I first read
Kerouac’s On the Road when I was 20
years old. I had just transferred from
UCLA to UC Berkeley, and it was one of my first purchases at Cody’s Books. In fact, my copy still has the original
receipt in the pages, so I know that I bought the book for $9.74 on August 3rd,
1992. I remember riding along on the
Bart reading in the sunlight as I leaned upon the glass puttering above the
neighborhoods south of Berkeley. I was
excited by the adventures I was reading and would have loved to have had some
crazy cross-country travels with friends and strangers and see
capital-A-America from the dirty back roads and torn-up highways. Berkeley’s liberal past and San Francisco’s
Beat history made it the perfect environment to romanticize what I was reading.
Actually, I
didn’t have to do much romanticizing, because Kerouac did most of that for
me. Coming back to the novel now, twice
the age I was when I read it the first time, I was rather disappointed with it. To be sure, there are some great characters
and Kerouac does a great job creating the world of the novel and the kids
running through it. The extent to which
I enjoyed the book was as an historical document, the capturing of a post-war
generation of youths who rejected materialism and sought spiritual ecstasy
among the culturally disenfranchised.
These are kids who want more from life than a nine-to-five job that pays
the bills and supports a family. They
don’t want to be stable and steady, seeking instead “the purity of the road,”
and embracing “the one and noble function of our time, move.” I can dig that. But Kerouac believed so unwaveringly in the
philosophical direction of “the beat generation” that the novel very rarely
looks beyond its own corridors.
J.D.
Salinger dealt with a very similar topic in Catcher
in the Rye, only he was able to see Holden’s struggles and see beyond them
at the same time. As I noted in my blog
about Catcher, a sixteen-year-old
reading the book will have a different experience than a forty-year-old because
Salinger so masterfully handles his subject.
For Kerouac, there is no looking above and beyond. William Gaddis is also concerned with the
emptiness of society in The Recognitions. Kerouac
lacks the intellectual intensity to try to understand the ins and outs of what’s
bothering him. He is happy to have Dean’s
hip nonsense stand-in for a true analysis—“There was nothing clear about the
things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear.” The book is trapped in its own mysticism and
the antics of the “holy goof” and “American saint” that is Dean Moriarty. A novel is of course under no obligation to
do more, but to fail to do more is to become locked into a time and place and
moment, to become an historical document.
Tied to
these limitations of Kerouac’s intellect and perspective is his desire to “know”
the world without doing any of the work required to know it. Sal skips through experiences like a stone
and then claims to have knowledge about entire peoples and cultures. The first such experience is when Sal is
living in central California with Terry and her son. After spending afternoons getting drunk with
Terry’s brother, Rickey, Sal decides he needs to find work to support this new
family of his. He gets a job as a
migrant worker picking grapes alongside refugees from the dust bowl nearly 15
years ago. After a short while picking
grapes and being lousy at it, Sal “looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God
for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little
people I loved.” This made me
laugh. Having just read The Grapes of Wrath in this list a
little while back, we’ve read of the real hardships of the Oklahoma migrant
workers who fought against a broken system to feed their family and maintain
their dignity. Here, little Sal is a
tourist who is playing at migrant working, and he doesn’t have the
self-awareness to know this. Not two
pages later, Sal is wiring his aunt for $50 so that he can get back home to New
Jersey to begin the next semester of school.
Sal’s aunt hovers on the horizon of all his adventures, and as a reader,
I never worried for Sal because he could always wire for $50 and get home to
his aunt’s and work on his novel. If Sal
showed even the slightest awareness that he was in fact not like those alongside
whom he “struggled,” I would respect the character (and his creator) a hell of
a lot more.
“Negroes”
and “colored folk” of all colors are present throughout the novel. This has been a source of pride for those who
see the novel as embracing the down-trodden and marginalized Americans. Early in my reading of the novel, I was
pleased to see the variety of the people that walked in and out of the
novel. But the deeper I read, the more
aware I became that these characters were more caricature, that Sal (and
Kerouac) skips off the skin of these characters as frictionlessly as Dean’s
tires fly over the ribbon of highway. At
one point in the novel, Sal is living in Denver and all his friends are living
elsewhere. Sal is lonely and feels “like
a speck on the surface of the sad red earth.”
As he wanders through the streets of Denver, he says,
At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, 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 stopped at a little shack where a man sold hot red chili in paper containers; I bought some and ate it, strolling in the dark mysterious streets. 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. I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there, occasionally the dusky knee of some mysterious sensual gal; and dark faces of the men behind the rose arbors. . . . 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.
It’s so sad
and hard to be the white man and so ecstatic to be a Negro of America! Sal’s (and again, Kerouac’s) awareness of
what it is to be black, Mexican, or Japanese is horribly lacking. He might like them, but he certainly doesn’t
know them and doesn’t show any interest in getting to know them or understand
them. The cultures he’s cut off from are
romanticized and idealized—never real or understood. Kerouac can’t see beyond his own white skin.
Nor can he
see beyond his own maleness. The women
in this novel are enough to make a feminist scream. The men are mad and impassioned, tearing off
across the country in search of God and America, staying up all night having
deep conversations about the world and the way to live in it. The women, meanwhile, will gladly wait in a
hotel room all day for a couple hours of sex with Dean. They will tolerate his marrying two other
women just to share a bit in his madness.
Or they are prostitutes reveling in the boys’ madness. Or they are aunts and saintly mothers who finance
and support the boys’ craziness. At one
point, Sal and Dean encounter a black man named Walter in San Francisco. Walter’s wife makes no fuss, even as they
keep the light on over her bed and talk all night as she tries to sleep. She just smiles and “never said a word.” Upon leaving Walter’s apartment, Dean says, “Now
you see, man, there’s real woman for
you. Never a harsh word, never a
complaint, or modified; her old man can come in any hour of the night with
anybody and have talks in the kitchen and drink the beer and leave any old
time. This is a man, and that’s his
castle.”
Yeah. That’s the world of On the Road. It’s
interesting as a slice of history, the presentation of the beat philosophy of
life and how to live it, but it doesn’t have the intellectual strength or
intuitive awareness to make it something more.
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