in Visions—breaks down. Yet in this breakdown resides the heart of the explanation. Cody’s “normality” is not explicable, because such a categorization will not hold in the contradiction-riven period following Word War II. Cody’s deviations are only precariously “normal” for a short period (circa 1945 to 1952), even if this period’s disruptions were to have long-term cultural consequences (increased promiscuity; more visible homosexual communities; more women in the workforce; a shrinkage in blue-collar work). By 1957, therefore, Cody/Dean has become more of a symbolic representative of something in the (recent) past. Recognizing Visions’ more contradictory, milieu-shaped identity, Cody/ Dean helps account for his allure for Duluoz/Sal, and why Duluoz/Sal draws him into his ambit. He is able to represent a novelty: the “son of a wino . . . stealing cars, gunning for girls,” Cody/Dean is moving in a fluid postwar socio-cultural matrix, where he is simultaneously “in there” yet outside, crossing uneasily between classes and sexual identities (On the Road 38–39, 6). As Carlo Marx in Road comically puts it, “I have finally taught Dean he can do anything he wants, become Mayor of Denver, marry a millionairess, or become the greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he keeps rushing out to see the midget auto races . . . He jumps and yells and is excited . . . Dean is really hung-up on things like that” (42). To begin with, when Kerouac rushed into his rapid typing-out of Road in 1951, he was recording what was very much a contemporary allure—in a &'*

G#?#:aa^h

moment during which other Deans and other Sals negotiated their lifestyles uncertainly and inchoately. In this sense, Road offered a troubled, unreliable diagnosis of an important aspect of its times. Yet by the time it was published in 1957, half a decade later, Road had become something of a historical novel. This reframing impacted upon how the 1957 novel’s exploration of the topics of sexuality, class and conformity is couched. This in turn raises some quite complex compositional issues, revolving around the novel’s styles. Here (again) there is no simple story of linear development to be told. It is certainly true that the very rapid composition of the text in 1951 rendered it experimental. The 1951 scroll possesses a fierce energy. Though most of the best of it carried across into the 1957 published version, not all was, and a different kind of On the Road blossoms when these elisions are noted. It can be argued that it is entirely predictable that passages such as the following, recording a run-in with the cops precipitated by a young female, would fall to the cutting-room floor: Everything was falling apart by degrees . . . that evening I called Edie again and this time she showed up with a case of beer in back of her car and we went out to hear jazz . . . She sped through a red light on Hastings Street and instantly a cruising car overtook us and ordered us to stop. Neal and I hopped out with our hands up. That’s how wretched we’d become by now. The cops immediately frisked us. We had nothing on but T shirts. They patted us and felt everywhere and scowled and were dissatisfied. “Goddam it” Edie said “I never get in cop trouble when I’m alone. Listen here you guys do you know who my father is? I won’t have any of this bull!” “What are you doing with that case of beer in the car?” “It’s none of yr. good goddam business.” “It so happens you went through a red light young lady.” “So?” You never saw anyone sassier with the cops. As for Neal and I we were completely inured to it. We followed the cops to the station house and gave ourselves over to the desk. Neal even got excited and told stories to the Sgt. Edie was making important phonecalls and getting all her relatives lined up behind her. . . . Neal and I were delighted to be in the police station, it was just like home. . . . The cops were sort of pleased with us. Another step and we’d be getting the hose in the backroom and screaming with delight. . . . (Scroll 1951 [2007] 347–48)

But this racy directness then gave way—when it became apparent to Kerouac that the scroll would not readily reach publication—to a long period of startling literary experimentation. The most radical of these experiments are (again) largely collated in Visions—in particular in the tape transcripts, seeking to deliver the true Cody, and the extraordinary “Imitation of the

&'+

Æ9ZY^XViZYid6bZg^XV!L]ViZkZgI]Vi>hÇ

Tape” section, in which a series of pastiches/parodies of various writing styles strive to deliver the “true” or “real” lying beyond the reach of the transcripts. Each imitation falls short and self-reflexively recognizes this failure, but—and this is crucial—the transcripts themselves fall short as well. They always recognize that they too become a “mo-dific-ation” (Excerpts 97): CODY . . . all I did now was re—go back to that memory and bring up a little rehash of, ah, pertinent things, as far as I can remember, in a little structure thing of the—what I thought earlier, and that’s what one does you know when you go back and remember about a thing that you clearly thought out and went around before, you know what I’m sayin’, the second or third or fourth time you tell about it or say anything like that why it comes out different and it becomes more and more modified . . . there’s no more spontaneous, there’s no . . . first happenings any more. . . . (Excerpts 95–96; see also Visions of Cody 145)

Visions becomes a hall of metafictional mirrors constantly reflecting back the literary artifice itself rather than reaching “reality.” A kaleidoscopic vortex of words and verbal impressions always—even increasingly—intervenes, climaxing in the imitations of the tapes and their endless reworkings of different literary styles. One might argue that Visions is deliberately designed to fail in its futile attempt to deliver anything at all “complete” (Visions 11; Excerpts 36). In this respect it is significant that the 1959 Visions, apart from its excision of almost all of the tape “Imitations,” includes nearly every one of the passages self-reflexively commenting upon Visions’s futile aspirations to completeness: by becoming more concentrated, the 1959 [Excerpts from] Visions makes this point even more forcibly. What I am arguing is well exemplified by the moment in Visions when what has stood (apparently) as the most unvarnished attempt to deliver a straightforward biographical account of Cody’s past is self-satirized. Its clichés become spelt out by way of their lampooning in the distorted mirror of an imaginary biography of a female in a pin-up photograph, prized for its capacity to become an iconic stimulus for masturbation. First we encounter an apparently unvarnished introduction to Cody: “Around the poolhalls of Denver during World War II a strange looking boy began to be noticeable to the characters who frequented the places afternoon and night and even to the casual visitors” (Excerpts 18; Visions 47). This may seem straightforward (honest, direct), but it is not: Duluoz’s attempt simply to describe Cody’s past has been sucked into a particular generic formula (popular journalism). Within a few pages this is made blatant, by suggesting that a pin-up’s nipple tells us more about her than such an autobiography: “the exact nipple will tell us

&',

G#?#:aa^h

more than Ruth’s entire life story, ‘Around the beauty parlors of Brooklyn during World War II a strange energetic young lady began to be noticeable to the characters who frequented the place afternoon and night and even to the casual visitors’” (Excerpts 51; Visions 76). By way of these disturbing verbal parallels, Cody is by implication reduced to the status of a nippleimage stimulating Duluoz to masturbate—an image that drives home the ambivalently valenced sexualities quite apparent in Visions but left relatively oblique in the 1957 Road: Dean/ Cody is Sal’s/ Jack Duluoz’s Ruth. Reading Visions alongside Road makes this layering clear. Such a clarification is needed, since Road, in marked contrast to its paratexts, is conservatively structured. At its core, the twinning/twining of Sal and Dean draws substantially upon conventional buddy relationships. They have adventures together, they talk, they bond, they share girls and fall out over girls, they are attracted to each other, and they argue with each other. Kerouac’s ironized generic debts to the picaresque bildungsroman are clear, as is the way he modulates upon these. However, this conventional depiction of a developing relationship making both (or at least one) of the young men more mature is laced in Road with a contradictory representation of an ever more ominous sense of depleting decay. Dean is depicted, on the one hand, as ascending to the status of God, and on the other, as declining into the satanic. The ascending apotheosis is obvious. Starting out as a “sideburned hero” (On the Road 5), Dean is in turns venerated by Sal as a mystic (121), then a “saint” (188), then an “Angel” (259), and finally (when both are high on marijuana) “God” (285). On the other hand, almost as obviously, Dean antithetically becomes ever more ominous. Starting out as a “madman,” a “jailkid” and a “conman” (6), he becomes increasingly “psychopathic”: “the Devil himself had never fallen farther” (147, 188), and he ends up shrouded and gargantuan, advancing with “mad bony purpose” whilst behind him “charred ruins smoked” (259). If any sort of “Angel,” Dean is an “Angel” of “rage and furies” (263), who deserts Sal in Mexico, like a “rat” (303). Visions compresses such contradictory antitheses into a series of oxymorons, so laying bare the complex love/hate mare’s nest: “he’s an angel. . . . / But enough of my greatest enemy—because while I saw him as an angel, a god, etcetera, I also saw him as a devil, an old witch, even an old bitch from the start” (Visions 298). In Visions these antithetical visions are part of a constant series of violently oxymoronic narrative twists and turns: “Cody isn’t great because he is average. . . . Cody can’t possibly be average. . . . / He believes in money, goes to work, spends it, and believes in money still” (330). In Road, however, this depiction is more structured and progressive, as Dean’s contradictions gradually twine together more closely

&'-

Æ9ZY^XViZYid6bZg^XV!L]ViZkZgI]Vi>hÇ

in a double helix, until he “finally” becomes “an Angel [who] . . . had rages and furies” (263). Visions offers no such finality. This greater structuredness extends to Road’s overall organization. The 1957 Road offers an account in five parts of Sal and Dean’s intimate relationship during four round trips by Sal: three across America, the last into Mexico. On the first trip, Sal hardly encounters Dean on his series of adventures whilst traveling from New York to San Francisco and back; their friendship is only budding. The second and third journeys depict its increasingly frenetic flowering. On the third trip, the friendship becomes more strained, and on the final Mexican excursion, signs of disintegration become clear. For this reason their last trip is divided into two: part 4 describes Dean deserting Sal in Mexico, part 5 a desolate separation in New York. This structure illuminates the vortex-movement of Dean’s paradoxical double-helix (ascent to saintliness/descent to the satanic) as the description of each trip Sal undertakes becomes progressively more cursory. (Part 1 spans 105 pages; part 2, 70 pages; part 3, 69 pages; part 4, 55 pages; and part 5, barely 6 pages.) Furthermore, Sal’s attempts to find an undefined “IT” fail, and his trips end in deflated returns to New York, as, depressingly, his quests exhaust all four compass points. In part 1, the movement is predominantly westward (the trip east only being summarily mentioned); in part 2 (south-)westward—this iteration itself emphasizing how Sal’s attempts to escape first take the traditional direction of the United States/American myth—west. In part 3, the movement is predominantly eastward, in part 4 predominantly southward and, most depressingly, in part 5 (implicitly) northward—back to New York yet again. The 1957 Road emerges as carefully—even traditionally—structured. Perhaps this is what Kerouac had in mind when describing it as a “pot-boiler” later in life (Montgomery). Compared to the raciness of the 1951 scroll and the metafictional self-reflexivities of Visions, the 1957 Road’s structure methodically matches the novel’s thematic development of Sal’s and Dean’s relationship, in what can only be described as a well-made way. Thus, the trips’ main pivot is clearly Denver, both Dean’s birthplace and a city in the center of the United States. Denver serves as the novel’s structural and thematic fulcrum, “like the Promised Land” (On the Road 16). This careful structure flies somewhat in the face of what might perhaps be expected from the best known facet of the book’s complex compositional history: its composition in a “muscular rush” over a three-week period. Reading the scroll version (which was displayed fully unrolled briefly at the University of Iowa in March 2005), with its long paragraphs stretching over many pages and its absence of chapter or section divisions, is very different

&'.

G#?#:aa^h

from reading the 1957 Road. The scroll demands a nonstop immersion in the act of reading matching the immersion in the act of writing by Kerouac, which he describes as involving “sit[ting] behind a big screen” typing constantly, whilst occasionally “yell[ing] ‘Coffee!’ and [Joan Haverty’s] hand would come around the corner holding a cup of it.”16 Haverty, Kerouac’s wife at that time, describes a sweat-soaked Kerouac typing furiously behind this screen (202). In arguing in this way, I perhaps risk implying that the 1957 Viking Press version of On the Road is inferior in some way to its 1951 scroll version and both versions of Visions of Cody. This risk I think arises because of the high value still placed upon spontaneity and its (implied) guarantee of greater authenticity in one Romantic strand of western white aesthetics. The claim that Kerouac naïvely searched for authenticity needs, I believe, to be treated sceptically—not least because it runs exactly counter to what Visions asserts is achievable. In this instance, for example, my contention that the 1957 Road is carefully structured might be countered by the contention that the book is autobiographical and that this (the book’s narrative) is what really happened, portrayed exactly as it happened. Yet Kerouac did not hold to this view, taking his cue from Proust’s Marcel: “The picture . . . in our own minds which we believe to be . . . authentic . . . has in reality been refashioned by us many times over” (1: 675). As Visions repeatedly makes clear, such “authenticity” is illusory. Instead Visions’s narrative is framed by the inescapable linguistic and intertextual heteroglossia that contains it. In this sense, the 1957 version of Road is a logical development of the experimentation evident in earlier writings representing Neal and Jack (Dean and Sal/Cody and Jack). This provides a basis for viewing Kerouac’s periodic returns to the scroll manuscript, to the journals he kept, and to the letters he received from Cassady. That Kerouac draws verbatim on Cassady’s letters gives the lie to the idea that he worked solely from the scroll manuscript in the final retyping[s] of Road and supports the idea that more complex things were occurring during the novel’s final composition (see Moore). In part this must be understood as a desire to refresh the narrative following the long process of revision that occurred. Reading the 1951 scroll and key letters by Cassady alongside the 1957 version makes clear just how often passages are closely similar, often (even) verbatim, despite all the intervening rewriting that had occurred—a similarity made possible by Kerouac’s returns to the scroll text and Cassady’s letters towards the end of Road’s long compositional development (Moore 118–26). Yet, evidently, important changes also occur—in particular in a switch of emphasis in terms of the role of the narrator. Sal becomes more foregrounded:

&(%

Æ9ZY^XViZYid6bZg^XV!L]ViZkZgI]Vi>hÇ

he had to sweat to and curse to make a living and so on. My first impression of Neal was of a young Gene Autry—-trim, thin-hipped, blue eyes, with a real Oklahoma accent. In fact he’d just been working on a ranch. . . . (Scroll 1951 [2007] 110) he had to sweat and curse to make a living and so on. You saw that in the way he stood bobbing his head, always looking down, nodding, like a young boxer to instructions, throwing in a thousand ‘Yeses’ and ‘That’s rights.’ My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry—trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent—a side-burned hero of the snowy West. In fact he’d just been working on a ranch. . . . (On the Road 6; deviances from scroll in bold)

Sal instructs the reader much more how to “read” Dean in 1957 than in 1951. Dean in 1957 is presented as a young boxer, slightly excessive in his desire to please so that he can get on with the fight, and slightly too fired-up. He is also mythologized by Sal as a “hero of the snowy West,” in line with what in 1957 emerge as Sal’s romanticizing propensities. The 1957 Dean, in my argument, is still partly depicted as one particular symptom of the postwar years and their relationship to the Depression and the World War that had immediately preceded them, just as Neal in the scroll (and Cody in Visions) are very directly symptomatic of this transition period. Yet, also, Dean’s depiction has changed (as the years have passed): where the 1951 Dean had been simply working on a ranch and had also been a car thief and a reform-school inmate, in the 1957 Road Dean is also insistently related to U.S. white national mythology, if in a comically “literary” way, as “a side-burned hero of the snowy West.” Though, to a significant degree, what the 1957 Road offers is not a revision of the myth of the west but a satiric rejection of it, there is, nevertheless, a species of engagement with the myth right from the start, causing later passages to be read with a more complicit, plangently nostalgic accent than other versions of Kerouac’s and Cassady’s relationship makes possible: “Hell’s bells, it’s Wild West Week,” said Slim. Big crowds of . . . fat businessmen in boots and ten-gallon hats, with their hefty wives in cowgirl attire bustled and whooped on the wooden sidewalks of old Cheyenne. . . . Blank guns went off . . . I was amazed, and at the same time I felt it was ridiculous: in my first shot at the West I was seeing to what absurd devices it had fallen. . . . (On the Road 33)

In the 1957 Road, Sal partly buys into the “absurd” myth, even as he recognizes its absurdity. Noteworthily, where, in 1957 Sal observes, “I was

&(&

G#?#:aa^h

amazed, and at the same time I felt it was ridiculous,” in 1951, Jack’s denunciation had been more pronounced: “I was amazed, and at the same time I had never seen anything so really ridiculous” (Scroll 1951 [2007] 135). In 1957, to Sal, Dean is a “western kinsman of the sun” offering “a wild yeasaying overburst of American joy . . . an ode from the Plains, something new, long-prophesied” (10), even as the novel quietly satirizes Sal’s romantic attachment; in 1951, by contrast, these passages had not been written; consequently Neal’s set-up in 1951 is quite different—far less mythologized than Dean’s in 1957. Taking account of what might be called Road’s paratexts (both the 1951 scroll and Visions), which offer far less romanticization, increases the volume of the satire. These paratexts affect, for example, how the 1957 Road’s descriptions are read. For example, in the light of the Visions, the words “I was more interested in some old rotted covered wagons and pool tables sitting in the Nevada desert near a Coca-Cola stand” (1951 [2007]: 282; On the Road 182) become altered. Though in both the 1951 scroll and the 1957 Road Sal is openly lured back to—“more interested in”—the anachronistic, “rotted” western “covered wagon” parked beside a “Coca Cola” logo, Visions again and again makes crystal clear how the postwar west is always infused by such commodity coding (Baudrillard 57 ff.)—an insistence further spotlighting how Sal in Road emerges as a deeply unreliable narrator, more interested passing Dean off as a western cowboy than in 1951 or in Visions. But, like almost all such narrators, Sal is not consistently untrustworthy in Road. A dialogue exists between the different voices of Sal. He can see how the west has “fallen” and has noted the “rotted” condition of its wagons, even as he celebrates its energy, its phallus-like “unbelievable huge bulge” (309). At the core of Sal’s response is a deep-seated ambiguity about the United States, compounded by intimations that he is unreliably forbearing. Once again this becomes clearer when reference is made to the 1957 novel’s paratexts—for example, to the epigrammatic heading of the 1959 Excerpts announcing it is “DEDICATED TO AMERICA, WHATEVER THAT IS” (7; my emphasis). Reading the scroll and the two Visions thus helps highlight Sal’s deeprooted unreliability in Road, renders less trustworthy his over-valuation of “western” spontaneity, and clarifies how his quest for the authenticity he believes it offers is already commodified. It also helps the reader to recognize how, insofar as the 1957 Road replicates the pervasive, urgent contingency—the lack of sure external referents—found in Visions, this occurs only to a subdued degree. Despite the published novel’s relative orderliness, Sal’s unreliability in Road constitutes a refusal of metanarrational mythic coherence; reading its paratexts makes this refusal inescapably apparent.

&('

Æ9ZY^XViZYid6bZg^XV!L]ViZkZgI]Vi>hÇ

Sal’s untrustworthiness undermines certainty and implicitly critiques postwar attempts to revivify a sense of national destiny. On the Road’s paratexts thereby serve as signposts to how, despite its apparently clear structure as a picaresque bildungsroman, the 1957 novel undergoes a constant loss of centering about what Sal’s or Dean’s “development” might constitute. The paratexts also deepen the gathering vortex-descent characterizing Sal’s traveling, so emphasizing how this is indicative of a loss of faith in both the U.S. national (white) project and its claimed direction. Such an interaction of text and paratexts helps illuminate just why Sal almost ignominiously retreats from exposure to the demands of the road in the back of that archetypal American consumer icon, a Cadillac, hired by his friend, Remi: “D’you think I can ride to Fortieth Street with you?” [Dean] whispered. “Want to be with you as much as possible, m’boy, and besides it’s so durned cold . . .” I whispered to Remi. No, he wouldn’t have it . . . So Dean couldn’t ride uptown with us and the only thing I could do was sit in the back of the Cadillac and wave . . . Dean, ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperature of the East, walked off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again. (On the Road 308–9)

The critical force of this is greatly intensified when set beside passages from Visions clarifying how postwar America is deeply alienating: America, the word, the sound is the sound of my unhappiness, the pronunciation of my beat and stupid grief—my happiness has no such name as America, it has a more personal smaller more tittering secret name—America is being wanted by the police, pursued across Kentucky and Ohio, sleeping with the stockyard rats. . . . ([Excerpts from] Visions of Cody 64)

One key impact of such passages on reading the 1957 Road is to highlight how important it is that three of Sal’s four round trips across America in Road have as their originally intended destination somewhere outside the United States. The first trip to San Francisco is made to catch an “aroundthe-world-liner” across the Pacific ( 11); the third, mainly depicting a return trip to New York, sees Sal heading for Italy; whilst the last is made to Mexico. This is all part of the gathering sense of desolate impatience with the United States’ materialistic directions and its government’s obsession with “all kinds of war material that looked murderous” (Road 135)—both on the increase in the postwar period: “Dean slowed down to look at [the

&((

G#?#:aa^h

procession of armaments in Washington]. He kept shaking his head in awe. ‘What are these people up to?’” (135). The irony is that a narrative which sets out, in 1957 (but not 1951) to celebrate a belief that “somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me ” ( 11), ends up, like the 1951 scroll, repeatedly depicting Sal intending to leave the United States, its seamy materialism and armament stockpiles. In a double irony, the one trip that sees Sal crossing the country with no intention of leaving it is one that he intends to end with a return “back to school” (143) and a college degree, potentially the entrance ticket to corporate America’s “salariat” (Bernard Bell, qtd. in Chafe 14). Or, as the Mexican cottonpicker, Terry, pithily puts it, “I thought you was a nice college boy” (83). His incipient recognition of the growing processes of corporatization, internationalization, and globalization leaves Sal simultaneously trapped within and alienated by America, and unstably intent either on leaving it or joining it as a graduate. This wavering sense of social disaffiliation in Road, so much stronger in Visions and even the scroll, is related to the onset of the nuclear era. Old Bull Lee is the first to voice this: “scientists . . . right now are only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world” (On the Road 154). Later on in the text, in Mexico, Sal takes up this point: “[the Mexican] Indians . . . didn’t know a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads” (299). Crucially, Kerouac relates this to America’s global impact: “shawled Indians . . . had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusions of it” (299). This emerging American global dominance ironically underlies Dean’s recognition that “the road must eventually lead to the whole world” (On the Road 230). Yet Sal, the college graduate manqué, either never leaves the country or soon hurries back to it and its “senseless, nightmare road” (254). Sal’s narrative constantly prevaricates, undercutting its own apparent directions, until the bildungsroman finally dissolves into sentimental nostalgia that is difficult for the reader to share: don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. (309–10)

It is significant that this sloppy paragraph is an addition to the scroll version (the final passage of the typescript was eaten by Lucien Carr’s dog) and prob&()

Æ9ZY^XViZYid6bZg^XV!L]ViZkZgI]Vi>hÇ

ably draws upon a conversation Kerouac had with Cassady’s children after the scroll was completed, in February 1954 (Kerouac, Some of the Dharma 17–18); the 1957 Road’s sentimentalism is again undercut by reference to its more direct and caustic paratexts. When taken together, these versions of Road and Visions constitute a species of late modernist fiction that, having lost faith in progress, anticipates the impatience of postmodernism with grand narratives whilst retaining modernist ironic literary tropes. Each text—the 1951 Road, the 1957 Road, the 1959 Visions and the 1972 Visions—mutually reinforce and reinflect each other’s themes and underline the loss of faith in narrative that the 1957 On the Road ironizes relatively obliquely. What I am claiming is that different readerships, with different levels of awareness concerning the history of Kerouac’s seminal text and the legends that frame it, will necessarily carry out the consequent negotiations that are called for in different ways. So perhaps the calculation of the anniversary of On the Road should be based not on the work’s first publication in 1957, nor on the scroll’s creation in 1951—despite the fact that the final version published in 1957 represents a substantial return to the 1951 scroll. It would be better, perhaps, to use 1959 to calculate the anniversary, when the edited excerpts from Visions of Cody were published, and every copy in the print-run was signed, or even 1972, when, belatedly and posthumously, the full version of Visions of Cody was published to stand alongside On the Road and serve as a paratextual commentary upon Road’s aspirations, highlighting the inevitability of Sal’s failures and failings. Or maybe a multi-anniversary needs to be somehow celebrated—so recognizing that On the Road is best thought of as a textual corpus, since in each of the years mentioned above—1951, 1957, 1959, 1972 (and, even, in the interstices between them)—a different kind of illumination of On the Road was born, shedding a different light on postwar America’s socio-cultural processes. CdiZh Unless otherwise noted, references to On the Road refer to the 1957 Viking edition. Complete bibliographical information for this and other versions of this work and for various versions of other works can be found in the bibliography. Many thanks to Dave Moore for all the help he provided on this chapter. 1. See the article by Matt Theado, “Revisions of Kerouac: The Long, Strange Trip of the On the Road Typescripts,” printed in this volume. See also Hunt. Except where noted, scroll transcriptions are by Moore. The Observer editorial appeared on Aug. 5, 2007, p. 24. My essay was written prior to the publication of the scroll version of On the Road by Penguin/Viking, and only limited changes were possible after it appeared. The now-published Penguin/Viking scroll version unfortunately contains errors. &(*

G#?#:aa^h

2. Aronowitz’s Post interview appeared on March 10, 1959; portions were reprinted in Kerouac’s Safe in Heaven Dead. Alfred Aronowitz, “Would You Have Run Away to Become a Beatnik If You Knew That the Man Who Wrote ‘On the Road’ Lived with His Mother?” US—The Paperback Magazine, May 1970, pp. 100–121. See also Theado. 3. Perhaps the best account is Nicosia’s. A more recent account is Maher’s. 4. Dave Moore wrote to me in an e-mail June 13, 2006: “the Poolhall section, written c. October 1950, was initially intended by JK to be part of OTR.” 5. This helter-skelter version of the Road adventures was probably written as a pared-down version of Road, intended for publication as a mass-market paperback by Ace, which had just accepted William Burroughs’s Junkie (1953). Ace in the end rejected it. 6. However, where each page of the 1972 Visions has, on average, approximately 560 words per page, the 1959 version has only about 480—14.3 percent fewer words per page. 7. No biography gives details, but the 1959 Visions’s introductory note makes the debt clear: “thanks to J. Laughlin for helping make this selection of 120 pages” (5). 8. See, for example, French 20. 9. The “Visions of Neal” notebooks are located in the New York Public Library. 10. Charles Rembar saw this as marking obscenity’s “end” in the United States. See Rembar. 11. See Sherry 57. “The . . . boom was unevenly distributed. It favored regions where capital-intensive industries thrived.” Denver also thrived, producing submarine chasers (72). 12. Chafe assesses the GI Bill of Rights’ significance (112). 13. The term “homosocial” is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s. 14. See Evans. “The intensity of wartime emotion contributed to short-term affairs” (228); “lesbian bars began to appear in cities all over the country” (229). See also Hartmann 31ff. Hartmann focuses on persecution of lesbians; Rowbotham (257) notes how “lesbian relationships” were “tolerated” in the forces. 15. Quoted in Charters xxv. 16. This account first appeared in an interview with Jerome Beatty, “Trade Winds,” Saturday Review, Sept. 28, 1957, and is reprinted in Paul Maher 51.

Ldg`h8^iZY Aronowitz, Alfred. “Would You Have Run Away to Become a Beatnik If You Knew That the Man Who Wrote ‘On the Road’ Lived with His Mother?” US—The Paperback Magazine May 1970: 100–121. Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings. Trans. Mark Poster. Cambridge: Polity, 1988. Brinkley, Douglas, ed. Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947– 1954. New York: Viking, 2004.

&(+

Æ9ZY^XViZYid6bZg^XV!L]ViZkZgI]Vi>hÇ

Burroughs, William. Junkie. New York: Ace Books, 1953. Chafe, William. The Unfinished Journey: America since World War II. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Charters, Ann. Introduction to On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995. vii–xxx. ———, ed. Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac: 1940–1951. London: Viking Penguin, 1995. D’Emilio, John, and Estelle R. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty: A History of the Women of the United States. New York: Free Press, 1989. Feied, Frederick. No Pie in the Sky: The Hobo as American Cultural Hero in the Works of Jack London, John Dos Passos, and Jack Kerouac. New York: Citadel, 1964. French, Warren. Jack Kerouac. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. Hartmann, Susan M. The Home Front. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Haverty, Joan. Nobody’s Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of the Beats. New York: Creative Arts Books, 2000. Hogan, William. “A Bookman’s Notebook: San Francisco Scene.” San Francisco Chronicle August 13, 1957: 28. Holmes, John Clellon. Nothing More to Declare. London: Andre Deutsch, 1968. Hunt, Tim. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: The Development of a Fiction. 1981. Rpt. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. Kerouac, Jack. [Excerpts from] Visions of Cody. New York: New Directions, 1959. ———. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1957. ———. Safe in Heaven Dead: Interviews with Jack Kerouac. New York: Hanuman Books, 1990. ———. On the Road: The Original Scroll. 1951. Ed. Howard Cunnell. New York: Viking, 2007. ———. Some of the Dharma. New York: Viking, 1997. ———. The Town and the City. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950. ———. Visions of Cody. New York: McGraw Hill, 1972. Maher, Paul, Jr. Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005. ———. Kerouac: The Definitive Biography. Lanham: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2004. Montgomery, John. “Jack Kerouac and the San Francisco Renaissance.” Unpublished typescript, in the author’s private library. University of Birmingham, 1974. Moore, Dave, ed. Neal Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944–1957. London: Penguin, 2004.

&(,

G#?#:aa^h

Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Grove Press, 1983. Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. 1913–1927. 3 vols. Trans. C. K. Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. Rembar, Charles. The End of Obscenity. London: Andre Deutsch, 1969. Rosenberg, Rosalind. Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. Rowbotham, Judith. A Century of Women. London: Viking, 1997. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. Sherry, Michael S. In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Wynn, Neil. The Afro-American and the Second World War. London: Paul Elek, 1976. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Longman, 1980.

&(-

7 L=:CB:M>8DADD@HA>@:B:M>8D/ I=:=NE:GG:6A>O6I>DCD;G68:6C9 I=:EJGHJ>ID;I=:6JI=:CI>8 Rachel Ligairi

Jack Kerouac’s representations of race in On the Road have been read as both revolutionary for their day and naïvely romantic, if not downright neocolonial. Though Sal Paradise affords African Americans, Mexican Americans, and other racial minorities admiration uncharacteristic of the historical moment, his stereotypical idealization of people of color elides the hardship associated with minority life in pre–Civil Rights America and perhaps even reenacts colonial patterns of paternalism. Such interpretations have been argued convincingly by scholars like Robert Holton, David Sterritt, and María Josefina Saldaña and require little expansion. However, in the half century since the publication of On the Road, the novel’s semiotics of race remains largely uncharted. Such an exploration of race not only provides understanding into the particularities of Sal’s, and by extension Kerouac’s, racial attitudes but—more crucially—situates those attitudes in a cultural moment dominated by the mass-media consumption that mediated cold war identities.1 This paradigm then allows for an analysis that neither excuses nor condemns depictions of race in On the Road but instead theorizes their function in relation to the questions of authenticity and representation raised by the novel and its milieu. The tension between the “authentic” and the “represented” dominating Kerouac’s narrative can be fruitfully explored by putting Jean Baudrillard’s corresponding conceptions of “the real” and “simulation” into conversation with On the Road. In his 1985 essay “Simulacra and Simulations,” Baudrillard argues that the postmodern is an era of the hyperreal, the more real

&(.

GVX]ZaA^\V^g^

than real. As part of a media-saturated environment, an exchange system of signs has multiplied to the extent that is has become disconnected from the objective world. Baudrillard offers four phases that lead up to this point: first, representation “is the reflection of a basic reality”; second, “it masks or perverts a basic reality”; third, “it masks the absence of a basic reality”; and fourth, “it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (170). Baudrillard uses Disneyland and Watergate as examples of third-order simulations that mask the hyperreality of America itself. On an ideological (second-order) level, Disneyland encompasses, or exaggerates, many American values that Sal would be quick to identify, including conformity, competitiveness, and materialism, while Watergate stands for the corruption of power-hungry politicians. Baudrillard, however, argues that Disneyland and Watergate are only presented as exceptional, that is imaginary or particularly scandalous, in order to mask the fact that American culture as a whole is childish and corrupt, devoid of “reality.” Initially, it may seem anachronistic to engage Baudrillard’s theories, deeply rooted in a specific technological and cultural moment as they are, with a novel written nearly thirty years before their articulation. However, closer inspection reveals that while simulation had perhaps infiltrated America on a somewhat smaller scale in the 1950s than in years to come, the mid-twentieth century truly was the beginning—and a dramatic one at that—of a hyperreal society. Specifically, the explosion of the atomic bomb, which is often used to bookend the postmodern era, was an image that became an object of mass consumption. Dennis McNally notes that “as Jack [Kerouac] left for Mexico City, the Atomic Energy Commission demonstrated a nuclear explosion in Yucca Flat, Nevada, thrilling some 35 million Americans who watched it on television at home” (156). The destruction the bomb could engender was incredible, yet the potential pain and loss of its victims were overshadowed for the American public by the widespread, recurring image of the bomb’s mushroom cloud. With the end of World War II, the mushroom cloud came to signify on an ideological level the raison d’etre for the cold war, the threat of mutual destruction. However, the image of the atomic bomb also became part of a hyperreal network of largely self-referential images in which the cold war was played out in the absence of physical violence. In short, if the image consumption of the 1950s differed in degree from the 1980s in which Baudrillard wrote, it did not differ in nature.2 Sal recognizes the simulated nature of society, as he is confronted everywhere with faulty representations that betray the country’s capital-dominated conformity. He is disgusted by the constructedness (or, as Holden

&)%

L]ZcBZm^XdAdd`ha^`ZBZm^Xd

Caulfield would say, “phoniness”) of white middle-class America. Sal’s resulting quest for IT, his fetishization of the authentic, in turn motivates his cross-country movement, his friendship with the socially marginal Dean, and—most notably—his appropriation of nonwhite racial identities and travels among Mexico’s indigenous peoples. Sal Paradise is looking for a Baudrillardian real, and he is a savvy cultural critic when it comes to identifying that which is not “real” in his own cultural context. However, Sal’s discerning eye falls short when it comes to race. The ideological ways in which race is represented in jazz and cinema are overlooked in favor of a conception of race that takes appearances at face value. Though Sal can distinguish between simulations and originals (even if they are fleeting) in his own cultural context, he becomes increasingly unable to make that distinction as he encounters racialized Others; upon entering Mexico, he thinks he has found supreme authenticity, when instead, the Mexico he accesses functions solely as the hyperreal. The hyperrealization of race in On the Road means that, semiologically, race has been transformed into a performative sign, measured on the basis of how well it can get Sal the authenticity, the reality, he craves. 9ZbVgXVi^dchd[i]ZH^bjaViZY The extent to which Sal misrecognizes the hyperreality of race for the authentic is all the more striking when analyzed alongside his ability to identify and dismantle the simulations and constructs that dominate his experience of middle-class white America. Both the precise nature of this American moment and Sal’s ability to see through dominant legitimating discourses of his day are made clear when read in conjunction with Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s best-selling centrist intellectual manifesto, The Vital Center (1949). In this book, cold war anxiety is concisely captured by Schlesinger’s warning that “one false step may plunge the world into atomic war or deliver it into totalitarian darkness” (156) and that Americans should therefore retreat from the twin threats of communism and fascism to the safe (and seemingly narrow) political center. Those who do otherwise, who, like the Beats, choose nonconformity, are labeled “intellectual escapists” (7). Schlesinger, himself attempting to “escape” his leftist intellectual past through this book, thus articulates a vision of America wherein conformity is packaged as centrism and unity is privileged over expression. It is in such a society and against such arguments that Kerouac uses On the Road to critique concepts as fundamental to liberal democracy as modern notions of progress, the capitalistic reification of time, traditional family structures, and the reigning intellectual climate. Rather than enhanc-

&)&

GVX]ZaA^\V^g^

ing life, the novel sees scientific progress as being used to annihilate it, as demonstrated by the creation of the atomic bomb. Bull Lee shares a common Beat sentiment by referring to scientists as “the bastards right now [who] are only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world” (153). In a world that could end at any moment, time is all the more precious, and Sal laments the fact that it has become a quantity to be bought and sold. His response to his temporary job at a fruit market is “In God’s name and under the stars, what for?” (179). Why sell time for money? Time is also squandered by members of the middle class as they give empty rehearsals of their growing nuclear families and material consumption. Sal relates attending a Christmas family get-together, in which relatives engage in a “weary recapitulation of who had a baby, who got a new house, and so on” while talking about mundane subjects like the weather (109). Not even intellectual America is free from Kerouac’s critique. Chad King, the anthropologist, is portrayed as studying life at the loss of living it, and Roland Major writes a story in which “the arty types were all over America, sucking up its blood” (40). Together, these critiques share a concern about a lack of authentic American experience; as Simon Rycroft puts it, they constitute an “intellectual revolt” (426) against conventionality. Beyond being unconventional, Sal clearly grasps the workings of simulation in his own cultural context. This understanding is perhaps most apparent when Sal is disappointed by the images that have replaced the Old West. Upon his arrival in Cheyenne, a Wild West Week is in progress. Of the display he declares, “I was amazed, and at the same time I felt it was ridiculous: in my first shot at the West I was seeing to what absurd devices it had fallen to keep its proud tradition” (30). The word devices in Sal’s reaction is important, as it indicates that here he recognizes that simulation may take on a performative function, a function that he later ascribes to race in a significantly less reflective manner. In this moment, however, Sal undoubtedly sees the West—which he has long fantasized about experiencing—as a construction. Paradoxically, Sal’s realization shows that the West has not, to use Baudrillard’s term, been reduced to “pure simulacrum” (173). It does not exist only in the realm of signifiers, for Sal also has access to pioneer history (10) to tell him that contemporary representations of the West are just that: copies of an original, though an original that has passed. Thus, Sal demonstrates a complex understanding of the relationship between the real and the represented. At the same time, Sal seems less critically attuned to simulations as they were most commonly packaged in the 1950s—in film. Taking place just a decade after the end of Hollywood’s golden age, Kerouac’s repeated refer-

&)'

L]ZcBZm^XdAdd`ha^`ZBZm^Xd

ences to directors, actors, and movies in On the Road—including W. C. Fields, Gary Cooper, Gene Autry, The Mark of Zorro (1940), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Of Mice and Men (1939), and several Westerns—seem to suggest that simulation obscures Sal’s view to some extent. However, the fact that Sal relates so many moments of his life to cinematic renderings suggests that, as with the Wild West Week, he can tell the difference between originals and representations, which resemble originals only to the extent that they differ from them. Rather than replacing or confusing reality, Sal’s film references serve as a lingua franca of sorts, a shorthand way of relating experience to other American youth who are also part of a media-saturated culture. Every time Sal utters a movie title he is in a way demarcating the division between what is said and what has only appeared on screen, between reality and first-order simulations. Not only does Kerouac, through Sal, distinguish the dividing line between the simulated and the real in middle-class white American culture, he also suggests that the film industry is just another construct that masks the problematic workings of capitalism. The fact that movies largely defined the mid–twentieth-century American mediascape points to an ambivalent Beat relationship with Hollywood. In the introduction to his Mad to Be Saved: The Beats, the ’50s, and Film, David Sterritt argues that while Kerouac and other Beat writers enjoyed movies and drew upon visual modes of expression in their writing, they also saw motion pictures, which “generally tried to function as a guardian of traditional values and the sociopolitical status quo,” as integral to the mainstream culture they were resisting (6). Evidence that Kerouac recognizes this fact is found in his portrayal of Sal’s only literary failure in On the Road. In writing a film script for which his guiding objective is not artistic but monetary, Sal attempts a story that “would satisfy a Hollywood director” (64). Kerouac therefore equates Hollywood with the conformity-producing values of capitalism. Though Kerouac’s analysis perhaps lacks sophistication, he seems to grasp what Baudrillard argues forcefully in his Watergate example: Watergate pretends to be scandal in order to conceal the “fundamental immorality” (173) of capital, which holds true political power and relies on scandal to produce the appearance that morality is the norm. Indeed, Kerouac (and therefore Sal) often sees through many U.S. constructs in this way. Neither political scandal nor newly opened Disneyland distracts Sal from an analysis of U.S. culture that Baudrillard argues such third-order simulations are meant to mask. Sal already sees white American power structures as corrupt and American citizens as childish in the sense that they lack the foresight and vision to fully realize their potential as individuals. Further-

&)(

GVX]ZaA^\V^g^

more, while Sal may feel threatened at times by the police, the presence of the penitentiary system, including his own brief stint as a security guard, does not lure him into the illusion that society outside of prison walls is free. Instead, Sal sees as penal the social conformity and cold war anxiety of the late 1940s and early-to-mid-1950s. Thus, On the Road’s pilgrimage and quest for IT can be reread as the search for a measure of authenticity in a world otherwise constructed by the exchange of money and images. HZVgX]^c\[dgi]Z6ji]Zci^X At the beginning of his search for this authenticity, Sal’s first reaction is to get moving in order to avoid the stasis of the era’s social conformity. Foremost in Sal’s desire to move across the physical space of the United States is a yearning to undergo firsthand a wide range of “authentic” experiences. As he leaves his university life and book-writing behind in New York, he abandons the vicarious in favor of the literal; no longer is he “vaguely planning and never taking off” (1). On a practical level, as Sal crisscrosses the continent, he is also largely free of family commitments and paid labor. In fact, when his temporary stay in any city results in either of these two restrictions, he feels the pull of the road and returns to his travels. However, movement does not ultimately offer Sal the degree of authenticity he seeks. One reason for this, as Linda McDowell convincingly argues, is that the Beat movement “simultaneously reflects and challenges hegemonic cultural values” in large part because in principle, leaving home as a form of rebellion requires a home from which to leave (413). By jumping from journey to journey, On the Road seduces the casual reader into the perception that movement was a constant for Kerouac and gang. Yet, no matter how many hitchhikers Dean picks up or how much food Sal steals, life on the road is not indefinitely sustainable, and McDowell documents the many homes that supported members of the Beat community, including Kerouac, who consistently returned to the home of his mother (reconfigured as Sal’s aunt) when road-weary. Perhaps Kerouac makes the rhetorical choice to emphasize movement because doing so heightens the countercultural image of him and his characters. Indeed, in defining what it means to be “hip,” Norman Mailer in “The White Negro” states that “movement is always to be preferred to inaction. In motion a man has a chance, his body is warm, his instincts are quick” (171). Sal and Dean apparently spend most of their time zipping across the fifty states, and in so doing avoid things like home ownership, with its implicit rootedness and associated conservative values. As William Levitt, father of the suburbs, pronounced, “no man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. . . . He has too much to

&))

L]ZcBZm^XdAdd`ha^`ZBZm^Xd

do” (Lacayo 150). Movement thus facilitates a categorical rejection of the American Dream. Indeed, when Sal does go home, Kerouac tends to obscure reasons for doing so with statements like “It was time for us to move on” (244), while he avoids declaring the obvious: home does not feel authentic, but neither does any other location to which America’s roads lead. Sal’s need for movement can be read as symptomatic of someone used to consuming the flickering and ever-changing images projected by mass media. While varied countryside and cities flash by—the faster the better—Sal is at his most excited or content. But when he slows down enough to actually see America in detail, he finds that what had previously excited or contented him was yet another simulation of sorts, that movement merely blurs the constructedness of the entire country. Perhaps it is for this reason that after a while Sal starts feeling less like a world-wise “Prophet” (35) and more like a “traveling salesman” (247). He is in effect wearing thin the country’s land; it runs out at each coast, forcing him either to become stationary or retrace his steps in a pattern that becomes increasingly claustrophobic and emblematic of the worst mainstream culture has to offer—a job that requires one to leave home and family in pursuit of money rather than enlightenment, or the inverse of the Beat persona. If the Beat persona could be captured by one character, that character would be Dean Moriarty, who serves as a “prophet,” or countercultural model for Sal. Though Dean too must journey in search of the elusive IT, he has an advantage over Sal in reaching this metaphysical goal: he is located on the social margins, which Kerouac figures as a position of power for someone attempting to escape artificiality. The socially marginal live outside of white middle-class America and all of the expectations and behavioral codes that accompany it. Therefore, they aren’t blinded by scripted roles that produce wealthy, predictable citizens while discouraging individuality and authenticity. Dean gains this marginal position in part by virtue of his parentage and time in prison but also, and more significantly, by taking on stereotypical cultural traits attributed to African Americans at the time. Indeed, Dean seems to be “the white Negro” that Mailer addresses in his 1957 essay of the same title. Dean definitely exhibits what Mailer calls the “existentialist synapses of the Negro,” for which “one must know one’s desires, one’s rages, one’s anguish, [and] be aware of the character of one’s frustration and know what would satisfy it” (171–72). Whether a new wife or a change in direction, Dean definitely knows what will satisfy his frustrations and desires and acts on those impulses without hesitation. In fact, Dean follows his impulses so

&)*

GVX]ZaA^\V^g^

slavishly that he becomes increasingly manic as the novel progresses. Such mental imbalance too fits with Mailer’s definition of the hipster, who is a “philosophical psychopath” (173). Though Mailer states that the latter is most commonly associated with “the Negro,” he implies that the former is a condition of whiteness. Such pairings point to the fact that Dean does not occupy the same space as the African American. His whiteness is reinforced by Kerouac’s portrayal of Dean as a true cowboy, though he lacks the “ten-gallon hat and Texas boots” (17) of the (white) cowboy of the American West. Instead, Dean is a cowboy in the sense that he is an outsider who refuses to conform to social expectations. However, his whiteness also simultaneously allows him to exist inside dominant social structures, thereby enabling him to go beyond mere rejection of conventions. For example, though wildly promiscuous and mobile, he is in the strange position of, if not maintaining, then at least staying connected to, three separate family units by the end of the novel, a subversion of traditional family structure rather than a dismissal of it. Furthermore, Dean subverts industrial time by following a schedule with minute exactness, but a schedule of his own making. In Denver he tells Sal “I haven’t had time to work in weeks” (44). Though such subversions may be powerful in their ability to modify existing constructions, they do not take Sal far enough in his search for the authentic. Therefore, he also turns to literal—not just figurative—racial minorities. GVX^Va>YZci^ÒXVi^dcVcY6eegdeg^Vi^dc Sal’s attempts to adopt the roles of racialized Others offer him another path toward social marginality while pointing toward his ultimate decision to head to Mexico. The most obvious examples are when he is living with Terry and gets mistaken for a Mexican (commenting “and in a way I am”) (98), and later in the novel when Sal walks through the “colored section” of Denver, wishing he were “a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a ‘white man’ disillusioned.” He also laments that he is not one of the “happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America” (179–80). Interpretations of these sentiments have varied to astounding degrees. Critics read Sal’s desires as being motivated by everything from neocolonial disillusionment with white freedom “burdened by responsibility of governing” (Saldaña 96) to self-disgust and an “exhaustion of whiteness” (Adams 62). Eldridge Cleaver even saw in these scenes an identification allowing for political unification and social progress (Cleaver in Belgrad 9). The diversity of these reactions indicates the complicated politics surrounding racial identification. The first reading

&)+

L]ZcBZm^XdAdd`ha^`ZBZm^Xd

is the least convincing in my mind, since the novel lacks evidence that Sal is interested in governing anyone, including himself; however, the last two necessitate further discussion. The idea that identification with racialized Others offers a way out of white exhaustion bears up well when the jazz scenes in On the Road are considered. Sal and Dean’s fascination with jazz is symptomatic of white appropriation of African American music in general (both during this period and since). Jazz is portrayed as a wellspring of energy and innovation that can counter white exhaustion in addition to providing a road toward IT. One horn player is described as blowing “a big foghorn blues out of every muscle in his soul” (177), and it is this kind of playing that sends Dean into a “trance” (198) and causes him to venerate the musician Slim, a “God” who “knows time” (177). Hearken back to the likes of Josephine Baker and her “jungle dance,” complete with banana skirt, and it becomes clear that jazz in the white American mind has also long been linked with what Marianna Torgovnick has called the primitive (111). Indeed, Kerouac draws on the primitive directly in portraying another musician who “hopped and monkeydanced” (202). Thus, before Sal and Dean ever cross the border into Mexico—which to them is Other in a distinctly primitive way as well—they are already searching for and encountering a similar source of “authenticity” in the United States. That these musicians of color seem to have access to the authentic is found in the fact that their San Francisco locale was at “the end of the continent” and “they didn’t give a damn” (178). They don’t mind running out of land, as it were, because they don’t have to resort to reality-blurring movement to temporarily conceal the falseness of America. They seem to embody the principle of originality that Sal and Dean envy. Yet, the jazz musician is not of the same world as Kerouac’s characters—Slim is neither anxious to get to New York nor game for the wife-swapping Beat lifestyle. As he looks at Dean “out of the corner of his eye” Slim forcefully asserts, “I tole you I was married to her, didn’t I?” after Dean shows a little too much interest in Slim’s “darling” (200). Though Dean and Sal can temporarily take part in the experience of jazz, they must go to Mexico in order to be fully immersed in the seeming authenticity a greater degree of Otherness can provide. This is true in part because in Mexico, they are better able to project their own sensibilities onto the Other without those Others talking back and asserting their own worldviews, at least not in a language Dean and Sal can understand. The final reading, that Sal is progressive rather than racist or insensitive in his desire to assume another ethnicity, seems plausible when Kerouac’s

&),

GVX]ZaA^\V^g^

visual depiction of the baseball game in Denver’s “colored section” is taken into account. The game, which would normally be described with an emphasis on movement, is described in a very static way: it is “at night, under lights” during which the “strange young heroes of all kinds, white, colored, Mexican, pure Indian, were on the field, performing with heart-breaking seriousness. Just sandlot kids in uniform” (180). More attention is given to the physical appearance of these players (though characteristically, Kerouac is still slim on adjectives) than to what they are actually doing. Together they form a veritable multicultural promotional poster, upon which every shade of skin in joined in the most American of sports. Another scene lends itself to a similar analysis. During Sal’s cotton-picking days, he tells of an “old Negro couple” who “picked cotton with the same God-blessed patience their grandfathers had practiced in ante-bellum Alabama; they moved right along their rows, bent and blue, and their bags increased” (96). Down to the painterly hue Kerouac gives this couple, it would be hard to find a figurative snapshot of slavery more stock than this. Both images constitute what Sterritt calls the “verbal tapestry” (9) of On the Road and demonstrate the extent to which Kerouac, through Sal, participates in the simulation of race. These two visually oriented depictions could offer politically progressive messages: first, that the United States is a place where immigrants from around the world can enjoy the good life and each other’s company; and second, nearly a hundred years after emancipation, African Americans unfortunately have yet to break free of slavery-era roles. However, Sal’s reliance on these visual techniques are instead motivated by an attempt to reach IT himself. He feels despair for himself, not happiness for the neighborhood baseball players. Similarly, his tryst with backbreaking labor doesn’t elicit sympathy for those who don’t have the luxury to quit it, as he does. In a text that largely defends Sal’s encounters with Others, Omar Swartz concedes that Sal and Dean are engaged in racial poaching to some degree, “borrowing the language, music, drugs, and despair of a repressed people in order to redescribe their own positions” (88). However, the poacher must first trespass on the Other’s territory, so to speak, in order to recognize those cultural traits attractive enough to steal. In other words, poaching, while undoubtedly a harmful act, implies that the poacher gains a degree of cultural familiarity (if not understanding) with those from whom he poaches. Though Sal shares physical space with Mexicans, Indians, and African Americans, he only skirts around the edges of their cultural worlds. Therefore what exactly Sal is poaching is more open to debate than Swartz implies. Arguably, Sal primarily poaches the stereotypical images he projects

&)-

L]ZcBZm^XdAdd`ha^`ZBZm^Xd

onto these ethnic Others in the first place, images that we might expect from films like Angels in the Outfield (1951)3 or the hugely popular Gone with the Wind (1939). Significantly, Sal, who is so quick to correlate cinematic moments with aspects of his own culture is surprisingly mute on that subject in these instances of On the Road. With so little cultural knowledge to go on, Sal mistakes pop-cultural racial images with reality even though he has rejected similar simulations within his own cultural context. Thus Sal remains far removed from anything that could be called a reality of minority lives in America. Race and economic class have long been linked in this country, and most of the Others Sal encounters are distinct from him not only by virtue of their ethnicity but also their position on a lower economic plane. As R. J. Ellis notes, for as much as Sal may like to spend time on the social fringes, he always has recourse to a position of privilege, as demonstrated by the easy hundred dollars a rich girl offers him to go to San Francisco (46). Though on the previous page it had seemed that nothing short of a darker shade of skin would content Sal, upon receiving the money he declares, “So all my problems were solved” (181). In addition, when things get complicated with Terry, Sal writes his aunt for some more cash (98), which subsequently allows him to abandon what had become a troublesome life. Sal consistently escapes the knowledge (and hardship) that would come with recognizing that his identification with racialized Others is only image-deep and that to be a person of color in America may often mean living in poverty. Considering the overwhelming role images play in Sal’s dealings with other races, it is not surprising that he meets Terry en route to Los Angeles—a city that is the primary home to the cultural machines that create virtual America. To take that characterization a step further, Los Angeles in the mid-twentieth century can be thought of as a simulation of sorts itself. As discussed earlier, Baudrillard writes of Disneyland as “presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation” (172). Fittingly, Sal notes that Main Street LA is “no different from where you get off a bus in Kansas City or Chicago or Boston” (83). This observation suggests that Sal recognizes that these streets, and perhaps the cities that house them, are all hyperreal to some extent—like Disneyland’s Mainstreet USA, copies of an original that never existed. Accordingly, Kerouac writes of Sal’s surreal experience of encountering a city full of beautiful people performing ordinary jobs along with a description of LA as a “desert encampment” (87), indicating that Sal sees the city in terms of a mirage—a shimmering yet insubstantial

&).

GVX]ZaA^\V^g^

vision. Finally, Sal notes that the gray dawn of a Hollywood morning is akin to “the dawn when Joel McCrea met Veronica Lake in a diner in the picture Sullivan Travels” (83), yet again drawing comparisons, and thereby distinctions, between reality and simulations. Yet, significantly, while Sal has been able to identify the artificiality of several U.S. constructs, including now the simulated nature of LA, he falls into a scripted role with Terry once inside that city. He can’t recognize the way in which LA constructs their relationship based on race: “I began getting the foolish paranoiac visions that Teresa, or Terry—her name—was a common little hustler who worked the buses for a guy’s bucks by making appointments like ours in LA” (83). Terry as a poor, brown woman makes more sense in this context as a prostitute than as a “girlsoul” (83). Even more interesting is Sal’s verbal slip. Though he has conceived of Terry as another human being up until now, she becomes visibly Mexican to him in this moment—a Teresa rather than an anglicized Terry. Sal clearly has a preconceived image of what it means to be Mexican, and he is delighted to see that image substantiated when he finally crosses the border into Mexico, where he encounters a place so Other to him that he no longer has the ability to distinguish the real from the hyperreal, thereby mistaking the latter for authenticity. 67ZViBZm^Xd Before analyzing the abstract implications of this journey into Mexico, it is important to note that Sal and Dean’s plan to cross that border is also profoundly practical. Dean is drawn to Mexico by the promise of easy access to a divorce from Camille, while both men (in addition to Kerouac, who himself traveled to Mexico multiple times) feel the pull of cheap, abundant drugs. Even money ceases to be a worry, as Sal and Dean revel in the “wonderful Mexican money that went so far” (275). However, the immaterial reasons for this journey far outweigh the practical, significant as they are. That Sal experiences Mexico as hyperreal (more real than real) is clear from his declaration upon crossing the border, when he happily proclaims, “Just across the street Mexico began. We looked with wonder. To our amazement, it looked exactly like Mexico” (274). Specifically, the men in “straw hats and white pants . . . lounging by the dozen against battered pocky storefronts” (274) coincide with what Sal thinks Mexicans should look like. But it is significant that Sal uses the word Mexico, not Mexican, for it indicates that the entire country conforms to his media-informed preconceptions of it. Ironically, though, Sal and Dean also find Mexico as the supreme source of authenticity that, according to Dean, “will finally take us to IT!” (265). At

&*%

L]ZcBZm^XdAdd`ha^`ZBZm^Xd

this moment in the text, Mexico simultaneously fits into categories of the stereotypical and the authentic, a seeming contradiction, but one that makes sense by again turning to Baudrillardian conceptions of simulation. Sal’s vision of Mexico can be classified as hyperreal in On the Road precisely because Sal misrecognizes its simulated nature for authenticity. According to Baudrillard, the hyperreal constitutes “the generation of models of the real without origin or reality” (169). Put another way, the hyperreal moves beyond “reduplication” and “parody” in “substituting signs of the real for the real itself” (70). Baudrillard would therefore say that Mexico in the context of Sal’s mind is a free-floating network of signs whose purpose is to incite desire. To be fair, Baudrillard is referring specifically to consumer objects, while I am expanding his analysis to include an entire country. I feel justified in doing so, however, thanks to the degree to which Mexico works as an object to be consumed by the experience-craving Sal and Dean. Mexico not only contains the “girls” and the “visions” that Sal expected to find on his journey—which he encounters in the brothel and in the jungle, when he literally sees the white horse that had previously existed only figuratively—but Mexico itself is arguably the “pearl” (8) that motivated Sal’s travels in the first place. It is important to note that while Mexico “incite[s] desire” in Sal and Dean, it is not because a force outside of them (such as an advertising firm) has constructed a simulation to do so; instead, both men project their own desires onto Mexico and, not surprisingly, see their dreams reflected in its landscapes, institutions, and people (“all Mexico was one vast Bohemian camp”) (301). In this sense, Kerouac uses Mexico as a blank screen upon which simulated images of Beat desires flicker, masking the complexity of the world behind. In the end, Sal’s eyes are quick to “read” America, an action that implies both an original and a highly abstracted sign (the word), while he himself participates in the conflation of the original and the sign as he views Mexico. By understanding that Sal participates in the construction of Mexico as hyperreal, it becomes clear why, as Manuel Luis Martínez argues, Sal—who was so interested in appropriating a new racial identity while in the United States—becomes distinctly American when in Mexico (49). Whereas Sal sees himself as Mexican when with Terry, he now notices the “strangeness of Americans and Mexicans blasting together on the desert and, more than that, the strangeness of seeing in close proximity the faces and pores of skins and calluses of fingers and general abashed cheekbones of another world” (283). This cinematic rendering—a metonymical close-up—differentiates Sal one cheekbone and finger at a time from the Mexican Other. In the United

&*&

GVX]ZaA^\V^g^

States, Sal sought to identify with the Mexican American in an attempt to gain marginality. South of the border, he contrasts himself to a people of the same ethnicity because in order for Mexico to be a place of authenticity, it must be totally distinct from the constructedness of the United States, of which he is a part. Put another way, the Mexican Other, in order to fit in this hyperreal environment, must be wholly separate from Sal—who still exists in the realm of originals—in order to be authentic. The moment in On the Road that most succinctly sums up Kerouac’s use of Mexico is found when the Pan-American Highway takes Sal and Dean high into the mountains, where they encounter an indigenous population they deem supremely authentic because they live outside of time, the carrier of civilization. Kerouac likens these Indians to the Fellaheen peoples he had read about in Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1922), who escape history and therefore are left the sole survivors when civilization inevitably destroys itself. Accordingly, Kerouac situates this encounter between Sal and Dean and the “Fellahin” as a meeting of the West with the rest of the undeveloped world, stretching from China to India, Arabia, Morocco, Polynesia, and Spain (280). He writes of the Indians coming from remote places to reach civilization (as represented by Sal and Dean), not knowing the “poor broken delusion of it,” not knowing 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 someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way” (298). But in the same breath that Kerouac shows the Fellaheen to be absolutely free of all Western constructions, he also describes them in terms that the Catholic Kerouac himself projects—the Indian girls had the “eyes of the Virgin Mother. . . . We saw in them the tender and forgiving gaze of Jesus” (296). A fetishized timelessness has given way to what was always behind the search for authenticity—spiritual blessedness, or the beatification from which the label “beat” originally came, according to Kerouac, who not surprisingly named his fictional counterpart Sal Paradise. But another way of looking at the meaning of “authentic,” one more germane to my argument, is also possible: authenticity can denote a system of representation that can be trusted, where signs correspond one-to-one with the signified. Sal has clearly lost faith in what the Western world has to offer in large part because he recognizes that “civilization” is full of simulation that often “masks or perverts a basic reality” (Baudrillard 170). In fact, Baudrillard argues that “All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager of representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange—God of course” (170). This concept perhaps illuminates Kerouac’s

&*'

L]ZcBZm^XdAdd`ha^`ZBZm^Xd

reason for figuring Mexico’s Indians as both Fellahin peoples and Christ figures; these double subject positions simultaneously render them liminal and, according to Baudrillard, central to Western schemes of representation. They offer both a way out of the representational system and a guarantee of its signs’ exchange value. However, of all the Others Kerouac has described thus far in the book, none are more silent or painterly than these brown-eyed Indians. As readers, we never hear them speak a word; their sounds are only conveyed as “yammering.” Instead, Kerouac tells us that “When they talked they suddenly became frantic and almost silly. In their silence they were themselves” (297). In their silence, the Mexican Others embody representational integrity in Sal’s mind by appearing as both sign and signified; Sal and Dean don’t recognize the gap between the simulation they project onto these people and the people themselves. Voiceless, they are relegated to the realm of the hyperreal, which Sal and Dean mistake for the authentic. And this is the novel’s final irony—at the very moment when IT seems attainable, simulacrum reigns supreme. If Kerouac had been able to access something beyond the hyperreal in Mexico, he may have been surprised to find that instead of offering an “authentic” counterpoint to the United States, Mexico was home to countercultural allies who shared many Beat sensibilities. Rachel Adams and Daniel Belgrad have, for instance, documented intellectual connections between the Beats and La Onda (a Mexican youth movement) and Magic Realists, respectively. Although a discussion of such connections fall outside the purview of this essay, I note their existence to show that the Mexico Kerouac perceived—or at least the one he chose to portray in On the Road—shares little with this other Mexican “reality” it seems he should have been drawn to. The hyperrealization of race in the novel consequently takes on the dimensions of a choice, a choice that suggests a larger Beat refusal to see racial Others as fellow questers rather than stepping stones toward the authentic. CdiZh Thanks to Kristin Matthews and Trent Hickman for their guidance throughout several drafts of this essay. 1. As Robert Holton notes, there are really three voices in On the Road: Sal Paradise the character, whose actions the book chronicles; the older Sal Paradise, who narrates stories about his past; and Kerouac, who bases most of the book on his own experiences (20). This distinction is worth keeping in mind because it highlights the fact that while the book is mainly autobiographical, it has been crafted and fictionalized to some extent. However, while I will mainly use the name Sal in this essay, I believe that much of my argument could be applied to

&*(

GVX]ZaA^\V^g^

Kerouac too, for I agree with Tim Hunt, who argues that Kerouac is writing a “biography of his self-image” (5). 2. Baudrillard’s theories are also rooted in the 1950s in a more practical way when one considers that Nixon rose to power during that decade—first by prosecuting the Rosenbergs and then as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president. 3. In fact, there was a whole rash of baseball films in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s: Death on the Diamond (1934), The Babe Ruth Story (1948), The Kid from Cleveland (1949), The Stratton Story (1949), The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), The Winning Team (1952), Pride of St. Louis (1952), and Damn Yankees (1958).

Ldg`h8^iZY Baudrillard, Jean. Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. Belgrad, Daniel. “The Transnational Counterculture: Beat-Mexican Intersections.” Reconstructing the Beats. Ed. Jennie Skerl. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. 27–40. Ellis, R. J. “‘I’m Only a Jolly Storyteller’: Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and Visions of Cody.” The Beat Generation. Ed. A. Robert Lee. East Haven, Conn.: Pluto, 1996. 37–60. Holton, Robert. On the Road: Kerouac’s Ragged American Journey. New York: Twayne, 1999. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 2005. Lacayo, Richard. “Suburban Legend: William Levitt.” Time Dec. 7, 1998. Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro.” Dissent 4 (Spring 1987): 168–77. McDowell, Linda. “Off the Road: Alternative Views of Rebellion, Resistance and ‘The Beats.’” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 21.2 (1996): 412–19. McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo, 2003. Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. “‘On the Road’ with Che and Jack: Melancholia and the Legacy of Colonial Racial Geographies in the Americas.” New Formations 47 (2002): 87–108. Schlesinger, Arthur M. The Vital Center: Our Purposes and Perils on the Tightrope of American Liberalism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. Sterritt, David. Mad to Be Saved: The ’50s, and Film. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1998. Swartz, Omar. The View from “On the Road”: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999. Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.

&*)

8 I=:B6@>CH: Michael Skau >ÉkZÒcVaanWZXdbZhdY^higVXiZYi]Vi^iÉh\d^c\idWZdcanl^i]i]Z\gZViZhihigj\\aZi]Vi>Éaa WZVWaZidÒcYdjil]d>Vb^ci]ZXdb^c\bdci]h^ci]Z]ZaaVcY\dcZd[i]ZldgaYVii]Zg^h` d[adh^c\bnb^cY[dgZkZg# Å?VX`@ZgdjVX!K^h^dchd[8dYn

When Lewis Carroll’s Alice encounters the hookah-smoking caterpillar, he asks her, “Who are you?” Alice replies, “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then” (35). Though Alice has entered into fantastic worlds and even changed size during her adventures, Jack Kerouac’s narrators could echo her response in their own more limited fashion. From adolescent athletic achievements and early love fumblings to merchant marine service and escapes into solitude, jazz, sex, alcohol, and religion, all experiences return Kerouac’s characters to the problem of self-discovery. Kerouac sees the confusion as resulting from the global situation: “I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy: and I picked on the world. And of course I was right” (Vanity 89). His attribution of blame has considerable validity. The Beat Generation emerged in a world whose values had been turned upside down. It was the first generation to experience a relentless threat of global nuclear destruction,1 to be spoon-fed on the jargon and theories of psychology and psychiatry, and to witness such organized violations of free will as brainwashing, cybernetics, and motivational research. The result was a conviction that the personal identity of the individual was besieged; therefore, the integrity of that identity must be preserved at all costs. For Sal Paradise of On the Road, that means a quest for the idiosyncratic and often ambivalent identification of selfhood and

&**

B^X]VZaH`Vj

nostalgia for the security and irresponsibility of childhood in a world that seems to promise only the guarantees of aging and mortality. Biographically, Kerouac shows clear evidence of identity confusion, and his recently published letters and journals afford valuable resources for an exploration of this aspect of his character. One of the most obvious examples involves his use of alternative names, pseudonyms, and adopted personae. Kerouac’s paternal grandfather, Jean-Baptiste Kirouack, came from French Canada; Jack’s father, Leo, spelled his surname Kérouack; and Jack was baptized Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac and as a child was called Ti Pousse and Ti Jean (which he used as a signature in letters as an adult, even into middle age), only becoming Jackie or Jack when he later began to meet people in his community who were not of French background. The variety of names presages an identity problem that is reflected in Kerouac’s letters, where he signs himself with a profusion of different names: Jean, BARON DE BRETAGNE; ZAGG; Flatfoot; Jean-Louis; John Perdu; Jean Louis Le Fou; Richard Wisp; Fyodor; Jakey Moorhouse; Snuffy Snuff. Much of this is mere playfulness, but it has roots in a ground of insecurity and instability. His first published novel, The Town and the City, identified the author as John Kerouac, and he published an excerpt blending passages from On the Road and Visions of Cody, as well as a poem from Mexico City Blues, under the name Jean-Louis.2 Later, “To avoid paying child support, he [Kerouac] was still receiving mail under aliases and at other addresses” (Nicosia 427). In a 1952 letter to Stella Sampas, Kerouac asked her to send mail to him in Mexico addressed to “Sr. Jean Levesque,” “MY SPANISH NAME” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 389), an amusing multinational request. Moreover, Kerouac’s ethnic background induced an anomie that affected his cultural identity: he spoke only joual, a French-Canadian dialect, until he started school: “I never spoke English before I was six or seven. . . . Isn’t it true that French-Canadians everywhere tend to hide their real sources . . . as once I did, say in high school, when I first began ‘Englishizing myself’ to coin a term” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 228–29). Kerouac also repeatedly commented on his own identity dilemma. In a 1950 letter to Neal Cassady, he says, “I’ve been trying to find my voice,” and he goes on to indicate a variety of voices and dialects that he was planning for narrators of projected novels (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 233–34). In addition, when Gilbert Millstein, who enthusiastically reviewed On the Road for the New York Times, hosted a party to celebrate the novel’s publication, Kerouac “told his friend John Clellon Holmes, who came to see him that night, ‘I don’t know who I am anymore’“ (Kerouac and Johnson 66–67).

&*+

I]ZBV`^c\hd[EVgVY^hZ

Kerouac remained obsessed by his identity confusion, the result of what he suggests is his “protean personality,” for “You can’t pin a wriggling fish like me” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 62, 188). He traces this quality to the “complex condition of my mind, split up, as it were, in two parts, one normal, the other schizoid” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 60). He elaborates on the dichotomy of his character in a letter to Carolyn Cassady: “Biggest trouble is hangup on self, on ego-personality. I am not Jack, I am the Buddha now. I am only Jack when I act myself, which is, mean, silly, narrow, selfish” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 428). The elements of identity confusion constitute a major motif throughout Kerouac’s writings. His Beats renounce the goals and aspirations of the conventional world: they see traditional values as deadening awareness, brutalizing feeling, and distorting the responses of the individual. Therefore, they sing their nonconformity (sometimes in chorus) and celebrate a new moral and ethical position intended to salvage human dignity. Kerouac extols “the miracle of everyday heartbeat” (Town 473), precisely because that miracle seems so precarious in the world of the mid-twentieth century. Affected by a new historical imperative, “Everybody in the world has come to feel like a geek. . . . It’s really an atomic disease, you see. . . . It’s death finally reclaiming life” (Town 369–70). In an exploding and imploding world, the individual finds himself diminished. Consequently, Kerouac’s characters, in self-defense, interpret experience in egocentric terms: Peter Martin, the protagonist of The Town and the City, “never thought of this [merchant marine service] in terms of war, but in terms of the great gray sea that was going to become the stage of his soul” (274). The individual, in consternation and desperation, exalts his own life above all else. Dissatisfied with a stultifying existence, he rejects the placid, boring, and superficial style of life in the society around him: “Can anyone be anything but a rebel in a conventional world like this?” (Town 450). In On the Road, Sal embraces the people who lead exciting, unpredictable lives, hoping to discover meaning for his own existence: 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 to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but 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 “Awww!” (5–6)

&*,

B^X]VZaH`Vj

Passion and intensity become the values that Sal treasures. However, in most of his works, the Kerouac personae (Peter Martin, Sal Paradise, Leo Percepied, Ray Smith, Ti Jean, and Jack [and Jackie] Duluoz) function primarily as followers, observers, reporters on the Beat and conventional worlds. In a 1949 journal entry, Kerouac, struggling with the project that became On the Road, says, “I decided I am not one of the hipsters, therefore I am free and objective thinking about them and writing their story” (Windblown 223). In The Town and the City, which lays much of the foundation for On the Road, Leon Levinsky explains Peter Martin’s outsider stance to him: “there’s a certain dignity to your soul . . . but it’s not a sadness of understanding, it’s really a neurotic failure to see yourself clearly” (366). Before Peter can participate wholly in the life of Sal’s “mad ones,” he must achieve self-knowledge. Peter’s crisis of identity perplexes and disturbs him: And what was most horrible to him that first night was the final terrible realization that he was only Peter Martin, only Peter Martin—and who was that in the world? Who was he, if not some sort of imposter and stranger and scoundrel, who somehow managed to fool people and even his own family into believing that he was Peter Martin. Who was he? (Town 126)

Early in On the Road, Sal undergoes a similar experience when he awakes in a cheap hotel in Des Moines and feels that it “was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was.”3 Sal explains this as a rite of passage: “I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future” (15). In his earliest projections for On the Road, Kerouac saw identity as a crucial theme: a journal entry from 1948 confides, “I have another novel in mind—‘On the Road’—which I keep thinking about: about two guys hitch-hiking to California in search of something they don’t really find, and losing themselves on the road, and coming all the way back hopeful of something else” (Windblown 123). The novel published nine years later develops this theme, especially in the portrayal of Sal, who says, “I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. . . . I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion” (125–26). When Bull Lee confronts Sal and Dean about their plans, Sal confesses that “we didn’t know anything about ourselves” (145). Later, abandoned by Dean and Marylou in San Francisco, Sal’s identity confusion becomes transhistorical as he sees a woman in a fish and chips shop: “It suddenly occurred to me this was my mother of about two hundred

&*-

I]ZBV`^c\hd[EVgVY^hZ

years ago in England, and that I was her footpad son, returning from gaol to haunt her honest labors in the hashery” (172). Still later, he finds himself wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. . . . I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a “white man” disillusioned. All my life I’d had white ambitions. . . . I was only myself, Sal Paradise, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America. (179–80)4

Sal’s confusion results from the fact that too often the process must lead him to a product, a violation of Kierkegaard’s precept that life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. In the mañana world of Southern California, Sal feels compelled to ask, “Where do we go now, man?” (92). When Dean Moriarty tells Sal, “Whee. Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there,” Sal’s response is “Where we going, man?” (240). When Dean is “so excited it made me cry,” Sal asks, “Where would it all lead?” (212). “I want to marry a girl,” he confesses, “so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old. This can’t go on all the time—all this franticness and jumping around. We’ve got to go someplace, find something” (117). However, Sal’s ambivalence dominates the novel. He vacillates between his impulse to pursue the mad life of his friends and his desire to settle down. He asks Ed Dunkel, “What are you going to do with yourself, Ed?” Dunkel answers, “I just go along. I dig life,” and Sal comments, “He had no direction” (123). Nevertheless, just a paragraph later, Sal himself says, “I didn’t know where all this was leading; I didn’t care” (124). Shortly afterwards, he reverses himself again, feeling that “This madness would lead nowhere” (128). This last passage provides further evidence of Kerouac’s impression of Sal’s wavering: in the original scroll manuscript of the novel, the word nowhere is crossed out, and the word everywhere is inserted instead. 5 Kerouac’s personae are uneasy riders, traveling between the secure and calm world of “aunt,” mother, and other relatives and the careening, exciting world of Dean and the Beats, and he is unsatisfied by both: “With frantic Dean I was rushing through the world without a chance to see it” (206). Another manifestation of the identity problem in Kerouac’s novels involves the idealization of childhood and the reluctance to surrender the innocence and imaginative liberty of childhood. A focus on childhood has always been popular with American writers, perhaps in part because America itself is often imaged as a child or adolescent, born of dreams

&*.

B^X]VZaH`Vj

of freedom and innocence, bursting with energy, vitality, curiosity, and idealism, reluctant to relinquish its naïve visions even after attaining the maturity of major power status. America remains endearingly and exasperatingly youthful, and Americans dare to share this quality with their country—often desperately. Kerouac’s novels document the American dream of youth, the loss of these dreams, and an attempt to regain the charm of youth. For Kerouac, childhood is a mystical spot of time invested with an innocence of delight, a sense of wonder, and a lust for sensation. He prizes fantasy and childish imagination, particularly inasmuch as the child can use them as protection from harsh reality and responsibility. In Doctor Sax, a novel whose story Sal tells to Marylou in On the Road (171–72), Kerouac provides an episode illustrating this escape: “I threw a piece of slate skimming in the air and accidentally caught Cy at the throat (Count Condu! he came in the night flapping over the sandbank and cut Cy in the neck with his eager blue teeth by sand moons of snore)” (74).6 Youthful imagination creates a scenario which exempts the child from guilt. In On the Road, Sal proclaims his own immunity from blame: he tells Dean, “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” (214). His defensive assertion has the sweep of a child’s blanket denial. Kerouac repeatedly articulates the yearning to return to childhood’s simple magic. He writes Holmes, “I feel happy in my overalls in the yard, like a Lowell Child again” and echoes this motif in a letter to Allen Ginsberg, saying he wants “to live my own kind of simple Ti Jean . . . life, like in overalls all day” (Selected Letters: 1957–1969 140, 142). Though these letters were written in 1958, the same spirit of childhood’s preciousness appears throughout On the Road, manifesting itself in Sal’s response to Dean, who “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, among the motorcycles, along the wash-lined neighborhood and drowsy doorsteps of afternoon where boys played guitars while their older brothers worked in the mills” (7). Similarly, Sal comments on his Denver acquaintances: “I wanted to see Denver ten years ago when they were all children, and in the sunny cherry blossom morning of springtime in the Rockies rolling their hoops up the joyous alleys full of promise—the whole gang” (59). In addition, Kerouac explicates his early draft of the novel: “My Smitty in ‘On the Road’ has a simple, almost childish method of arriving at pure knowledge of the world” (Windblown 231). Much the same can be said of Sal, with his whimsical escape into the child’s awe and reverence for life. Pilfering food

&+%

I]ZBV`^c\hd[EVgVY^hZ

from a California barracks cafeteria with Remi Boncoeur, Sal “went to the soda fountain. Here, realizing a dream of mine from infancy, I took the cover off the chocolate ice cream and stuck my hand in wrist-deep and hauled me up a skewer of ice cream and licked at it” (70). To the young, youth is eternal, and they expect to live and to remain young forever, the child’s intuitive and instinctive Peter-Pan assumption. In 1948 Kerouac imagines living on a ranch where “I can be my childlike self forever” (Windblown 91). Darker moments intrude upon this idealized world, but even these are attributed to the exuberance of youth: “At twenty young Joe was the victim of the early fatalism that says: ‘What’s the use anyway? Who cares what happens!’ That frame of mind proceeds on towards even greater excesses in the name of despair, while all the time it is only the sap of youth running over, running wild” (Town 89). The approach of adulthood, which brings sudden and frightful acquaintance with the world of sorrow, suffering, and death, intrudes upon the security of childhood. In his notebook draft “Gone On the Road” (dated July 26, 1950, when Kerouac was 28), his narrator finds that “the realization came unimpeded like an unkind dream that I was growing old and I would die” (Windblown 363). With revealing candor, Kerouac asserts in Visions of Cody, “I’m writing this book because we’re all going to die” (368).7 The discovery of death brings knowledge of the fragility and autonomy of life and the human body: in Doctor Sax, young Ti Jean, walking with his mother across Moody Street Bridge, sees a man in front of them who is carrying a watermelon suddenly collapse; betrayed by “the sin of life, of death, he pissed in his pants his last act” (117), for, “when a man dies he pees in his clothes, everything goes” (129). 8 To the child, exulting in physical exuberance, this is especially disturbing, and the epiphanic revelation presages the debilitation which accompanies the accumulation of adult years. Throughout his works, Kerouac reveals an anxiety about aging. Dean tells Sal, “We know life, Sal, we’re growing older, each of us, little by little” (187). The novel illustrates this condition, in the spring of 1950, in precisely the athletic activities that Kerouac treasured: Later in the afternoon we went out and played baseball with the kids in the sooty field by the Long Island railyard. We also played basketball so frantically the younger boys said, “Take it easy, you don’t have to kill yourself.” They bounced smoothly all around us and beat us with ease. Dean and I were sweating. At one point Dean fell flat on his face on the concrete court. We huffed and puffed to get the ball away from the boys; they turned and flipped it away. Others darted in and smoothly shot over our heads. We jumped like maniacs, and the younger boys just reached

&+&

B^X]VZaH`Vj

up and grabbed the ball from our sweating hands and dribbled away. . . . They thought we were crazy. (On the Road 252)

The boys think they’re crazy, but they’re just growing old, trying to pretend that the ravages of time have not begun to take their toll on them (Kerouac would have been 28, and Cassady just 24). In fact, the only argument that Sal and Dean have is caused by Dean’s comment about Sal’s age; Sal retorts, “Who’s old! I’m not much older than you are! . . . you’re always making cracks about my age” (213). The inevitable loss of the freshness and vigor of childhood is instrumental in the formation of Kerouac’s outlook on life. When the qualities of youth encompass all ideals, one does not look eagerly toward tomorrow. One of the critical factors in the child-to-adult process involves alienation from the father. Kerouac repeatedly portrays his characters as a generation of orphans. This is, on occasion, the result of the child’s disappointment in the father, which becomes the pattern for adult disillusionment. In his “Forest of Eden” journal (1947–48), Kerouac explains the process: But when the child grows up and learns that his father knows very little more than the child himself, when the child seeks advice and meets with fumbling earnest human words, when the child seeks a way and finds that his father’s way is not enough; when the child is left cold with the realization that no one knows what to do—no one knows how to live, behave, judge, how to think, see, understand, no one knows, yet everyone tries fumblingly—then the child is in danger of growing cynical about the entire matter, or despairing, or mad. (Windblown 144)9

Fatherlessness even serves to unify the characters for Sal: “Here were the three of us—Dean looking for his father, mine dead, Stan fleeing his old one [actually, his grandfather], and going off into the night together” (267). Kerouac’s original manuscript highlights the function of loss of the father. The published version of On the Road contextualizes Sal’s first meeting with Dean as “not long after my wife and I split up” and after Sal’s “serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead” (1). However, the manuscript of the novel specifies that the meeting occurs “not long after my father died” and that the illness “really had something to do with my father’s death and my awful feeling that everything was dead” (On the Road: The Original Scroll 109).10 Sal generalizes his haunting memory by stating, “Either you find someone who looks like your father in places like Montana or you look for a friend’s father where he is no more” (179). Sal’s trauma even generates behavioral repercussions in the manuscript version.

&+'

I]ZBV`^c\hd[EVgVY^hZ

When Dean convinces Sal to have sex with Marylou while he watches, Sal is unable to perform and notes in the published version that the bed “had been the deathbed of a big man and sagged in the middle” (131). The scroll introduces a further complication by explaining that the bed was the one in which his father had died (On the Road: The Original Scroll 232). Part of the quest then becomes a search for a surrogate father-figure, though in the novels the quested father may be actual or symbolic. Fatherfigure identification takes place among Kerouac’s real-life friends and among his characters. In a letter to Gary Snyder, Kerouac says, “here’s your old dad writin you a letter” and goes on to tell him, “i am your father” (Selected Letters: 1957–1969 105, 107), though Kerouac was only eight years older than Snyder. His letters refer also to Philip Whalen as “father” (Selected Letters: 1957–1969 245, 250), but Kerouac was a year and a half older than Whalen. In Book of Dreams, “Cody and my father mingled into the One Father image of Accusation” (13), and in Big Sur, “I remind him [Cody] of his old wino father but the fantastic thing is that HE reminds ME of MY father so that we have this strange eternal father-image relationship” (134). Identities within the Beat social group also begin to meld. Kerouac writes Carl Solomon in 1951 that “the latest things I wrote and have been writing ‘about Neal’ [Cassady] suddenly and curiously are really about myself ” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 328–29). In On the Road, Sal’s identity blends with Dean’s, in his own mind and the minds of others: Sal explains that Ed Dunkel “was starting to turn to me as well for advice; one Dean wasn’t enough for him” (123), and Stan Shephard’s grandfather mistakenly, but symbolically, addresses Sal as “Dean” (266). Misidentification threatens individuality, and in 1961 Kerouac writes to Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky that he “can’t think of anything more tedious than becoming Kerouassady again” (Selected Letters: 1957–1969 316–17). The result, however, is the establishment of strong-bonded comradeship among the men. Kerouac celebrates “some kind of new thing in the world actually where men can really be angelic friends and not be homosexual and not fight over girls” (Big Sur 135).11 Such friendship appears to be a desire to return to the point of childhood before Ti Jean “began to distinguish between sexes—as noble and beautiful as a young nun” (Doctor Sax 73), when he courted Ernie Malo, a boyhood playmate. This attraction eventually becomes the “innocent-homosexual” experience which Leslie A. Fiedler characterizes as including such aspects as “the camaraderie of the joint trip to the whorehouse (bursting into your buddy’s room with a bottle of booze to see how he’s doing)” (188).12 The episode at the Mexican whorehouse in On the Road provides a parallel here, and Dean’s desire to watch Sal have

&+(

B^X]VZaH`Vj

sex with Marylou offers another similar motif. These incidents embody the “homosocial” bonds that Eve Sedgwick explores in her book Between Men, particularly as they relate to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of “the male traffic in women” and to Gayle Rubin’s insightful critique of this objectification of women as property. Furthermore, by the latter portion of On the Road, Sal is virtually pimping for Dean: he makes a point of introducing Inez to Dean (248); when he learns that Dean is coming to Denver, he wonders, “Are there any girls for him?” (259); “back in San Antonio,” on the way to Mexico, Sal “had promised Dean, as a joke, that I would get him a girl” (280). Unlike Dean, Sal is frequently self-conscious and inept in his relationships with women, and he tends to withdraw to a safe, unthreatening male innocence, as the novel’s prose juxtapositions subtly but clearly indicate: “I was the only guy without a girl. I asked everybody, ‘Where’s Dean?’“ (41); “A whole bunch of girls showed up. I phoned Carlo to find out what Dean was doing now” (47); in Central City, Sal and his friends stay in a miner’s shack, where “great crowds of young girls came piling into our place,” and Sal comments, “I wished Dean and Carlo were there” (53–54). This preference for male society reflects the attempt to recapture the camaraderie of carefree youth. In fact, in 1957 Kerouac writes Ginsberg, “I hunger for final ultimate friendship with no hassles, like with Neal early days” (Selected Letters: 1957–1969 94). The safety of the male friendships forestalls the “hassles” of heterosexual bonds. Youth often feels an urge to deny, or to postpone, immersion in the adult world. Motion, kicks, and renunciation of the concerns and responsibilities of the adult world characterize the adopted lifestyles of Sal and his friends. Carlo tells Sal, “I have finally taught Dean that he can do anything he wants, become mayor of Denver, marry a millionairess, or become the greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he keeps rushing out to see the midget auto races” (41–42). Kerouac recommends in 1948 that Cassady “believe in everything, like a child, a bird; like I do” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 165). His reveries of youth are idealized pictures of “beautiful sadness” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 122), which he can even admit as partly imaginary: “now I see there is no such spot in Lowell or in mind but I made it up to fit the dream” (Book of Dreams 150). His adult dissatisfaction constantly impels him to revisit the idealized state, to return purposefully for its delicate delights, because, as he confesses to Ginsberg in 1952, “I wish I was innocent again” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 345). Grown beyond childhood innocence, Sal searches for adult values and feels the compulsion to travel, for he recognizes “our one and noble function of the time, move” (134). However, the aimlessness indicated here recalls

&+)

I]ZBV`^c\hd[EVgVY^hZ

Hemingway’s admonition that one must be careful not to confuse movement with action. Kerouac himself seems to recognize this: a carnival owner asks Sal and a fellow hitchhiker, “You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?” and Sal comments, “We didn’t understand his question, and it was a damned good question” (20). Sal imagines “driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves” (280), implying that they have not yet learned themselves. The danger is that, without a compass, he can find himself traveling, like “the Ghost of the Susquehanna,” in the wrong direction (104). Sal can only abide the rootlessness, the uncertainty, and the careless abandon of the vagabond life in doses. He recognizes “the ragged madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road” (254). For his own health, he must abandon the nightmare. After Sal’s final return to New York, independent of Dean, he meets a new woman, Laura, and begins making plans for their future life together. Forced to let Dean make his own way back from New York, Sal provides a coda in the final paragraph that offers a grudging acceptance of growth and a reluctant maturity. The passage combines nostalgia for the world of childhood innocence, affection for Dean (the unwitting agent of Sal’s growth), suspension of the father search, and sad acceptance of aging and mortality. Sal’s development may seem limited, but, after all, the very title of Kerouac’s novel indicates that life is a journey. By the novel’s end, Sal frees himself from Dean, though wistfully, and he is now enabled to develop his own independent life and identity, “hopeful of something else” (Windblown 123), as Kerouac had initially projected. CdiZh 1. Jeff Nuttall treats the effects in his book Bomb Culture. 2. The pseudonym for the prose excerpt upset Malcolm Cowley, who had been publicly promoting Kerouac and felt that his efforts were undermined by the nom de plume (Nicosia 474). 3. See Mexico City Blues: “Who am I? / do I exist?” (178). 4. Sal ignores the poverty, deprivation, prejudice, and violence that America’s minorities faced, but Eldridge Cleaver cites this passage as evidence of the early stage of “rebellion of the white youth” against the American system (71–72). 5. Over three weeks in April of 1951, Kerouac typed out his first full-length version of On the Road on strips of paper taped together to form a 120-foot scroll. This manuscript is currently in the collection of James S. Irsay. From Jan. 19 until March 13, 2005, the manuscript was displayed in full length (lacking the last several feet, which were accidentally destroyed many years ago) at the University of Iowa Museum of Art.

&+*

B^X]VZaH`Vj

6. Kerouac’s notebooks for Doctor Sax bear the title “A novella of Children and Evil, The Myth of the Rainy Night” (Charters 27); he also describes it as “dealing with the American Myth as we used to know it as kids” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 169). 7. During his appearance on The Steve Allen Show in 1959, Kerouac reads a variant of this passage as a lead-in to the conclusion of On the Road (Kerouac). 8. Kerouac alludes to this incident in Tristessa: “I’d rather walk than ride the airplane, I can fall on the ground flat on my face and die that way.—With a watermelon under my arm” (45). 9. Kerouac provides a variant of this passage as a realization by Peter Martin in The Town and the City (424). 10. The beginning of the scroll manuscript is photographically reproduced in Phillips (36). In a journal entry dated Aug. 1949, Kerouac focuses on his conflicted feelings: “I cannot for instance as yet understand why my father is dead . . . no meaning, all unseemly, and incomplete. It seems he is not dead at all. I haven’t cross’t the bridge to knowing that he is dead” (Windblown 204). 11. In an undated letter (circa 1943) to Cornelius Murphy, Kerouac says that he told his psychiatrist about “being more closely attached to my male friends, spiritually and emotionally,” than to the women with whom he was involved (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 62). 12. Fiedler is discussing James Jones’s From Here to Eternity. The essay originally appeared in 1951, six years before On the Road. The moral prejudice signaled by the word innocent is characteristic of prevalent attitudes of the early 1950s. 13. Kerouac’s own resolution of the identity problem was less salutary. Feeling doomed to loneliness and alienated from his friends, he had no sense of belonging. He self-consciously developed an identification with his ancestors: “I’m a French Canadian Iroquois American aristocrat Breton Cornish democrat” (Desolation 340). His celebration of his nationality, his pride in his ancestry, and his discovery of the family escutcheon furnished him with a sense of his place in historical terms: “[I]t should be pointed out that all this ‘Beat’ guts therefore goes back to my ancestors who were Bretons who were the most independent group of nobles in all old Europe” (“Origins” 57). Kerouac also became obsessed with the derivation of his name. He variously suggested, “Ker—house, ouac—in the moor” (Interview with Stanley Twardowicz 4), leading him to a new identity: “I am Thomas Hardy now” (Selected Letters: 1957–1969 374); “House (Ker), In the Field (Ouac)” (Satori 72); and “‘Kern’ being Cairn, and ‘uak’ language of; then, Ker, house, ouac, language of ” (Vanity 128). He writes Holmes, “Louis Lebris de Kéroualles (descended of the mistress of Charles II England, Louise de Kéroualle, Dutchess [sic] of Portsmouth, altho she only borrowed the name from old Fambly there, mine)” (Selected Letters: 1957–1969 415). The quest for identity became a genealogical search, as if the secret of the apple were told only in the roots of the apple tree.

&++

I]ZBV`^c\hd[EVgVY^hZ

Jack McClintock quotes Kerouac shortly before his death: “But, yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical” (189); Gerald Nicosia indicates the extremes to which Kerouac went in tracing his family history, even claiming relation on his mother’s side to Napoleon Bonaparte (21–22) and extending his ancestral lineage to Canada, Ireland, Cornwall, Wales, Brittany, Scotland, England, Russia, and Persia (653–54). This genealogical ploy offers neither a road to identity nor a solution to essential human problems.

Ldg`h8^iZY Carroll, Lewis [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson]. Alice in Wonderland: Authoritative Text of Alice in Wonderland; Through the Looking Glass; and The Hunting of the Snark: Backgrounds; Essays in Criticism. Ed. Donald J. Gray. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1971. Charters, Ann. A Bibliography of Works by Jack Kerouac: 1939–1975. Rev. ed. New York: Phoenix, 1975. Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: Dell, 1968. Fiedler, Leslie A. “Dead-End Werther: The Bum as American Culture Hero.” An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics. Boston: Beacon, 1955. 183–90. Jean-Louis [Jack Kerouac]. “Jazz of the Beat Generation.” New World Writing: Seventh Mentor Selection. Ed. Arabel J. Porter. New York: New American Library, 1955. 7–16. Kerouac. Dir. John Antonelli. Videocassette. Active Home Video, 1985. Kerouac, Jack. Big Sur. 1962. New York: Penguin, 1992. ———. Book of Dreams. San Francisco: City Lights, 1961. ———. Desolation Angels. 1965. New York: Bantam, 1966. ———. Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three. New York: Grove. 1959. ———. Interview with Stanley Twardowicz et al. (Part 2). Ed. Diana Scesny. Athanor 2 (Fall 1971): 1–15. ———. Mexico City Blues (242 Choruses). New York: Grove, 1959. ———. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 2005. ———. On the Road: The Original Scroll. Ed. Howard Cunnell. New York: Viking, 2007. ———. “The Origins of the Beat Generation.” Good Blonde and Others. Ed. Donald Allen. Rev. ed. San Francisco: Grey Fox, 1994. 55–65. ———. Satori in Paris. New York: Grove, 1966. ———. Selected Letters 1957–1969. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking, 1999. ———. Selected Letters 1940–1956. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking, 1995. ———. The Town and the City. New York: Harcourt, 1950. ———. Tristessa. 1960. New York: Penguin, 1962. ———. Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935–46. New York: Coward-McCann, 1968. ———. Visions of Cody. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.

&+,

B^X]VZaH`Vj

———. Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947–1954. Ed. Douglas Brinkley. New York: Viking, 2004. Kerouac, Jack, and Joyce Johnson. Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, 1957–1958. New York: Viking, 2000. Kerouac, Jean-Louis. “One Hundred and Twentieth Chorus.” Variegation 10 (Autumn 1956): 66. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon, 1969. McClintock, Jack. “This Is How the Road Ends: Not with a Bang, with a Damn Hernia.” Esquire Mar. 1970: 138–39+. Millstein, Gilbert. “Books of the Times.” Review of On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. New York Times Sept. 5, 1957: 27. Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Nuttall, Jeff. Bomb Culture. New York: Dell, 1968. Phillips, Lisa. Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York: Monthly Review, 1975. 157–210. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

&+-

9 INE:I6A@>C8:6C9 E:G;DGB6C8:>CDCI=:GD69 I^b=jci

Anyone wanting to make sense of the impact of the Beats in the 1950s—and this question has now come to seem not only academically legitimate but even academically important—necessarily turns to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as a key text. The novel offers a portrait of the period, and its primary characters are all central Beat figures. Moreover, the book’s reception functions as a microcosm of how the Beat ethos was lauded and reviled, as well as how its potential for cultural change was partially realized over time but also partially contained and subverted (and even commodified into banal tropes for advertising, including what should be an oxymoron but isn’t—stylish jeans). Thus, it is not surprising that we are still reflecting on Kerouac’s best known novel more than fifty years after its publication. The study of literature has become, after all, increasingly the study of cultural processes, and few books of the last half century offer a richer smorgasbord of delights for examining how we concoct and consume cultural objects than On the Road. I am happy to agree that a significant part of On the Road’s current importance lies in the multiple routes of its cultural circulation in the decades since its publication and how those highways and byways can be mapped, and I am also willing to agree that this has something to do with Kerouac’s achievement in writing it. But after a quarter century of reading and thinking about On the Road, I am more drawn to another aspect of the novel’s continued life—that it still matters as imaginative and aesthetic experience. We continue to read it not just for academic purposes or for historical interest or as a scene for ideological interrogation and theorizing but because it

&+.

I^b=jci

has remained—and remains—imaginatively compelling. We can still experience this book as if it is in some significant way still contemporary to us while most other mid-1950s literary artifacts are simply that: artifacts. Why and how On the Road felt new, compelling, exhilarating, even threatening when it first appeared in 1957 has been discussed at length. But why did the book still feel new and contemporary when I first read it in the summer of 1971? And why does it feel as if it matters now—as if it is still new and contemporary—to the young students who write me from time to time having just read the novel, exhilarated and convinced that it is still new, different, and imaginatively crucial for them now in ways that, say, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (a culturally interesting artifact) is not? Put simply, the question is why are we still able to read On the Road rather than just study it? And how might some understanding of this help us not only better appreciate the novel’s achievement but also better understand its significance as a cultural document, be clearer about the cultural work it has done, and more adequately assess the cultural work it can and cannot do? Ironically, part of what has made On the Road matter culturally—the controversy it generated when published—has helped obscure why it is imaginatively and aesthetically compelling. When it was first published, On the Road was hailed and assailed (more the latter) for the series of hedonistic pilgrimages in search of kicks and “IT” that fill the book. For some, the travels of Sal and Dean offered a vision of escape from the social expectation of middle-class conformity in cold war America. For others, their travels were a sordid threat to social norms and culturally authorized meaning. The ensuing tug of war over such matters as whether the novel’s version and vision of mid-twentieth-century America is nihilistic (as detractors claimed) or beatific (as Kerouac claimed) or a road map to a distinctly American sense of individual authenticity and freedom (as some of its champions then and now have claimed) has helped focus our attention on what is represented in the novel. Clearly, what the book represents is important to understanding its initial impact and the way it is a document of its time. But however shocking Road’s portrayal of drugs, kicks, and seemingly casual sex might have been to readers in 1957 (or would have been to readers in 1951 when the novel was originally drafted), these would hardly merit the literary equivalent of a PG-13 rating today. While the “what” of On the Road is key to understanding its significance as a mid-twentieth-century document, it is a problematic and insufficient basis for understanding its power to compel contemporary readers—its power to be read as if it is still contemporary. This power, I would like to suggest, comes less from “what” the novel represents than “how” the novel represents it. The truly radical quality of On

&,%

IneZiVa`^c\

the Road is less a matter of benzedrine, fast cars, marijuana, and failed three ways than Kerouac’s approach to writing about such things. The “how” of his novel is the basis of its continued imaginative power and the key to understanding why we can continue to experience Road as if contemporary a half century after its publication and sixty years after the earliest of the events on which the novel is based. And understanding this “how” helps us understand what was, and still is, radical and significant in Kerouac’s approach to writing. While the socially aberrant actions of the characters in the novel—especially in the context of the mid-1950s—has encouraged us to focus our thinking about On the Road on the way the characters act in the world and on the world they enact, the novel’s continued power comes in large part from the way Kerouac enacts a particular style of consciousness in and through the writing that cannot be collapsed into the actions of his characters and which, in fundamental ways, disrupts and refashions the relationship between writer, text, and reader in ways that we have still only partly recognized and assimilated. Before I try to explain what I think this “how” might involve, I need to explain what it is not. In defending the artistry and achievement of his book against his detractors (including Truman Capote, who quipped dismissively that Road was merely “typing” rather than writing) (Charters, Kerouac 308), Kerouac invoked the concept of “Spontaneous Prose” and offered such explanations of his practice as “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” Kerouac’s dicta on Spontaneous Prose have some value for understanding On the Road’s power for contemporary readers, but they are also problematic. For one thing, Kerouac didn’t begin writing Spontaneous Prose—at least consciously and fully—until late spring 1952, nearly a year after the three weeks he spent writing the basic draft of On the Road, the famous scroll, in April 1951 (Hunt, Kerouac’s Crooked Road 108–25). (Doctor Sax and the posthumously published Visions of Cody were the first novels that Kerouac wrote using Spontaneous Prose as Kerouac defined that practice in statements like “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.”) For another, while Kerouac wrote the initial draft of On the Road very quickly, so quickly that it must necessarily have involved a certain degree of improvisation, he revised the original draft several times, and the novel’s final text, as published by Viking Press, reflects not only these revisions but also Kerouac’s work with Malcolm Cowley of Viking and a final round of additional changes when the Viking copyeditors reworked the prose as the book was produced. These copyeditors deleted phrases they apparently thought were extraneous, chopped long sentences into shorter ones, added punctuation, and changed wording in what Kerouac had thought was the final version of his novel

&,&

I^b=jci

(Charters, Introduction xxvi–xxvii). Comparing the prose in On the Road as Viking published it to the prose in the three excerpts from On the Road that Kerouac published in periodicals before the novel appeared (which seem to have been set from typescripts that hadn’t undergone this final, unauthorized round of copyediting) suggests that the Viking copyeditors were trying to make Kerouac’s prose as conventional as possible (see “The Mexican Girl,” “Jazz of the Beat Generation,” and “A Billowy Trip”). While Kerouac’s ideas about Spontaneous Prose are significant for understanding the writing following On the Road, they cannot be used directly to explain his approach to writing in Road, and the process of revision and editing that led to On the Road as published are a further complication in assessing the “how” of the book. Yet even if On the Road was not written spontaneously (as Kerouac defined Spontaneous Prose and practiced it after Road), and even if the prose we read in the Viking text is a mix of refinements that Kerouac wanted (his revisions) and those he didn’t (the work of the copyeditors), his approach to writing in Road is still the key to its power to convince readers it is still new and contemporary. For all the conventional gloss waxed and buffed onto the prose by Viking and in spite of the novel’s relatively conventional structure (influenced, I’ve suggested elsewhere, by Kerouac’s reading of The Great Gatsby) (Kerouac’s Crooked Road 8–10, 73), On the Road subverts the form of the modern novel even as it seemingly fulfills that form. If this shows it to be something of a transitional work in Kerouac’s career—suspended between the relatively conventional form of The Town and the City and what Kerouac termed the “wild form” of Visions of Cody and his later books—it is, nonetheless, a significant transition and a decisive turn. On the Road, that is, might be said to subvert the category of the “literary” (as that category was constructed in the 1940s and 1950s) even as it aspires to be literature, and the way Kerouac references the form of the conventional novel in Road even as he drives his book beyond this form is a primary reason why the book has been, and continues to be, more widely read and discussed than Kerouac’s more experimental work. Oddly enough, the radical nature of Kerouac’s approach in On the Road is most apparent in some of the novel’s quieter moments. For instance, midway through part 1, Sal, the novel’s narrator, brings a waitress he has met back to the apartment where he is staying in Denver on the night before he is planning to push on to San Francisco. Throughout his visit, Sal has moved back and forth between two social groups, unable to fit in fully with either or commit fully to either. One set centers on Dean; the other set he meets through his college buddy Chad King. Sal is drawn to both, but the two sets

&,'

IneZiVa`^c\

have drawn apart into what Sal describes as “a war with social overtones” (37). That Sal is accepted in both camps but belongs fully to neither has added to his sense of being adrift and suspended. Sal tells us, I got her [Rita] in my bedroom after a long talk in the dark of the front room. She was a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me prove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing. She sighed in the dark. “What do you want out of life?” I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls. “I don’t know,” she said. “Just wait on tables and try to get along.” She yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together; saying that, and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned away wearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad. We made vague plans to meet in Frisco. (57–58)

Sal’s behavior here is exploitative. His claim that he wants “to prove” that sex is “beautiful” is a con, and he knows it. Yet he does want to prove this for her and not just to her, and he regrets his failure to do so. Similarly, his question about what she “want[s] out of life” is both a ploy and genuine. Sal is, it seems, attempting to lessen her sense that she has been used and thus ease his guilt, but he also does want her to be “excited” about life, even though what excites him is the prospect of pushing on to “Frisco” and not the “life and things we could do together.” Sal’s relationship to this moment, to Rita, and to relating it to us as readers is complex. He wants a genuine relationship with Rita, yet he wants his freedom. He willingly barters romantic clichés for sex, and yet he also sees a more fundamental beauty or possibility within the romantic cliché and his relationship to her. And he celebrates this possibility to Rita and to us as readers even as he knowingly distorts it to manipulate her into letting him “prove” what he fails to prove. We might conclude that Kerouac is so superficial and confused that he doesn’t sense these layerings and reversals, but that would be a mistake. In the next paragraph, Sal, having walked Rita home, “stretch[es] out on the grass of an old church with a bunch of hobos.” First, the “talk” of the hobos makes him “want to get back on that road” (and presumably away from romantic and potentially domestic entanglements just as the hobos have rejected, transcended, or failed at such entanglements). Seemingly, their talk “of harvests and moving north” with the season should evoke for Sal the freedom to follow the warm weather

&,(

I^b=jci

and drink in the evening after a day in the field. And it does, but the image of following warm weather from harvest to harvest seems also to evoke a sense of the yearly cycle of seasons and a potentially pastoral or romantic, even domestic, notion of harvest closer to the Tin Pan Alley line of “Shine on, harvest moon, for me and my gal.” This would, at least, explain how Sal veers from “want[ing] to get back on the road” as the hobos talk to noticing instead that the evening is “warm and soft,” which in turn (seemingly through his association with “warm and soft” and his complex encounter with Rita) leads him to add, I wanted to go and get Rita again and tell her a lot more things, and really make love to her this time, and calm her fears about men. Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk—real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious. I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotive howling off to the mountains. I wanted to pursue my star further. (58)

What might seem odd here, but it is also significant for understanding how the novel works, is not the way Sal pauses with the hobos (who have, it seems, rejected romance and domesticity more definitively than he has) but how their talk drives a desire to “get back on that road,” even as their talk also leads him to extend his meditation on his encounter with Rita and how, in turn, his desire for “real straight talk about souls” so quickly transforms into “want[ing] to pursue my star further” on the road as he listens to the locomotive in the mountains. In the three paragraphs that follow Sal’s hollow conquest of Rita and his moment on the church lawn with the hobos (which end the chapter and his stay in Denver), Kerouac continues to layer, deepen, and complicate these desires, reactions, and reflections. And if we read the passage slowly (allowing the reversals and paradoxes to resonate) rather than reading it headlong (as the story of its initial composition might suggest we should), what stands out is that the action of the scene (seducing Rita, lounging with the hobos, listening to the train whistle) is secondary. The action serves as an occasion for something else. Rather than represent the action, the writing represents Sal’s complex and dynamic awareness of self, of other, of cultural and social conventions, and of cultural context. And actually, the more accurate claim here would be that the prose does not so much represent this awareness as enact it. The quality of Kerouac’s imagination in this passage underscores how much we miss if we focus too closely on what the novel represents and fail to allow ourselves to respond to how it represents.

&,)

IneZiVa`^c\

The novel is about being “on the road” and about Dean and about America and so on, but it is also the experience of Sal’s multiply-layered and volatile awareness—his often simultaneous senses of engagement and alienation; of cultural and personal past; of mythic possibility; of gritty reality; of fantasy, fact, failure, and hope. It is, of course, possible to see the complexity of awareness in this scene as simply Sal’s confusion—or Kerouac’s confusion—and conclude that Sal’s narration of his seduction of Rita points to Kerouac’s failure as a writer and that he was, as Capote wanted to believe, merely “typewriting” rather than “writing.” That would, however, be a mistake. There are too many instances in the novel of Sal’s simultaneous awareness of, and allegiance to, conflicting desires and values for this feature of the narration to be only accident and randomness. Moreover, Sal’s awareness—his openness to possibility yet his awareness of cost and loss—is, ultimately, what defines him as a character and as a narrator. But perhaps most tellingly, Sal’s persistent commitment to conflicting possibilities coheres thematically and threads through the whole book. Later in part 1, for instance, as Sal is traveling by bus to Los Angeles, he encounters “the cutest little Mexican girl in slacks” (81). Sal’s time with Terry, first in Los Angeles, then in several agricultural communities in central California where he attempts to support her and her small son by picking cotton, further complicates the issues in his brief affair with Rita and intensifies his experience of his contradictory desires and hopes and his guilty failures. The way the other relationships in the novel (Dean’s with Marylou, Camille, and Inez; Remi’s with Lee Ann, Dunkel’s with Galatea, even Sal’s “miserably weary split-up” that opens the novel and his liaison with Laura at the novel’s end) similarly play out competing desires for physical freedom, meaningful domestic stability, and romance not only reinforce the pattern but layer and complicate it. I am not trying to claim here that Sal’s brief description of his tryst with Rita is some sort of previously unnoticed interpretive key. Rather, I’m trying to point to two things that are central to how the novel works and its continued power to compel imaginatively, not just historically, for what is now half a century. First, these few paragraphs do not present (or represent) the result of awareness (in which the contradictions have been erased or structured into a series of subordinations that would imply their resolution). Instead, these few paragraphs enact a process of awareness. This distinction is central—even foundational—to Kerouac’s imagination. Second, the way these enactments of consciousness gain additional depth, richness, and imaginative impact within the frame of the novel and for the reader is through their associational relationship to other parallel moments

&,*

I^b=jci

in the novel. This is central to Kerouac’s approach to writing. Indeed, Road is best understood as an all but continuous series of associationally related moments, and once we focus on the motion within passages and the way the passages and episodes function as a series of variations around a series of unresolved and irresolvable desires, the novel’s imaginative power and the underlying coherence to the seeming randomness become clearer. Sal’s desire to go on the road is both a desire to escape and a desire to settle down. It is a desire for freedom from structure and obligation but also a desire for place, significance, meaning. Leslie Fiedler once dismissed Road by suggesting that Kerouac and his characters thought they were playing at being Huck Finn but were actually playing at being Tom Sawyer and not even managing that (491–92). But Fiedler is wrong. While Sal and Dean are avatars of Huck, and arguably failed avatars, they are Huck and Tom wanting to be Huck and Jim. If Sal and Dean fail to fulfill the agenda Fiedler seems to set for them, it is not because they fail to understand the difference between Huck and Tom—or the difference between Huck and Jim. They understand these matters all too well. They fail at being Huck and Jim (even as they succeed at not being Tom) because they are both adults, compelled to search for a way to include Becky on the community of the raft—something that should have interested Fiedler, given the larger argument he develops in Love and Death in the American Novel. The scope of a relatively brief essay doesn’t allow a full reading of the ways the episode with Rita anticipates the episode with Terry and how, conversely, Sal’s relationship with Terry intensifies our sense of the episode with Rita, but the larger patterns of the novel suggest that these repetitions are not random. Sal senses the contradictions in his various desires for Rita and Terry, but he also knows that these contradictions cannot be resolved into a final structure or hierarchy in which, for example, sexual desire and the freedom (yet isolation) of being on the road is subordinated to the desire for stability and domestic order or vice versa (or even one where mutual sexual pleasure permanently transcends the dialectic of freedom from the other and responsibility to the other). This conflict, as it is projected in the novel (and as Kerouac seems to have experienced it in his own life), is not resolvable, nor can it be given some kind of final or stable mapping. Moreover, the conflict is best understood as an irresolvable dynamic rather than an irresolvable structure, which is why the novel’s coherence does not come from (and cannot come from) the linearity of its plot, in which a thematic argument would develop in parallel with a plot that moves progressively from a start to a finish, but instead emerges from its recursiveness in which nodal moments of experience, awareness, and reflection, such as Sal’s narration of his seduction

&,+

IneZiVa`^c\

of Rita are probed and elaborated through parallel moments (such as Sal’s encounter with Terry). In Road each recurrence and repetition is a deepening of the central conflicts rather than a progression forward toward some final resolution. (Kerouac, like Whitman, is willing to contradict himself in order to express the multitude of implications he senses.) The fundamental quality of Sal’s consciousness and the multiple ways he relates to the world around him require simultaneity not subordination, and the coherence of On the Road is the coherence of a jazz solo, not the coherence of a fugue or even of a symphony. As such, Sal’s description of several jazz solos in chapter 4 of part 3 can be read as an analogy for the way Kerouac develops Sal’s engagement of his experience and telling of it. In describing these jazz performances, Sal emphasizes the way the soloist develops relatively simple thematic and stylistic motifs through repetition, variation, and layering. In elaborating the multiple possibilities of the relatively simple material in the real time of performance (rather than the different time and space of solitary composing), the soloist enacts a structural process in which the multiple possibilities of the material are teased out and celebrated rather than distilled and fixed into hierarchies. In fact, in Sal’s description of the performances, he celebrates process as itself structural rather than something that leads to structure. That Kerouac experimented with modes of writing that would in part parallel the bop musician’s commitment to improvisational performance and the action painter’s willingness to foreground the canvas as a field that records the act of painting rather than the result of painting (or more accurately a deliberated result) has, I realize, been noted a number of times. But what hasn’t, perhaps, been sufficiently considered is that Kerouac’s efforts to develop what he termed a “bop prosody” reflected not only his need for a prose that would have the immediacy and discursive reach of Charlie Parker’s bop or the sense of kinetic elaboration in Jackson Pollack’s painting but also his need for a mode of writing that would allow him not simply to represent the process of consciousness (as he does in the passage where Sal describes his affair with Rita) but also to enact consciousness. As such, the significance of his prose is only partly its stylistic register and tone. As with bop and action painting, Kerouac’s writing is not only at root performative but it is also a practice that asks us to attend to process and emphasizes process over product. It is a practice that foregrounds elaboration. Kerouac’s aesthetic is an aesthetic of enactment, not an aesthetic of compositional construction. This emphasis on writing as process, performance, enactment is precisely what Capote missed (or dismissed) when he labeled the writing in Road

&,,

I^b=jci

as merely typewriting. For Capote, the writing in Road lacked art because Kerouac had not planned the prose, then committed it to the page, then further refined it through revision. For Capote, the way the prose in Road unfolds reflected Kerouac’s failure to commit himself to writing as a matter of compositional distillation, in which the traces of the process have been eliminated from the final product. The writing was tainted by the presence of these traces, and Kerouac and his novel seemingly celebrated a lack of aesthetic control and a deliberate rejection of craft—with the somewhat misleading story of how Kerouac had typed the initial draft in a mere three weeks as the ultimate sign of the novel’s failure. That Kerouac’s desire (or need) for what might be termed an aesthetic of enactment rather than an aesthetic of composed or constructed product or object led him into modes of writing that emphasized the motion of perception and the momentum of the language is, I think, generally recognized (if not, as Capote illustrates, universally celebrated). What is less recognized is that Kerouac’s desire or need to cast writing as enactment, as performance, also led him into experimenting with point of view and to modes of writing that involved a radical recasting of what were then the established norms for the rhetoric of fiction. And this aspect of On the Road is, I’d suggest, finally the most powerful reason why readers who come to the book today can still respond to it as if it is contemporary. In Crooked Road I tried to make sense of how Kerouac handled point of view in On the Road. At the time, I was struck by how much more fully experimental Kerouac’s approach to writing and fiction became as he pushed on beyond On the Road to write Visions of Cody and Dr. Sax. This led me to cast On the Road as a transitional text between Kerouac’s largely conventional first novel, The Town and the City, and the work that followed. In my zeal to demonstrate the importance of the more radical work that followed, Cody, I underestimated the experimental nature of Road and how much Kerouac’s handling of point of view in the novel already marked a decisive turn toward an alternative aesthetic. In that earlier reading of On the Road, I suggested that the book could be read as a recasting of The Great Gatsby, with Dean paralleling Gatsby and Sal paralleling Nick. I still believe that Kerouac’s reading of Fitzgerald’s masterwork (which was regaining prominence as Kerouac worked on earlier versions of his “Road book”) influenced On the Road and that Kerouac was aware of the parallels between Gatsby and Dean and Nick and Sal. However, in my efforts to demonstrate that part of the achievement of Road was the way it succeeded as a relatively conventional novel, I didn’t attend closely enough to the ways Kerouac was simultaneously referencing the form of the conventional novel while

&,-

IneZiVa`^c\

subverting that form by fashioning an alternative rhetoric through the way Sal functions as narrator. For those who have continued to believe that Kerouac is a relatively artless writer (that he was a typewriter rather than a writer), there is no clear or purposeful (that is, aesthetic) handling of point of view in On the Road because the speed of the writing (that is, the typing of the scroll draft) would have meant that Kerouac had no time for the reflection and planning he would have needed to construct Sal Paradise as a persona clearly distinct from himself, to maintain this persona consistently, and to exploit its aesthetic possibilities. If the alternatives are casting Sal as simply a pseudonym for Kerouac or a narrating persona, concluding that Sal is simply Kerouac (and thus casting the book as rambling autobiography) seems fully justifiable, even though to collapse Sal into Kerouac is precisely to miss how and why the book remains radical and compelling. In my earlier attempt to address this problem (probably in part because I was emphasizing that On the Road was relatively conventional when compared to Visions of Cody), I tried to emphasize the ways in which Sal as narrator and persona in Road paralleled Nick as narrator and persona in The Great Gatsby. The parallel is, I believe, there and critically important, but what is, I’d suggest, finally more important is how the parallel suggests what is different in the way Nick and Sal each function within the two novels. In The Great Gatsby, we can, as many commentators have noted, distinguish between the time of the novel’s action and the time of its telling. As Nick narrates his relationship with Gatsby, he is reflecting back on his earlier actions as a character in his story. There is, in effect, an earlier Nick and a later Nick, and the narration offers us two intertwined actions: one is the story of Nick, Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom in which Nick is a character and which leads from Nick’s first hearing of Gatsby to Gatsby’s death; the other is the story of Nick’s growing awareness of himself as he reflects on these matters and projects the bits he knows into a fuller history of Gatsby and a more complex interpretation of Gatsby’s final and problematic “greatness.” For Nick, his earlier experience is a text to be interpreted, and the way Fitzgerald uses the device of Nick implicitly establishes two distinct but interrelated levels: experiencing (what the naïve Nick does as he interacts with Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom) and reflecting (what Nick does as he tells the story to make sense of it). Much of the novel’s richness comes from Fitzgerald’s handling of the interplay between the earlier Nick who experiences and the later Nick who reflects and tells. In On the Road, the way Kerouac casts Sal as a character in the story that Sal tells after the action of the plot has concluded resembles Fitzgerald’s use

&,.

I^b=jci

of Nick as a narrator, but in spite of this parallel, the way Sal functions as a narrator enacts an altogether different fictional rhetoric. In Gatsby, Fitzgerald maintains a consistent distinction between what Nick experiences as a character and what he learns as he reflects on his story, and the logic of the relationship between Nick as character and Nick as narrator is consistent. Nick, as narrator, may well become more thoughtful about his story as he tells it, but the distinction between the story he tells and the act of telling it remains clear and aesthetically purposeful. There is a consistent logic to the relationship between Nick as character and Nick as narrator, and Fitzgerald plays these two frames, action and telling, against each other in ways that are highly artful and thematically rich (as has been noted in study after study of the novel). In On the Road, however, the dichotomy between the Sal who is a character and the Sal who narrates is neither as fully established nor as consistently maintained. This would seem to be a failing on Kerouac’s part and a significant weakness in the novel. But for Sal to be able to enact and perform awareness (as he does in the episode with Rita), the distinction between experiencing and reflecting cannot be as absolute or consistent as the distinction between experiencing and reflecting is in Gatsby. Here, again, the difference between performance and composition implicit in jazz and in Kerouac’s portrayal of jazz in the novel is useful. In a jazz performance, the soloist, among other things, works to subvert the distinction between experiencing and reflecting. He draws on experience (previous interactions with musicians, the melodies and harmonic changes that are the materials for the act of performance, his own musical character which is partly a matter of the technique and sound he has developed and his perspective on, his stance toward, his particular musical language), but in the moment of performing, these structures and possibilities must be engaged and enacted in the present, driven by present reasons and contexts, and managed in the real time of the performance’s actual duration. The materials of past experiences must be re-experienced and recreated in the jazz musician’s act of playing for himself, the musicians around him, and the audience. The text of the past cannot be represented. The text of the past must be re-presented by engaging its possibilities as if the past were also the present. It is a process of discovering what is new in what has been known but can now become known in a differently inflected way that treats both the material of the past and its performance in the present as dynamic and changing. While performance clearly builds what was known and experienced in the past, it exists in, it engages, the present. It is less a process of packaging past experience than a process of re-experiencing it in real time in the present. It is a matter of recasting past experience into

&-%

IneZiVa`^c\

new experience more than it is a matter of reflecting on past experience. In performance, the materials of the past are not a text to be fashioned but the raw materials to be enacted through a complex awareness of past and present, self and other, and in performance the dichotomy between experiencing and reflecting disappears. If this analogy has any value, it suggests that Sal isn’t treating his past as a fixed and finished text that can serve as an occasion for interpretation (and learning through his interpretation), as Nick treats his past; rather Sal is engaging his past improvisationally and performatively—reflecting upon it and interpreting it but also re-experiencing it in ways that can (in response to the contexts and process of performing) not only change his understanding of the past but lead him into new experiences that change the past even as he presents it. In his telling about his tryst with Rita, then, we cannot fully determine which of his awarenesses and his conflicting impulses reflect the moment of the original experience (the text for his performance) and which reflect his re-experiencing of it in telling it in the novel. In Road, that is, Kerouac reshapes (actually transforms) the dichotomy of experience and reflection implicit in Fitzgerald’s fictional mode into the dialectic of experience and re-experience. The past is not a fixed text to be glossed. It is a fluid text shaped by the simultaneous processes of recalling and presenting in the real time of performance, and the complexity of awareness that occurs in this re-experiencing through performing both drives and determines the improvisational elaboration. In this way, Sal is not simply or merely a pseudonym for Kerouac but neither is he a conventional persona who can be completely distinguished from Kerouac. Sal is, instead, a performance of Kerouac, and Road is, in turn, a sequence of performances enacted through what might be thought of as performative identity (a constructed stance for performing) that is more akin to the relationship of the biographical Lester Young to the performance stance of “Pres” or of Billie Holiday’s to “Lady Day” than of Fitzgerald to Nick. Sal’s full name is Salvatore (i.e. Salvation) Paradise, which underscores the way it functions as a performative stance or identity (and the way Remi and Bull pun on Sal’s name further suggests that Kerouac was aware of what he was doing in naming the version of the self who performs the story). If On the Road is in some sense performative rather than compositional, then Capote’s binary of “typewriting” and “writing” becomes clearly inadequate for understanding what Kerouac was doing in the book and how and why it continues to work for readers. Capote is right to see “typewriting” as a key to the nature of Road, but where he reads the “typewriting” as a sign of Kerouac’s rejection of “writing” (in the sense of composing), I

&-&

I^b=jci

would suggest that the “typewriting” should be read as both the sign that he was attempting to compose the novel as if performing and as his means for doing so. For Kerouac, that is, “typewriting” wasn’t an evasion of “writing” (in Capote’s sense of that term), it was a recasting of both “writing” and mere “typewriting” into something else—into a kind of performative “typetalking.” This underscores the importance of Kerouac’s claim to Ann Charters (in 1966) that he wrote the Road (that is, typed the scroll draft of it) soon after he married his second wife, Joan Haverty, “to tell her what I’d been through” (Charters, A Bibliography 19). In typing the initial draft, that is, Kerouac was writing quickly to perform his earlier experiences for another person (Joan Haverty), and this meant that he needed to remember in a manner that included the possibility of seeing events and situations not only anew but even differently, and by writing quickly (typewriting) the process and the time of the writing could resemble performing a story for an actual “you” in real time (Kerouac’s ability to type rapidly would have been, clearly, a necessary precondition for what I’m suggesting here). This attempt to enact writing as if talking is part of what gives On the Road its performative quality. It enables Kerouac (as he imagines talking to Haverty through the performing identity of Sal) to enact consciousness—both re-entering the past of the novel’s action and extending the implications of the past through becoming more fully aware of its multiple dimensions and implications. This typetalking also shapes the fictional rhetoric of Road in ways that help clarify how the book recasts (and subverts) the form of the modern novel even as it seems, on the surface, to fulfill it. In composing a novel, the reader (as Walter Ong has aptly demonstrated) is a fiction—an absent fiction. In writing, one usually treats the surface of the page (both the actual page on which one writes and the produced page of the eventually published work) as a surface for storing the writing and as a kind of surrogate other—the fictional “you” to which the language is not so much directed (as one directs language to another in speaking) as given. The activity is, that is, more a matter of composing than performing. In the several versions of On the Road that Kerouac attempted and abandoned before drafting the scroll that he revised into the published On the Road, Kerouac was attempting to compose his material rather than perform it. In typing the scroll, however, he created a quite different rhetoric for the writing. Talking requires a “you” to whom the talker talks. And telling a story to an actual person in real time is inherently performative. It is not simply a reciting of the past as it actually happened; rather, it is an engagement in the present moment of what happened in the past (a re-experiencing of it for the sake of the self, for the sake of the story, and for the sake of the listening

&-'

IneZiVa`^c\

you to whom the story is directed and who to some degree also elicits it). To tell the story, to engage and perform it in real time, is to improvise on the text of one’s experience. It is to create a new past. In writing as if talking, in what I’ve termed typetalking, Kerouac substituted an actual “you” (Joan Haverty) with whom he wanted to share his story for the empty surface of the page and allowed her to function as a mediation for the reader who, though clearly still in Ong’s sense a fiction, could as a result be imagined (and spoken to) as if an actual and specific you. In Gatsby the “you” that Nick addresses is generic. We hear the novel not as speech directed to us as individual readers but as speech directed to the generic, abstracted you and which we overhear. By writing as if talking to an actual you (Joan Haverty) Kerouac was, I would suggest, able to engage the page (rather the continuously unfolding roll of paper) as a mediation to the reader cast as a singular and specific you rather than as a surface to be filled (that is constructed and composed) for the reader. He was, that is, able to reconceptualize the page as a medium for recording performance—the performance of enacting Sal and re-experiencing his past through, and also as, his performance. Here, again, the analogy of music may be useful. In Road Kerouac functions like a musician in a recording studio, casting those present at the recording session as a surrogate for the eventual listeners of the recording so that he can play for those who are absent and deferred in time as if they are present in both space and time. Typetalking is not, then, actual talking to the reader but rather a recorded performance of talking as if talking to the actual reader. That recordings created through performance can have great immediacy and impact—in spite of the mediation and deferral involved in the process—is evident if one considers such recordings as John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, or (to pick an example closer to Kerouac) the various sides Billie Holiday, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker recorded. Kerouac’s strategy of writing his novel as if he was talking to an actual person (Joan Haverty) at an actual moment—not his decision to type the initial draft of the novel quickly onto a long roll of paper—is, I would suggest, the actual radicalism of On the Road as well as key to why we still read it as if contemporary. This decision, it seems, allowed him to perform Sal and to perform the material of the novel. The typewriting was a matter of typetalking—an essentially improvisational performance. While Sal as narrator might seem to resemble Nick as narrator, in reading Gatsby we understand that Nick is a composed voice; it is as if we overhear him; and his relationship to the past of his experience and his relationship to the implied or abstracted you that he addresses is consistently maintained; we both fulfill the position of this abstracted you even as we know that we are finally not this you. We

&-(

I^b=jci

accept, that is, that we are reading a novel and that we are actually outside the frame of the novel—much as, in attending a performance of a traditional drama, we pretend that what we see beyond the proscenium on stage is real, giving ourselves up to that illusion but knowing that the proscenium is there. In Road Sal is a performed voice, and he addresses us as if we are an explicit, actual, and singular you. In the construction that is Fitzgerald’s Nick, what matters (for the fictional illusion to work) is Fitzgerald’s artful construction and control of the persona he has composed to structure the fictional world structure (in much the way that perspective in a representational painting orders the visual space and projects a three-dimensional relationship on and from the two-dimensional surface of the canvas). In the performance that is Kerouac’s Sal, what matters is less the traditional craft as aesthetic control than improvisational craft, energy, and motion that reflects experiential engagement and that creates for us as single, specific, real readerly “you’s” the sense that the speaker, Sal, is sincere, genuine. By foregrounding sincerity, and allowing the speaker’s relationship to self, past, and reader/listener to continually shift in response the emotional demands of the moment rather than establishing and maintaining a consistent, artful distance, Kerouac in Road dispenses with the proscenium. The reader, even though the reader does not speak, becomes an actor in Sal’s performance of his story. In this way, Sal’s experience—though a fictional act—is “actual” in a way that Nick’s is not, since Nick and Nick’s experiences and his reflections on them are composed reflections. The analogy of music may be useful here. In listening to a recording of a symphony (even a concert performance of a symphony), one recognizes that one is hearing the realization of a composed text. In listening to a jazz performance (even one recorded in a studio without an actual physical audience present), one still recognizes the engagement, discovery, and immediacy of the performance. The way Kerouac casts the reader as a genuine and singular “you” (through the explicit you of Joan Haverty) and asks the reader to read as if listening to an actual, present moment of an “I” re-experiencing the past and performing it (and the way the fluidity and momentum of the prose support this) is at the core of the “how” of Road works and crucial to its continued power to be read as if not only fully contemporary but fully real. For some this has made the book seem merely autobiographical; for others, it has made the book seem authentically confessional. Both responses, I’d suggest, involve some recognition that the novel is performative rather than compositional, but neither response adequately characterizes the novel’s achievement or the significance of Kerouac’s turn away from the fictional conventions of the first half of the twentieth century. Neither response gives

&-)

IneZiVa`^c\

us a real basis for understanding why the novel continues to compel readers nor why the novel not only can be studied but should be studied. For that, we must accept that reading On the Road requires a particular kind of listening and a willingness to accept its transformation of the relationship between writer, writing, reader, and reading. And to accept this is to begin to make sense of its actual importance. CdiZ This essay revisits—and recasts—aspects of the reading of On the Road I offered in 1981 in Kerouac’s Crooked Road. In that study I tried to distinguish the more conventional aesthetic of On the Road from the radically experimental aesthetic of Visions of Cody. In focusing on the contrast between the two, however, I failed to credit how aspects of the writing in On the Road anticipate the experimental practice to come, and how these aspects of On the Road already initiate a fundamental break with the conventions for fiction in the 1940s and 1950s. Walter J. Ong’s work, which calls attention to the relationship between (and differences between) speaking and writing, started my process of rethinking my earlier readings. The issue of “orality” in On the Road, which is implicit to the claim in this essay about “typetalking,” is discussed in “Men Talking in Bars.” The issue of the differences between performing and composing as contrasting strategies for creating works of art, a matter which also threads through the argument in this piece, is developed in “The Muse Learns to Tape.” Although Warren Tallman’s excellent 1959 essay “Kerouac’s Sound” is not mentioned directly in this piece, his sensitivity to Kerouac’s style figures indirectly in this attempt to consider what might be termed Kerouac’s fictional rhetoric. It remains one of the most subtle and thoughtful discussions we have of Kerouac as a writer. I would also like to note Ronna Johnson’s essay, “‘Girls, visions, everything’: Gender and Narrative in On the Road,” which she generously shared with me in manuscript. Her recognition of what she terms On the Road’s “liminal status at the postmodern divide” has been key in helping me realize that On the Road was not simply Kerouac’s last traditional novel before the breakthrough to experiment in Visions of Cody but is instead a significant stage in the transition from the more conventional fiction of The Town and the City to the more radical aesthetic of Visions of Cody and Dr. Sax. Ldg`h8^iZY Charters, Ann. A Bibliography of Works by Jack Kerouac. Rev. ed. New York: Phoenix Bookshop, 1975.

&-*

I^b=jci

———. Introduction. On the Road. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Penguin, 1991. vii–xxix. ———. Kerouac: A Biography. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973. Fiedler, Leslie. “The Eye of Innocence.” The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler. Vol. 1. New York: Stein and Day, 1981. 471–511. Hunt, Tim. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1981. ———. “Men Talking in Bars.” Kerouac’s Crooked Road. Rpt. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996: xiii–xxvii. ———. “The Muse Learns to Tape.” Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print. Ed. Elizabeth Loizeaux and Neir Fraistat. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2002. 189–210. Kerouac, Jack. “A Billowy Trip in the World from On the Road.” New Directions 16. New York: New Directions, 1957: 93–105. ——— (Jean-Louis). “Jazz of the Beat Generation.” New World Writing: Seventh Mentor Selection. New York: The New American Library, 1955. 7–16. ———. “The Mexican Girl.” Paris Review 11 (Winter 1955): 9–32. ———. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 2005. Ong, Walter J. “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction.” PMLA 90 (Jan. 1975): 9–21. Tallman, Warren. “Kerouac’s Sound.” 1959. A Casebook on the Beat. Ed. Thomas Parkinson. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969: 215–29.

&-+

10 86CDCI=:GD69cYZm

coffee, 14–15 Commager, Henry Steele, 66 commercial economy, 38–39, 78, 79–80 communism, 61, 66, 141 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx), 61 conformism, 65–67, 70–71, 74n4, 140–41. See also road space, tension portrayals consumption and male power, 83–84, 91–92 containment and disillusionment, as road space theme, 37–38, 48–54 Cook, Bruce, 22 Coppola, Francis Ford, 193, 289 Corber, Robert, 57n8 cotton-picking scene, 148 cowboy representations, 146 Cowley, Malcolm, 10, 26, 27–30, 31, 85, 165n2 “Crime and Punishment” (film), 189–90 criminality theme, 40, 82–83, 192 Criterion, 23 Cronenberg, David, 187–89 Cru, Henri, 8–9

Buddy Willard, in The Bell Jar, 105, 107 Bull Lee, in On the Road, 31, 74n2, 134, 158 Burroughs, Joan, 187, 188 Burroughs, William, 30–31, 64, 74n2, 136n5 bus seductions, 23, 83 Canary, Jim, 18 Cannastra, Bill, 10 Capote, Truman, 14, 177–78, 181–82 Carlo Marx, in On the Road, 30–31, 124– 25 Carr, Lucien, 20, 22, 32–33 car thievery, Cassady’s, 82–83 Cassady, Carolyn, 9, 29, 96n9, 157 Cassady, Curtis, 9 Cassady, Eva, 80 Cassady, Joan, 20 Cassady, Neal: “auto-erotocism” quip, 77; as Kerouac fantasy, 85, 96n10; limousine scene, 8–9; at mother’s apartment, 9–10. See also The First Third and Other Writings (Cassady) Cassady, Neal, correspondence with Kerouac: bus seductions, 83; childhood reverie, 39; coffee, 15; film adaptation, 192; as inspiration for On the Road, 11, 17, 130; narrator voices, 156; publishing efforts, 19; as spontaneous prose inspiration, 96n8; writing of On the Road, 18–19, 48 Cassady, Neal, Sr., 80–82 Certeau, Michel de, 68 Chad King, in On the Road, 142, 172–73 character revisions/disguises, 22–23, 28, 30–31, 85 Charters, Ann, 19, 54 Chelsea neighborhood, 10–11 Cheyenne, Wild West Week, 142 childhood: Kerouac’s, 2, 12–13; road space freedom, 39–40 Christie’s Auction House, 32 Christmas scene, in On the Road, 142 cinema. See film entries circulation theme. See road space, tension portrayals Cleaver, Eldridge, 146, 165n4

Dean Moriarty. See specific topics, e.g., homosocial bonds; lumpenproletariat; race; rejection scene, New York; road space, tension portrayals; Visions of Cody death scenes/images: in The Bell Jar, 107; and childhood idealizations, 161; in On the Road, 109–10, 113, 198; in Tristessa, 166n8 Deleuze, Gilles, 35, 36, 56n7, 58n14 delivery myth, scroll manuscript, 19–20 Denver: in The First Third, 81, 84; in On the Road, 110–11, 146, 148, 160, 172–74; as pivot point, 129 Denver D. Doll, in On the Road, 30 desire lines, in architecture, 54–55 desires and freedom, as road theme, 38– 48 Des Moines, in On the Road, 108 Desolation Angels (Kerouac), 60 Dharma Bums, The (Kerouac), 22, 28 Dime Western magazine, 12 disguise efforts, character, 22–23, 28, 30–31, 85

'%-

>cYZm

feminine spaces. See masculinity themes; mothers/mother figures Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 85 Fiedler, Leslie A., 163, 166n12, 176 fiftieth anniversary recognition, x, 118 film adaptations, of On the Road: appeal of, 187, 191–92; Coppola’s efforts, 189, 193; father theme, 189; Lost Highway parallels, 195–96; Naked Lunch comparison, 187–89; and Pull My Daisy, 194–95; structural challenges, 192–93, 195 film industry: in Kerouac’s journals, 189– 90; Kerouac’s script writing, 11, 24; in On the Road, 142–43, 150, 190; in Visions of Cody, 190–91 First Third and Other Writings, The (Cassady), 77–78, 79–85 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 178–80, 183–84 “Forest of Eden” journal, 162 Fox, Joseph M., 26–27, 33 Fox, Mardou, in The Subterraneans, 192 Frank, Robert, 193, 194 freedom: and desires, 38–48; in The First Third, 82–85; lumpen portrayals, 68– 69. See also aesthetic power; masculinity themes French, Warren, 4

disillusionment and containment, as road space theme, 48–54 Disneyland, 56–57, 140, 149 Doctor Sax (Kerouac), 160, 166n6, 171 Dodd, Mead, 27, 28 dog story, 20, 22 Doll, Denver D., in On the Road, 30 Doreen, in The Bell Jar, 105 drugs, 15 Duluoz, Jack, in Visions of Cody, 120, 121, 127–28, 194 Dunkels, in On the Road, 89, 111, 159, 163 Dutton, 23 Dylan, Bob, 10–11 Eakin, Paul John, 95n2 economics/money, 38–39, 141–42, 149 Ed Dunkel, in On the Road, 89, 159, 163 Edie, in On the Road, 31, 126 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The (Marx), 61–62, 63 Ellington, Duke, 8, 53 energy portrayals, 62–63, 64–65, 67–68, 73 Esther Greenwood, in The Bell Jar: automotive metaphor, 103; as Beat representation, 101, 114–15; depression roots, 103–4; dual nature, 106–7; grave scene, 115n6; Rosenberg preoccupation, 102–3; Sal Paradise parallels, 102–3, 106, 107–14; self-denial and disassociation, 104–7 ethnicity. See race, in On the Road Evans, Walker, 193 Everitt, Rae, 24–25 [Excerpts from] Visions of Cody (Kerouac), 120–21

Galatea Dunkel, in On the Road, 89, 111 garbage/refuse images, 64–65, 67–70, 71, 72 Gartman, David, 83 Gatsby, in The Great Gatsby, 178–80 ghost images, 108–9, 114 Giamo, Ben, 111 Gilling, Joan, in The Bell Jar, 107 Ginsberg, Allen: as celebrity, 3; criticisms of Viking, 21; and Esther in The Bell Jar, 105; in On the Road, 30–31, 124–25; in Pull My Daisy, 195; road poems, 197–99 Ginsberg, Allen, correspondence with Kerouac: agent relationship, 24–25; Benzedrine myth, 15; childhood, 160; friendship, 164; identity, 163; manuscript rejection, 27

Faber and Faber, 115n2 farewell scene. See rejection scene, New York Farrar Straus Young, 23 fathers, 80–82, 99, 156, 162–63, 166n10, 189 Faulds, David, 115n3 Fellaheen, in On the Road, 46–47, 72–73, 152

'%.

>cYZm

87–89; during World War II, 123–24. See also masculinity themes Hughes, Ted, 99, 100, 107, 115n3, 115n115 Huncke, Herbert, 17, 63–64, 74n2 hyperreality: Baudrillard’s theory, 139–40; Mexico as, 150–51; race as, 141

Giroux, Robert, 11, 19–20, 25 Go (Holmes), 11 Goodman, Paul, 68 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 178–80, 183–84 “Green Automobile, The” (Ginsberg), 197–98 Greenwood, Esther. See Esther Greenwood, in The Bell Jar Guattari, Felix, 35, 36, 58n14 Guilty of Everything (Huncke), 63–64 Guinea, Philomena, in The Bell Jar, 104

identity confusion: Beat Generation context, 155–56; in childhood idealization, 159–62, 164; as continuous motif, 157–59; and fatherlessness, 162–63; homosocial bonds, 163–64; in Kerouac’s life, 156–57, 166n13; and motion, 159–60, 164–65; race and ethnicity, 110–11; SalDean interchangeability, 163; Sal-Esther parallels, 108; in The Town and the City, 158; from travel, 92, 108; in Visions of Cody, 125 Inland Empire (dir. Lynch), 195–97 intellectuals, in On the Road, 141, 142 international visions, in On the Road, 133–35. See also Mexico Interstate Highway System, 36, 55–56 Irsay, James, 32

Hall, Donald, 19–20 Hanns, Joe, in The First Third, 84 Hansen, Diana, 9 Harcourt, Brace, 19, 20, 23, 25 Harper and Row, 115n2 Harris, Oliver, 43 Hassel, Elmer, 69, 74n2 Haverty, Joan, 130, 182 Herr, Michael, 5 highway system, 36–38, 55–56, 56n2 Hipkiss, Robert, 4 Hitchcock, Alfred, 58n15 hobos, 68–69, 112–13, 173–75 Hogan, William, 119 Holiday magazine, 37 Hollywood, in On the Road, 142–43, 150, 190 Holmes, John Clellon: agent suggestion, 24; on Beat Generation, 101, 104, 114; correspondence from Kerouac, 160, 166n13; Kerouac’s identity comment, 156; on Kerouac’s typing style, 13, 19; Mademoiselle description, 100; publications, 1, 11; on sentence style, 119 homosexuality: as hidden theme, 43–44; Plymouth driver scenes, 43–44, 90–91, 121–22; revision edits, 30–31, 57n9; in Visions of Cody, 122, 125; World War II impact, 123–24, 136n14 homosocial bonds: ambivalent nature, 113; as continuum, 87, 96n12; as family substitute, 79; as identity confusion, 163–64; in Kerouac’s life, 87, 166n11; and misogyny, 122–23; power complexities, 89–90; with traveling economy, 85,

Jack Duluoz, in Visions of Cody, 120, 121, 127–28, 194 “Jack Lewis’s Baseball Chatter Number 3” (Kerouac), 18 Jackson, Phyllis, 25–26 Jameson, Fredric, 68, 71, 74n6 James Woods, in Videodrome, 187 “Jazz of the Beat Generation” (Kerouac), 27 jazz performances, 147, 177–78, 180–81 Jennison, Chris, 32 Jennison, Keith, 27–28, 31–32 Joan Anderson letter, 83–84, 96n8 Joan Gilling, in The Bell Jar, 107 Joan Rawshanks, in Visions of Cody, 190– 91 “Joe Hanns” (Cassady), 84 Johnson, Joyce, 3 Johnson, Ronna, 185 Kerouac, Gabrielle, 9–10, 96n11 Kerouac, Jack: as celebrity, 3; childhood, 2, 12–13, 156; death, 4; Huncke meet'&%

>cYZm

theme, 71–73; rags/raggedness, 67–68, 70, 73; refuse theme, 64–65 Lynch, David, 195–97

ing, 63–64; limousine experience, 8–9; marriages, 10, 21; New York writing period, 9–15; publisher relationships, 25, 27 Kerouac, Joan, 9–10, 11 Kerouac, Leo, 12–13, 156 King, Chad, in On the Road, 142, 172–73 Kirouack, Jean-Baptiste, 156 Knopf, 26–27 Krim, Seymour, 5 Kristeva, Julia, 65, 73, 74n6

Mademoiselle magazine, 30, 100–101 “Mad Girl’s Love Song” (Plath), 101 Mad to Be Saved (Sterritt), 143 Mailer, Norman, 144, 145–46 male power. See masculinity themes Marcus, Greil, 193, 195, 198 Marcuse, Herbert, 66–67 Mardou Fox, in The Subterraneans, 192 marijuana, 15 Martin, Peter, in The Town and the City, 157, 158 Martinez, Manuel Luis, 151 Marx, Carlo, in On the Road, 30–31, 124–25 Marx, Karl, 61–62, 67–68 Marylou, in On the Road, 31, 88, 109, 110, 163 masculinity themes: consumption, 83–84, 91–92; cultural traditions, 57n8, 79–80; exchange model, 77–78, 79–80; in female resistance, 57n8, 79, 80–82, 87–88; in freedom/containment tensions, 42– 44; sexuality, 82–84; traveling truths, 86–87; travel traditions, 78–79. See also homosocial bonds Maude, in The First Third, 81 MCA, 24, 25–26 McClintock, Jack, 166n13 McDowell, Linda, 144 McManamy, John, 115n5 McNally, Dennis, 140 Mehlman, Jeffrey, 62 Metropolitan Opera House, 8–9, 53 “Mexican Girl, The” (Kerouac), 27 Mexico: abandonment scene, 52, 91, 128; apocalypse allusion, 72–73, 134, 152; as authenticity idealization, 147, 151–53; freedom/containment tensions, 45–47, 51–52, 57n13; as hyperreal, 150–51 MGM, 192 Miles, Barry, 96n8 Mills, C. Wright, 70 Millstein, Gilbert, 1, 156 Milo, in The Beat Generation, 194 mirror destruction, in The Bell Jar, 106–7

“Labeled Generation, The” (Raphaelson), 100–101 La Onda, 153 Lardas, John, 197 Laughlin, James, 120 Laura, in On the Road, 53, 113, 165 Lazarus, Emma, 69 Lee, William, in Naked Lunch film, 188 Leed, Eric, 78 Lenny Shepherd, in The Bell Jar, 105 Leon Levinsky, in The Town and the City, 158 Leo Percepied, in The Subterraneans, 192 lesbians, 123, 136n14 Levinsky, Leon, in The Town and the City, 158 Levitt, William, 144–45 Lhamon, W. T., Jr., 37 Limerick, Patricia Nelson, 95n2 limousine scene. See rejection scene, New York list-making, for lumpenproletariat containment, 62–63, 64 Literary Situation, The (Cowley), 27 Little, Brown, 23 Lolita (Nabokov), 58n15 Lonely Crowd, The (Reisman), 65, 74n4 Lord, Sterling, 26–27, 32, 192 Los Angeles, in On the Road, 111, 149–50 Lost Highway (Lynch), 195–96 Louanne, in On the Road, 31 lumpenproletariat: as bohemian category, 60, 63; and conformism debates, 65–67; energy images, 62–63, 67–68; Marx’s portrayals, 61–62; nonproductivity '&&

>cYZm

topics, e.g., aesthetic power; Ginsberg, Allen; scroll manuscript Orlovsky, Peter, 163

Mississippi Gene, in On the Road, 68–69 Mississippi River, 16–17 money/economics, 38–39, 141–42, 149 Moore, Charles, 56 Moore, Dave, 21 Morgan Library, 32 Moriarty, Dean. See specific topics, e.g., homosocial bonds; lumpenproletariat; race; rejection scene, New York; road space, tension portrayals Morley, Frank, 23 mothers/mother figures, 80–81, 103–4, 108, 158–59 motion: and authenticity, 144–45; as freedom, 78–79, 112; and identity confusion, 159–60, 164–65; race car driver, 84; as resistance, 39; for reverie, 39–40; as violence, 50–51; writing styles, 96n9 Murger, Henri, 61, 62–63, 73, 73n1 Murphy, Cornelius, 166n11

Pacifico, Massimo, 112 Paramount Pictures, 192 Paris bohemians, 60–63, 70–71 Paris Review, 27 Patricia, in The First Third, 83 Peel, Robin, 116n7 Pennebaker, D. A., 192–93 Percepied, Leo, in The Subterraneans, 192 performance, writing as, 177–85 Peter Martin, in The Town and the City, 157, 158 Philomena Guinea, in The Bell Jar, 104 Plath, Sylvia, 99–102, 115nn1–2, n5, 116n7. See also Esther Greenwood, in The Bell Jar Plummer, William, 82, 96n11 Plymouth driver scenes, 43–44, 90–91, 121–22 poaching theory, 148–49 police station scene, 126 Porter, Arabelle, 27 Potchky (dog), 20 promiscuity, societal, 37–38, 56n6. See also road space, tension portrayals Psycho (dir. Hitchcock), 58n15 Pull My Daisy (Kerouac), 194–95 punctuation myth, 21 purity/impurity theme, 49–50 Pynchon, Thomas, 4

Nabokov, Vladimir, 58n15 Nadel, Alan, 37 Naked Lunch (Burroughs), 187–89 Naked Lunch (dir. Cronenberg), 187, 188– 89 names: character disguise efforts, 22–23, 28, 30–31, 85; Kerouac’s multiplicities, 156 “New Colossus, The” (Lazarus), 69–70 New Directions, 27 New World Writing, 27 New York: Kerouac’s writing period, 9–15; in On the Road, 85–86, 165. See also rejection scene, New York New York Post, 21, 119 New York Times, 1, 156 Nick, in The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), 178–80, 183–84 Nicosia, Gerald, 15, 166n13 nipple scene, 127–28

Queer (Burroughs), 188 race, in The Bell Jar, 104–5 race, in On the Road: as hyperrealization, 141; idealizations, 44–45, 57n11, 110–11, 159, 165n4; impulse stereotype, 145–46; jazz portrayals, 147; Los Angeles representations, 149–50; poaching interpretation, 148–49; progress interpretation, 147–48; refuse images, 64–65, 69; traditional interpretations, 139, 146–47. See also Mexico race car driver, in The First Third, 84

One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse), 66–67 Ong, Walter J., 185 On the Road (Kerouc): critical attention, x–xiii, 4–5; journey significance, ix–x; long-term appeal, x, 4–6; publication reception, 1–4, 170. See also specific '&'

>cYZm

Sal Paradise: The Bell Jar parallels, 102–3, 106, 107–14; character edits, 30–31; The Great Gatsby parallels, 178–80; multivoice nature, 153n1; name allusions, 54, 71, 181. See also specific topics, e.g., aesthetic power; homosocial bonds; identity confusion; rejection scene, New York; road space, tension portrayals Sampas, Stella, 156 San Francisco: in On the Road, 108–9, 111, 147, 158–59; in Visions of Cody, 190–91 Saturday Review, 26, 27 Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (Murger), 61, 73n1 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 141 Schwartz, Roolfe, in The First Third, 81 scientific progress, 141–42 Scribner’s, 23 scroll manuscript: disposition of, 31–32; energy characteristics, 126; exhibition of, x, 165n5; myths about, 11, 15, 19–24, 119; origins, 10; reading experience, 129–30; as typetalking, 182–83; writing of, 11, 14–15, 16–19, 21. See also revisions and edits Sedgwick, Eve, 96n12, 164 self-denial theme, in The Bell Jar, 104–5 sewing circle, 89 sexuality themes: The Bell Jar, 107; contradictions and complexity, 122–25; and fatherlessness, 163; in freedom/containment tensions, 42–44; post-World War II context, 123, 124–25. See also homosexuality; homosocial bonds Shepherd, Lenny, in The Bell Jar, 105 Shrouded Traveler image, 51, 92–93 Simon Rycroft, in On the Road, 142 “Simulacra and Simulations” (Baudrillard), 139–40 Slim, in On the Road, 147 Snyder, Gary, 163 social relationships, in freedom/containment tensions, 40–44, 50, 52–53 soda fountain scene, 161 Solomon, Carl, 23, 163 speech as America, 194 Spengler, Oswald, 72, 152

rags/raggedness, 67–68, 69, 70, 71–72, 73 Raphaelson, Joel, 100–101 Raskolnikov, in “Crime and Punishment” film, 189–90 Rawshanks, Joan, in Visions of Cody, 190– 91 refuse/garbage images, 64–65, 67–70, 71 rejection scene, New York: ambivalence in, 36, 53; death allusion, 113, 198; depletion portrayal, 73, 93; as national allusion, 133; as writing inspiration, 8–9 religious themes, 68, 72, 74n6, 128–29 Remi Boncoeur, in On the Road, 53, 113, 133 retread image, in The Bell Jar, 103 revisions and edits: myths about, 19–20, 21; and reading experience, 118–20, 129–30; T2 manuscript, 20, 22–23, 32–33; T3 manuscript, 26–31, 33; by Viking, 28, 171–72. See also Visions of Cody (Kerouac) Riesman, David, 65, 74n4 Rita Bettencourt, in On the Road, 88, 173, 174–75, 176–77 Rivera, Jose, 289 “Rivers and Rains” journal (Kerouac), 16–17 road poems, Ginsberg’s, 197–99 road space, tension portrayals: overview, 35–36, 38, 54; cultural context, 36–38, 54–56, 56nn3–6; desires and freedom, 38–48; disillusionment and containment, 48–54; international visions, 45–47; with literary style, 47–48; sexuality, 42–44 Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 10 Roland Major, in On the Road, 142 Roolfe Schwartz, in The First Third, 81 Rosenbergs, in The Bell Jar, 102–3 Ross, Andrew, 37 Rubin, Gayle, 164 Rutgers University, 32 Rycroft, Simon, in On the Road, 142 sadness-joy duality, 111–12. See also Esther Greenwood, in The Bell Jar Sales, Walter, 289 salesman comparison, 91–92, 145 '&(

>cYZm

Van den Abbeele, Georges, 78 Vanity of Duluoz (Kerouac), 22 Videodrome (dir. Cronenberg), 187 Viking, 21, 27–30, 31, 171–72 Visions of Cody (Kerouac): angel scene, 128–29; Cody identity, 125; Cowley’s submissions, 27; experimental nature, 119–20, 126–27, 130; film scene, 190–91; homosocial bonds, 122–23; as outsider’s view, 193; Plymouth driver scene, 121–22; Spontaneous Prose plan, 23–24; typewriters, 13; writing conversation scene, 120–21, 194 Vital Center, The (Schlesinger), 141

Spontaneous Prose, 16, 23–24, 96n8, 171– 72 Stallybrass, Peter, 72 Statue of Liberty, 69 Stephenson, Gregory, 91 Sterritt, David, 143, 148 Steve Allen Show, The, 22, 166n7 Stevenson, Adlai, 66 Stimpson, Catharine R., 87, 95n7 Stone, Robert, 5 Stubbins, Ann, in The First Third, 80–81 Subterraneans, The, 192 Swartz, Omar, 148 T1 manuscript. See scroll manuscript T2 manuscript, 20, 22–26, 27, 30, 32–33 T3 manuscript, 26–31, 33 Tallman, Warren, 185 tape transcripts. See Visions of Cody (Kerouac) Taylor, Helen K., 28 teletype paper myth, 22 Terry, in On the Road, 109, 111, 149, 150, 175, 176–77 theater scene, 64–65, 71 Tillich, Paul, 66 Torgovnick, Marianna, 147 Town and the City, The (Kerouac), 13, 25, 119, 156, 157 Tristessa (Kerouac), 166 typetalking, 182–84 typing skills, Kerouac’s, 11–14. See also scroll manuscript Tytell, John, 4

Warner Brothers, 192 Watergate, 140, 143 Western Journal, A (Wolfe), 57n12 West themes, 85, 86, 95n2, 131–32, 142, 147 Whalen, Philip, 163 “white ambitions,” 45, 103, 159 Whitehorn, Nathaniel, 30 “White Negro, The” (Mailer), 144, 145– 46 “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (Ginsberg), 198– 99 Willard, Buddy, in The Bell Jar, 105, 107 William Lee, in Naked Lunch film, 188 Wolfe, Thomas, 10, 57n12 women. See masculinity themes; mothers/mother figures Woods, James, in Videodrome, 187 Wyn, A. A., 23

'&)

Beat Studies / Literary Criticism

“What’s Your Road, Man? shows how pertinent Kerouac’s On the Road is to critical concerns and functions as a compendium of current debates about Kerouac and the Beats.” —James T. Jones, author of Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction

T

he ten essays in this groundbreaking volume cover a broad range of topics and employ a variety of approaches—including theoretical interpretations and textual and comparative analysis—to investigate such issues as race, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as the novel’s historical and literary contexts. What’s Your Road, Man? illustrates the richness of the critical work currently being undertaken on this vital American narrative. Featuring essays from renowned Kerouac experts as well as emerging scholars, What’s Your Road, Man? draws on an enormous amount of research into the literary, social, cultural, biographical, and historical contexts of Kerouac’s canonical novel. Since its publication in 1957, On the Road has remained in print and has continued to be one of the most widely read twentieth-century American novels. Hilary Holladay, a professor of English and the director of the Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for American Studies at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, is the author of Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton. Robert Holton is a professor of English at Carleton University. His most recent book is On the Road: Jack Kerouac’s Ragged American Journey.

Contributors: Mary Paniccia Carden R. J. Ellis Hilary Holladay Robert Holton Tim Hunt Lars Erik Larson Rachel Ligairi Michael Skau Matt Theado Regina Weinreich

Southern Illinois University Press 1915 University Press Drive Mail Code 6806 Carbondale, IL 62901 www.siu.edu/-siupress isbn 0-8093-2883-6 isbn 978-0-8093-2883-3

Cover illustration: iStockphoto © Alexander Hafemann Printed in the United States of America