Cristina Felea
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Kerouac and America on the Road to Postmodernism
Abstract: This study introduces Jack Kerouac as an author “who intuited aspects of the postmodern and developed fictional strategies and projects that both express and engage our contemporary moment” (Hunt, xxvi) and anticipated formal, artistic and cultural phenomena that would be theorized later in postmodernist thought. On the Road, his most popular work is presented in its quality of transitional work from The Town and the City, a first published traditional work, to experimental novels such as Visions of Cody.
Keywords: American Literature, Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac: On the Road, Postmodernism.
Because Jack, like me, we speak the unspeakable. And we feel free. We’re Americans, why not? (Gregory Corso, qted. in Watson, 124).
Many commentators, among whom Ronna C. Johnson, argue that the “collapse of distinctions between his media image and fiction produced Kerouac as an “icon” and “cult hero” and left out his dimensions as a creative artist. As a result, “his literary historical significance and artistic achievement remain underestimated” (in Myrsiades, 22). The major cause of this phenomenon, she thinks, is the special quality of his writing whose innovative style, hybrid forms, and composition techniques were ahead of their time. Kerouac’s life and work were both “liminal” and “idiosyncratic” – the former quality accounted for his role as a witness to the neither modernist/ nor postmodernist conditions of a transitional America characterized by major splits in societal and cultural forms whereas the latter points to his original, “invaluable contribution to the definition and clarification of this transitional moment” (Johnson in Myrsiades, 22).
On the Road – a novel deemed characteristically American – illustrates the Beat affinity for the road as a symbol of an attitude toward experience that braves anything as long as movement is encouraged. Even if he has not been considered a great writer, Kerouac is credited with providing the portrait of America for his generation. Despite the passage of time, the book’s audience has grown, and its initial appeal remained.
Depicting an underground culture that departed entirely from the dominant middle-class, On the Road recorded the sense of release and joy experienced by the less privileged. At the time, the book was totally incomprehensible in its general scope and the humanity it described was promptly labeled as psychopaths and neurotics. Similarly to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Kerouac’s book spoke only to the sensibility of those who “felt trapped in the bind of societal or parental expectations, bound by the ethos of personal secrecy and self-constraint that was prevalent” in the era (Tytell 1976, 142).
Kerouac started his exploration of America in the late 1940s and early 1950s. His enterprise is rendered unique by his building of a continuous tension between representation and reality (Holton, 38) which accounts for a destabilizing of the myth of America as it was in favor of new frontiers and places. This tension also resulted in the weakening of the myth of the “self” as a firm, safe unit in favor of a multiplicity of assumed identities. Kerouac’s extensive use of the “data-bank” of cultural identities and composition techniques provided by popular culture, among others Hollywood movies, certifies a fictional space new for the 1950s. Finally, the experience of movement and speed relegates traditional temporality to the background in favor of space and causes the apparent dissolution of the issue of representation altogether in favor of the book seen in Deleuzean terms as a machine, as something which does things rather than signifies (6).
The version of On the Road published in 1957 represented the scroll manuscript (written in three-week Benzedrine-induced frenzy) which, through the persistence of Malcolm Cowley, got revised and cut for publication by the prestigious Viking Press. Probably due to these changes, this version is much more structured than the other components of The Duluoz Legend, Kerouac’s autobiographical project in the line of Proust and Galsworthy. With the exception of the final fifth part, the first four parts of the novel are based on Kerouac’s and Beat friend, brother-figure Neal Cassady’s life on the road, having a repetitive narrative pattern: as a consequence of some biographical disillusion, Sal Paradise (Kerouac’s autobiographical projection as the novel’s narrator) sets out in search for “kicks” in the company of and galvanized by manic Dean Moriarty. After a climactic experience, there follows an anti-climax that sends him home.
The two friends participate in an increasingly frenetic travel across the country, the expression of a vast and restless dissatisfaction with their lives and an effort to get free from any socially imposed roles or authority. Referring to Kerouac’s use in the very fiber of his book of earlier American texts (particularly Moby Dick, Huck Finn, The Great Gatsby) one of his later commentators, Tim Hunt, describes the relation between Dean’s formidable energy and hyperactivity and enthusiastic and desperate Sal, in terms of the latter’s exploration of his Americanness, of the conflict between the “East” of everyday life society and the “West” of the visionary society. Finally, the “true ‘West of the “America’ of the imagination transcends and contains the actual society of the ‘East’ ” (44-46).
Tim Hunt claims that the “central dynamic of the novel” is based on the tension between Sal-as-character’s naïve expectations (“Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me” (OTR, 11)) and the narrator’s observations on what experience really offered him (Holton, 7). On the other hand, Robert Holton contends that the novel does not entirely rely on the “traditional linear coherence” such an assumption might imply. Studies and bohemian city life have not prepared young Sal for the actual experience of the road. This is best illustrated in the false start, when his dreams and plans are challenged by the real world. Sal-the-narrator intervenes early in the text with a remark that frames the whole endeavor: “It was my stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great line across America instead of trying various roads and routes” (13).
After Sal sets out, he experiences intensely the joy of finding his imaginary mythic America when he arrives on the banks of the Mississippi, the water road of Huck Finn and the subject of his own “myth of the rainy night” or as else mentioned, “the rainy night of America.”
A similar satisfaction appears in his description of ordinary American life where Sal recovers, one by one, more or less nostalgically, the blue-collar working world reminding him of native Lowell, traces of the “wild selfbelieving” spirit of the past in farmers and cowboys, in marginal figures such as hobo Mississippi Gene and the fellahin colored people, Mexicans, and Native Americans. This way, Kerouac discloses gradually the Beat space and Beat identity with the help of Dean and his friends, “the sordid hipsters of America.”
As Douglas Brinkley remarks, Kerouac was fascinated with “Wild West legends […], football players” and “range-worn cowboys as the paragons of true America;” Kerouac’s journals “teem with references to “folk heroes” and praise for Zane Grey’s honest drifters, Herman Melville’s confidence men, and Babe Ruth’s feats on the diamond and in the barroom.” He concludes that “Kerouac, in fact, brought confidence-man Neal Cassady into the American mythical pantheon […] compelling others to join his roaring drive across Walt Whitman’s patchwork Promised Land” (xvi).
Yet, especially during the first journey, there are episodes that illustrate the clash between what is expected, the represented, and the reality found on the road. For instance, a significant juxtaposition is that of the old America of the frontier spirit and the new America of the suburb as found, for instance, in Council Bluffs: “All winter I’d been reading of the great wagon parties that held council there before hitting the Oregon and Santa Fe trails; and of course now it was only cute suburban cottages of one damn kind and another” (OTR, 18). In spite of Sal’s disappointment at the assumed vanishing of the American frontier spirit, he insists on the figure of the cowboy as preserver of “some older individual integrity,” as Holton notes (1999, 42).
In a subsequent episode, this time occurring in Cheyenne, Sal learns a bitter lesson in what Holton calls “a manifestation of postmodern history” (1995, 272):
“Hell’s bells, it’s Wild West Week,” said Slim. Big crowds of businessmen, fat businessmen in boots and ten-gallon hats, with their hefty wives in cowgirl attire, bustled and whoopeed on the wooden sidewalks of old Cheyenne; […] Blank guns went off. The saloons were crowded to the sidewalk. I was amazed, and at the same time I felt ridiculous: in my first shot at the West I was seeing to what absurd devices it had fallen to keep its proud tradition.” (OTR, 29)
Sal spends the night drinking in bars but cannot fail to notice among “the fat burpers [who] were getting drunker” a strange apparition, “Indian chiefs wandering around in big headdresses and really solemn among the flushed drunken faces” and then, other “Indians who watched everything with their stony eyes” (30, 31). The juxtaposition of these images creates the sense of a vanishing reality in a world in which the spectacle of the past, its parody, replaces the real and depth is lost in favor of surface. Robert Holton points out the “collapse of history in postmodern parody” from this scene, emphasizing that Kerouac sensed the “finite amount of reality in America” which was “being consumed too rapidly by the culture industry, whose function is to transcribe reality into depthless signifiers, simulacra” (273).
While I agree with his claim that the description suggests both the Indians’ alienation and the superficiality of the fake cowboys, I only partially adhere to his supposition that Kerouac “locates the “real” in the fellahin” because of the latter’s “extra-modern” position, somewhere on the “outside of the degraded culture of modernity” (273). Holton echoes Baudrillard’s and Jameson’s definitions of simulacra and their assumptions that apparently presuppose the existence of a reality. In contrast, Deleuze and Guattari maintain that the simulacrum is a phenomenon of a different nature, a process that “carries the real beyond its principle to the point where it is effectively produced” (87) [1].
Kerouac’s fellahins,[2] for instance, are described on several occasions and enter various relationships with what Spengler has termed “the beings without depth,” the world’s intellectuals, “waste products” who do not change events or are changed by them, their lives being “planless happening[s] without goal or cadenced march” (qted. in Prothero 1991, 212). In contrast, Kerouac “translates” (in its etymological meaning of transposition, transmutation) Spengler’s concepts in The Decline of the West generates a movement of deterritorialization that destabilizes, one by one, some of the major master narratives present in postwar American culture. While the accusation brought especially from the realm of gender or postcolonial studies may configure a racist and male chauvinistic attitude that legitimated earlier, pre-modern, versions of master narratives,[3] a closer look at Kerouac’s intense spiritual preoccupation yields a different, more accurate picture. The encounters with several “residues” of the “fellah” type are meant neither to posit new “signs” nor to build up an oppositional discourse that would acknowledge the depth model but to open new territories in terms of new forms of expression, a new language, and a new literature that, in their turn, reconfigure the American cultural map.
According to Holton, Kerouac takes over, reverses some of the Spenglerian concepts and reinserts them into the postwar discourse. By doing this, it may be added, he forces Spengler’s pessimistic, apocalyptic vision of history into becoming an obsolete master narrative/ a simulacrum in its own way.
His description, in Part Four of On the Road, of the last journey to Mexico, reminds of the process of simulation as described by Deleuze and Guattari: “Simulation does not replace reality… but rather appropriates reality in the operation of despotic overcoding, it produces reality on the new full body that replaces the earth. It expresses the appropriation and production of the real by a quasi-cause” (210). For Sal and Dean, as for other “old American outlaws who used to skip over the border and go down to old Monterrey,” the “fellah” Mexico represents before crossing the border something like a “Holy Lhasa,” a mythical presence. “We had no idea what Mexico would really be like,” says Sal-the narrator but “everything changed when we crossed the mysterious bridge over the river” (OTR, 224). In many ways, their visit is supposed to be a way out of everything modern America stood for: “Now, Sal,” says Dean, “we’re leaving everything behind us and entering a new and unknown phase of things” and he adds, “’It’s the world,’ […] ‘My God!’ he cried slapping the wheel. ‘It’s the world!… Think of it! Son-of-a-bitch! Gawd-damn!” (226).
But this world is no more “real” than the one left behind. Sal’s sense of the Mexicans’ being out of history, an echo of Spengler’s view of “primitive” fellahs, could be the quasi-cause that abstracts from the bodies and things and events mentioned a “transcendental plane of ideal identities” (Massumi) and relocates everything at a different level. The “mysterious bridge” signals the entry into “a new and unknown phase of things,” where, among others, in a drug-induced episode, Sal rejoices in the mere presence of their Mexican friends whose language they do not understand but consider “magnificent:”
For a mad moment I thought Dean was understanding everything [Victor] said by sheer wild insight and sudden revelatory genius inconceivably inspired by his glowing happiness. In that moment, too, he looked so exactly like Franklin Delano Roosevelt – some delusion in my flaming eyes and floating brain – that I drew up in my seat and gasped with amazement. In myriad pricklings of heavenly radiation I had to struggle to see Dean’s figure, and he looked like God. […] The mere thought of looking out the window at Mexico – which was now something else in my mind – was like recoiling from some gloriously riddled glittering treasure-box that you’re afraid to look at because of your eyes, they bend inward, the riches and the treasures are too much to take all at once… .” (OTR, 233)
The apparently solemn spiritual dimension of the above scene whereby Dean looks “like God” is rendered derisive by the previous reference to Roosevelt and the narrator’s ironic remark. The powerful deterritorializing effect of the drug engenders a zig-zag movement at various speeds, “a whole rhizomatic labor of perception, the moment when desire and perception meld,” as Deleuze and Guattari suggest in A Thousand Plateaus (284). “All drugs fundamentally concern speeds, and modifications of speed,” they add, and Sal goes on, “For a long time I lost consciousness in my lower mind of what we were doing,” says the narrator in recall, “and only came around sometime later when I looked up from fire and silence, like waking from sleep to the world, or waking from void to a dream, and they told me we were parked outside Victor’s house […]” (OTR, 234).
Deleuze and Guattari’s have commented on the specific nature of Anglo-American writers’ effort to “break to the wall of the signifier:”
From Hardy to Lawrence, from Melville to Miller, the same cry rings out: Go across, get Out, break through, make a beeline, don’t get stuck on a point. Find the line of separation, follow it or create it, to the point of treachery. That is why their relationship with other civilizations, to the Orient or South America, and also to drugs and voyages in place, is entirely different from that of the French. They know how difficult is to get out of the black hole of subjectivity, of consciousness and memory […] (188)
Restless movement and speed compress time and give space a predominant role in On the Road. “There is simply no connection between men and time,” wrote Kerouac in a 1949 diary entry, “men are only involved in space and place” (Brinkley, 230). In this respect, as many researchers have attested, Kerouac can be said to travel back and forth between what Deleuze and Guattari call the centered system of Western tree and the acentered rhizome system described in A Thousand Plateaus.
Space is central to Deleuze and Guattari. As compared to the centered system of Western tree, the acentered rhizome system is described as being made of plateaus (a term drawn from Gregory Bateson) that are “always in the middle” and of being “composed not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion” (Deleuze and Guattari, 21). It is also presented as a being a multiple, circular system of “taproots” (5). In spite of its not being “immune from domination by trees or the search for roots” (see, for example, the Americans’ quest for national identity or Kerouac in search for his Breton ancestors), “everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs, successive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside” (20).
Actually, paraphrasing Massumi’s analysis of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, we could say that if Sal and Dean found out how to undo their “pre-programmed” “death-in-history,” they would also find a way out of the metanarrative of progress and civilization and have a choice to flee to a new vital spatial dimension “to see things no human being ever has or will” (1987).
In spite of the fact that Kerouac is seen by the two French theoreticians as failing “to complete the process” (“The neurotic impasse again closes – the daddy-mommy of oedipalization, America, the return to the native land – or else the perversion of the exotic territorialities, then drugs, alcohol, or worse still, an old fascist dream. […]”), they think that “through the impasses and the triangles a schizophrenic flow moves, irresistibly; […]” (133). Therefore, the key to Kerouac’s success is in their view his spontaneous prose method:
…an author is great because he cannot prevent himself from tracing flows and causing them to circulate… that is what style is, or rather the absence of style – asyntactic, a grammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing, but what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode – desire. For literature is like schizophrenia: a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression (133)
One thing that definitely sets apart On the Road among the books of the decade and contributes decisively to its still fresh appeal is the way it was written and particularly Kerouac’s aesthetics of spontaneity. He discovered the power of the actual and the ordinary, the natural and the commonplace by refusing any ‘literary’ perfection, any craft or revision of the written text. He removed all literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibitions and the arbitrary barriers of conventional punctuation (in the line of Joyce) and used his unusual gift for sound and music to release “the unspeakable visions of the individual”, the music of the body, the pure joy of the ‘undisturbed flow” of the mind, as he calls it. In “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” as well as in the Paris Review interview, he emphasized that his rejection of revision and selectivity helped him communicate “through the sheer ignition of felt energy” (Berrigan, 554).
In terms of aesthetics, Kerouac’s “wild form” was mostly indebted to jazz. He had frequented Harlem music joints since his undergraduate days, and in 1951, they inspired his “bop prosody.” Kerouac’s model was a “tenor man drawing a breath and blowing a phrase on his saxophone, till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his sentence, his statement’s been made… that’s how I therefore separate my sentences, as breath separations of the mind…” (Berrigan, 555)
Jazz improvisatory method reflected his belief in “moment to moment” truth, and its riffs provided a loose structure for his novel’s dialogue (Watson 139). Indeed, Kerouac is reputed to have exploded many of the remaining boundaries in fiction in his time, following Charlie Parker’s famous opinion that music was the result of the of the artist’s own experience, thought, and wisdom: “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art” (Tytell, 144).
The dissolution of the myth of America is supported by Kerouac’s use of writing as experiment conceived as a “process of controlled trial and error.” Marco Abel elaborates on this argument, noting that the accomplishments from Visions of Cody, Tristessa, and the Subterraneans were already visible on the level of expression and content in On the Road. Repetition, for instance, the stop-and-go movements, which he calls “stuttering,” are characteristic for the composition patterns that organize Sal’s and Dean’s travels. Other commentators have called attention to this in various forms: Hunt by referring to the development of Sal-the-character, marked by death and rebirth, Holton by emphasizing the moments of epiphany that are never transformed into revelations, Stephenson by building the pattern of descent and ascent.
In contrast, Marco Abel adopts the Deleuzean concept of refrain (“in impromptu jazz music”) and invests it with a poetic value (“its itinerative force”) that accounts for Kerouac’s aesthetic intent and accomplishment (2004, 17), in other words, it gives consistency to the novel, its characters and the unknown places Kerouac speaks about. Kerouac’s narrator/ character Sal and Dean desire new experiences, set forth, then stop to “figure losses and gains;” similarly, the author of On the Road comes back to the material described and, unsatisfied with the result, writes two other books, Visions of Cody and Doctor Sax, each experimenting strands of On the Road left unexplored.
Sal and Dean repeat their – physical and spiritual – travels in order to comprise as much as possible of America and “the variation of their travels,” states Abel, “affects multiple communities and locations” uniting them in a rhizomatic network that invents a “new America” (20). He also mentions Kerouac’s intense attraction for names and places in On the Road. Indeed, the reading of Kerouac’s journal entries from the late 1940s and early 1950s confirms the writer’s fascination: the section entitled “Rain and Rivers” comprises a vast catalogue of places encountered during his trips, all of them accompanied by minute notes that would later be transformed in pages of On the Road.
Thus, the accusations brought by early critics that the novel and the majority of his books are plotless and that characters are not “rounded” is rendered non-operational by a reading that appeals to “the surface model produced by the force of repetition,” as Abel states (21). Each new movement frees perception of automatism; movement, speed, surfaces, “the American earth in all its extensiveness” (Abel, 21), break down models of “inside” and “outside” and give a sense of flatness to characters and to what Abel, quoting Deleuze, calls the “missing” people. The lack of plot and of “round” characters recalls Ong’s description of oral culture that “has no experience of a lengthy, epic-size or novel-size climactic linear plot.” The novel’s start in media res, its episodic quality, ties Kerouac with epic poetry in this acceptance of the episodic as a “totally natural way of imagining and handling lengthy narrative” (144) and of the presence of the “itinerant hero whose travels serve to string episodes together” (149).
As to the characters, Kerouac’s position is somewhat ambiguous: he would rather go for “flat” types that do not offer surprises because their continuous movement yields them a sort of presentness. Still, Kerouac’s spiritual formation pervades his style and renders his characters memorable. But not for their supposed “depth” or complex psyche. In the Essentials of Spontaneous Prose, Kerouac states that his aim is to free the inner mind and give it verbal shape in the outer world. Kerouac as creator gave the world characters that are not “round” but sites of “positive becoming” (in Deleuzean terms) where “nomad thought” no longer reposes on identity but on difference, not on power but on force, creating an open-ended space (Charters 484-486).
The remainder of the study will discuss briefly how the fragmentation of the subject, the destabilization of the self in favor of a multitude of identities is visible even in a fairly traditional novel such as On the Road. As Frederic Jameson, among others, has claimed, with the repudiation of the depth models of reality and temporal themes replaced by spatial, there also came the dissolution of the old centered self (in Docherty, 72). Sal as narrator/character adopts various identities ranging from the naïve and idealist to prophet and patriarch. His “fluid, shifting self” is the result of the representational clash mentioned earlier in connection with his historical and mythical projections colliding with the “geographical” America he discovers as well as of the “difficulty [he has] separating a real self from his images of selfhood” (Holton 1999, 65). All along the narrative, Sal “tries on” several roles, a quality his author, Kerouac, also possessed to a large extent, as Charters notes in her introduction to the Selected Letters (1940-1956):