Rereading On the Road

Posted 5 September, 2007 in Book Reviews |

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. Penguin Classics, $18.99 pb, 286 pp., ISBN: 978-0-14-1182674.

On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s classic novel of the Beat Generation, was published fifty years ago today — September 5, 1957. It had been seven years since the publication of Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City, a massive tome written in the naturalistic mode of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, which took Kerouac two years to write and was published to middling reviews and largely ignored by readers.

On the Road, by contrast, was written in one feverish three-week burst of sustained writing, on a series of typewriter pages that Kerouac had taped together into one continuous scroll so as not to have to stop writing to change sheets.* The book abandoned what Kerouac felt was the too-conventional style and tone of The Town and the City in favour of a semiautobiographical stream-of-consciousness story involving Sal Paradise (Kerouac), who befriends a manic wanderer named Dean Moriarity (Neal Cassady). The book details their travels around the United States and down into Mexico, along the way featuring encounters with figures such as Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsberg), Old Bull Lee (William S. Burroughs), Tom Saybrook (John Clellon Holmes), and Slim Gaillard (Slim Gaillard).**

Fifty years after its publication, the book that the Village Voice called “a rallying cry for the elusive spirit of rebellion of these times” has become the defining document of the Beat Generation, just as Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises defined the Lost Generation, and Generation X defined its eponymous generation. It is a novel of constant, frenetic movement, which is appropriate since Kerouac felt that the “one and noble function of the time” was to move, to search, to explore.

This sustained motion is evident in the manner in which the book was written, and in its frequent flurries of lyrical prose, when the words seem to tumble over themselves in a flood:

On rails we leaned and looked at the great brown father of waters rolling down from mid-America like the torrent of broken souls — bearing Montana logs and Dakota muds and Iowa vales and things that had drowned in Three Forks, where the secret began in ice. Smoky New Orleans receded on one side; old, sleepy Algiers with its warped woodsides bumped us on the other. Negroes were working in the hot afternoon, stoking the ferry furnaces that burned red and made our tires smell. Dean dug them, hopping up and down in the heat. He rushed around the deck and upstairs with his baggy pants hanging halfway down his belly. Suddenly I saw him eagering on the flying bridge. I expected him to take off on wings. I heard his mad laugh all over the boat — “Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!”

The danger with this kind of writing, of course, is that it descends into solipsim and self-consciousness, and Kerouac’s novel is certainly guilty of that on more than one occasion:

And for just a moment I had reached that point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn’t in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especially because the transactions 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. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment.

This passage displays a lack of control that is persistent throughout the novel — the vague mysticism of “bright Mind Essence,” the purple prose of “innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven,” the plodding, clanging nature of the final clause in the penultimate sentence.

But the passage also evinces an undeniable exuberance in the tumbling, word-drunk opening sentence and the melodically alliterative “sweet, swinging bliss.” John Updike’s comment about Nabokov — he “writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically” — could apply equally to the Kerouac of On the Road.

The second quoted passage is also notable for its explicit linkage of the pursuit of physical sensation — “sweet, swinging bliss like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein” — with a spiritual quest for enlightenment and transcendence, a subject that carries through the novel as a whole. For Kerouac, the pursuit of sex and drugs was not an end in itself; these things were doorways to spiritual understanding. Those who would apply the name of the Beat Generation to a group of unreconstructed hedonists miss an essential aspect of what Kerouac — who was born to a family of French Canadian Catholics — meant when he used the term: in the novel, Sal refers to Dean as “BEAT — the root, the soul of Beatific.” That last word is essential in grasping what Kerouac was after: not physical pleasure, but spiritual awakening.

This is what separates Kerouac, and his fictional counterpart Sal Paradise (note the surname), from figures such as the Jesuit college boys he hooks up with in the latter stages of the novel, boys who “were full of corny quips and Eastern college talk and had nothing on their bird-beans except a lot of ill-understood Aquinas for stuffing for their pepper.” Similarly, Sal comes to recognize that Dean’s soul “is wrapped up in a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road,” whereas for him, the road represents a kind of spirit quest leading to something ecstatic and unknown.

That this spiritual aspect of the novel often gets lost in a secular society more interested in the immediate pleasures afforded by casual sex and recreational drugs is not surprising, nor does it necessarily detract from an honest appreciation of Kerouac’s novel. It can be read, after all, as a paean to the American spirit of adventure, of the ecstatic pursuit of freedom as symbolized by a convertible tearing down the open road. This was something that was already present in the American psyche and elsewhere when Kerouac fed his scroll of paper into his typewriter and began work on what would become his masterpiece. As William S. Burroughs commented later,

The Beat literary movement came at exactly the right time and said something that millions of people of all nationalities all over the world were waiting to hear. You can’t tell anybody anything he doesn’t know already. The alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road.

*For those of you reading this who were born after 1990, a typewriter is a manual content-input device consisting of a keyboard, an ink ribbon, and metal keys with letters and figures imprinted on them. When a key is struck, the metal strikes the ribbon and leaves an impression of the letter or figure on a page, each sheet of which must be fed into the typewriter’s roller by hand.

**Kerouac included the names of actual people and places in the scroll manuscript; his publisher insisted these be changed for publication, to avoid libel lawsuits.

(Kerouac cover image courtesy of Empty Mirror Books.)

2 comments to “Rereading On the Road”

Denise, September 19th, 2007 at 12:26 pm:

• Hi Steven,

  If you’re going to hotlink to the book cover of On the Road which is located on our site, please at least link back to our website, http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com from your blog post. We specialize in books by, and information about the Beat Generation, small press and avant garde authors.

  Thanks.
  Denise

Steven W. Beattie, September 19th, 2007 at 12:37 pm:

• Thanks, Denise. I like to use the image of the edition I read for review, and this was the only one I could find. I appreciate your permission for its use.

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