Fifty Years of Kerouac on the Road

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Fifty Years of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road"

Author(s): J. T. BarbareseSource: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 112, No. 4 (Fall, 2004), pp. 591-594Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27549602 .

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THE STATE OF LETTERS 591When I think back on those days I marvel at how innocent we were.I keep remembering a boy named Roger Rath. He was a little youngerthan the rest of us, only twenty-one or so, but married, settled, and verymuch a part of our crowd. He had a surprisingly sophisticated prose

style for one so young, as I recall; he wrote long, intricate, interestingsentences that even a Nabokov might not have rushed to disown. Hehadn't yet mastered narrative, but he was getting there, we felt, andwould someday do us proud. What I remember most about him was hisopenness, his charm, his delight in good company, the way he lovedto talk.

Some years after leaving Iowa he died in an automobile accident, andnever got a chance to "realize his potential." Andre Dubus?of course itwould be Andre, you knew it would be Andre, our leader, our host?dedicated a story to him, the long one that opens his collection TheTimes Are Never So Bad ( 1983 ). The dedication says, with touchingsimplicity: For Roger Rath out among the stars. And now Andre is outthere too. Along with Yates, and Engle, and too many others to contemplate from those days. Time just gets away from us, as that great philosopher Mattie Ross says at the end of True Grit (1968), a book whoseauthor, Charles Portis, was then a favorite of ours.But the house on Brown Street is still there, still looking pretty muchas it did then. And so what if the present owner doesn't know, or seemto care, who preceded him on the premises? That doesn't mean it didn'thappen. That doesn't mean there weren't good parties there, and interesting talk, and high hopes, and budding aspirations. That doesn't meanYates didn't once sleep on a couch inside, that Crumley didn't send acroquet ball flying out back, that innocent garbage cans didn't oncesuffer ,45-caliber indignities right there on that very lawn.

FIFTY YEARS OF JACKKEROUAC'SON THE ROADJ. T. BARBARESE

Of how many books can it be said that their contribution to a timetransformed a time into a period, or turned a particular national habitof mind?in our case, our American rootlessness?into an emblem ofnational consciousness? At the same time one realizes the limits of thisnovel. It is not awork of transcendent art like The Scarlet Letter, domi? 2003 by J.T. Barbarese

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592 THE STATE OF LETTERSnated by formal symmetries and so static it seems nearly operatic. It isnot and will never be held up for its contribution to social or politicalconsciousness. It is not even very "modern" or "modernist." Its habits ofmind are romantic and its ironies situational, or reducible to funny moments whose charm is their transience:

His father opened the door, a distinguished tall man in pince-nez."Ah," I said on seeing him. "Monsieur Boncoeur, how are you?Je suis haut!" I cried, which was intended to mean in French, "Iam

high, I have been drinking," butmeans

absolutely nothing inFrench.This is the drunken Sal's introduction to his friend Remi Boncoeur's stepfather. What's funny is not the joke but the way Sal steps on what mighthave been one. "The doctor was perplexed. I had already screwed upRemi. He blushed at me." Kerouac's sentences contract around incidentsand seal them off in order to preserve their hermetic charm. This is aworld where every revelation is disposable?and everything prized forits disposability?because revelations are as unending as the road itself.One comes back to On the Road, now fifty years after its composition,reminding oneself that Kerouac wrote this book and did not just talkit into this form. The prose is still rich and excitable, breathless, and, ifno longer revolutionary, still unconventional; it is the outcome of muchrevision and worrying over how tomaster the energy of live speech without losing some of its electricity and confusion. The result is the voice ofSal Paradise and his deliberately flat intonation. "I first met Dean notlong after my wife and I split up," Sal's opening line, is never going toseduce by itsmusic and will never put Twain ("You don't know aboutme, without you have read a book . .." ) or Hemingway out of business.His voice is rootless and disembodied and as rinsed of regionalism?where is Sal from??as a newscaster's. Apparently Kerouac's goal wasprose tough enough to master the richness and banality of Sal's experience without qualifying or overdeliberating either quality. The result,

no matter the book's humor, is a narrative that seems powerless to control what it cannot forget?the novelistic equivalent of film noir.And, for all the book's deadpan humor, On the Road is neither con

sistently comic nor an exuberant affirmation of "the road." If anythingit's a muted reflective elegy hedged from beginning to end by Sal's confused estimation of Dean, who even at the novel's end remains a problem for Sal as a psychological impasse, a fabulous reminder of howwarped the American male identity can become when it fails to growup. This is, after all, a book in which the men are always leaving thewomen for other men?Sal leaving an unnamed woman for Dean, Deanleaving several wives for Sal, Ed leaving Galatea Dunkel for Dean, then

Tommy Snark, then Sal and Dean and the road?and in which none of



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THE STATE OF LETTERS 593them is worthy of our respect until Sal rejects the best friend he everhad for Remi ("He blushed at me" ) and a limo ride. By the book's endit is Sal who is blushing, and why not? Whatever insight he had intoDean took several cross-country trips (the last to Mexico, where Deanabandons him ) to mature into conviction, and Sal is saved by the verycommercialism he had rejected for Dean.For the question is how much Sal understands about his situation. InOn the Road it is always safe to assume that human intuition will outstriphuman intellectual potential. The argument, which is heard throughoutthe novel, seems to be that we always know more than we will ever beable to articulate. It's the same retro-romantic investment in the inarticulate found in contemporary Ginsberg poems like "Sunflower Sutra":

[Dean] was out of his mind with real belief. "And of course now noone can tell us that there is no God. We've passed through all forms.You remember, Sal, when I first came to New York and I wantedChad King to teach me about Nietzsche. You see how long ago?Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since theGreeks has been predicated wrong. You can't make itwith geometryand geometrical systems of thinking. It's all this!" He wrapped hisfinger in his fist.

The sentiment is Blake ("Man is born a garden ready and planted; thisworld is too poor to produce one seed"); the elliptical syntax, with ideaafter idea following in an order dictated by verticality rather than logical contiguity, is pure Emerson; and the history, especially the backhanded dismissal of Euclidean geometry (which finds its way intoDennis Hopper's dialogue inApocalypse Now), is the Beats' bequest tothe second half of the twentieth century. But where it ends is in a versionof moral nihilism that scares even Sal. As part three begins, Dean Moriarity, Sal says, "no longer cared about anything... but now he alsocared about everything in principle." Sal wises up probably long afterthe reader, who sees in Dean Moriarty another figuration of Americanmale desire prolonged too far past adolescence, another one of thoseenthusiastic blockheads like Tom Sawyer, Amaso Delano, and Jay Gatsby, who cannot grow up and force the world to pay for their mistakes.The novel's genius is embodied in how Kerouac has tilted the consequences and turned what might have been a travelogue into one of themore profound American meditations on coming of age. Sal finally sellshis book, puts distance between himself and Dean (whom he begins tothink of as "a rat"), and grows up; it can be argued that Sal even sellsout. The success he finds at the end of the book surely has a cockeyed,glitzy quality to it. For there is Remi again wearing a tacky handpainted necktie and refusing to open his Cadillac for Dean, and there isour last glimpse of Dean, who "couldn't talk any more and said nothing,



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594 THE STATE OF LETTERSand Remi turned away," because Dean had always been a mere "idiot,"a sentiment Sal may not share but does nothing to dispel. "So Deancouldn't ride uptown with us and the only thing I could do was sit inthe back of the Cadillac and wave at him." Not even the "bookie at the

wheel" wants Dean in the car. Off goes Dean, all alone, "ragged in amotheaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperaturesof the East," while Sal, Laura, and Remi head to the concert. Andabruptly the book is over:

So inAmerica when the sun goes down and I sit on the old brokendown river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey andsense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulgeover to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the peopledreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now thechildren must be crying in the land where they let the children cry,and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God isPooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding hersparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming ofcomplete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups thepeaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what'sgoing to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old,I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty, thefather we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

There is enough going on here to leave one confused, a confusion thatthe powerful closing cadences and literary echoes only prolong. WhileSal seems to be having a vision of the dark fields of the Republic rollinginto historical night, this sounds tinnier, more Otis Redding than ScottFitzgerald. And there is something oddly, stickily sentimental in thatreference to Pooh and kids crying in Iowa. The passage is like the viewfrom a small plane that can't seem to get above the ground clutter. Yetthis is Sal's point of view, and if the father that Sal finally finds, Remi,is more corporate sponsor than Olympian Chronos, this may be precisely Kerouac's point in Sal's hymn to a vanishing paradise?the loss ofinnocence is tragic everywhere but in America, where every loss canalways be exploited. Either like Dean we embody innocence withoutknowing it, or we cease to be children, enter the wage-stream and fullpolitical consciousness and, as the book's culminating image suggests,leave our bags at the door. Is it any wonder that before the novel endsSal says at least twice that Dean is aphasie, or that he cannot rememberwhat he wants to say? The theft

of Dean's voice, which is all that Salever wanted, is complete; Dean is left with the experience of innocence,and Sal with its sound?the sound of profit.


Fifty Years of Kerouac on the Road

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