Fifty Years of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" Author(s): J. T. Barbarese Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol.

112, No. 4 (Fall, 2004), pp. 591-594 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27549602 . Accessed: 07/04/2013 10:19
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I think back on those days I marvel at how innocent we were. When a boy named Roger Rath. He was a little younger I keep remembering or so, but married, than the rest of us, only twenty-one settled, and very much a part of our crowd. He had a surprisingly prose sophisticated long, intricate, interesting style for one so young, as I recall; he wrote sentences that even a Nabokov might not have rushed to disown. He but he was getting hadn't yet mastered narrative, there, we felt, and us most I remember about him was his What would do someday proud. in good company, the way he loved his charm, his delight openness, to talk. Some years after leaving Iowa he died in an automobile accident, and course it never got a chance to "realize his potential." Andre Dubus?of would be Andre, you knew it would be Andre, our leader, our host? a story to him, the long one that opens his collection The dedicated Times Are Never So Bad ( 1983 ). The dedication says, with touching simplicity: For Roger Rath out among the stars. And now Andre is out there too. Along with Yates, and Engle, and too many others to contem plate from those days. Time just gets away from us, as that great phi losopher Mattie Ross says at the end of True Grit ( 1968), a book whose author, Charles Portis, was then a favorite of ours. But the house on Brown Street is still there, still looking pretty much as it did then. And so what if the present owner doesn't know, or seem to care, who preceded him on the premises? That doesn't mean it didn't happen. That doesn't mean there weren't good parties there, and inter esting talk, and high hopes, and budding aspirations. That doesn't mean Yates didn't once sleep on a couch inside, that Crumley didn't send a croquet ball flying out back, that innocent garbage cans didn't once suffer ,45-caliber indignities right there on that very lawn.

FIFTY YEARS OF JACK KEROUAC'S ON THE ROAD

J. T. BARBARESE
to a time Of how many books can it be said that their contribution a time into a period, or turned a particular national habit transformed
of mind?in our case, our American rootlessness?into an emblem of

national consciousness? At the same time one realizes the limits of this art like The Scarlet Letter, domi novel. It is not a work of transcendent ? 2003 by J. T. Barbarese

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and so static it seems nearly operatic. nated by formal symmetries It is not and will never be held up for its contribution to social or political consciousness. It is not even very "modern" or "modernist." Its habits of mind are romantic and its ironies situational, or reducible to funny mo ments whose charm is their transience: His father opened the door, a distinguished tall man in pince-nez. on I said him. "Monsieur how are you? "Ah," Boncoeur, seeing in French, "I Je suis haut!" I cried, which was intended to mean am high, I have been drinking," but means in absolutely nothing

French.

This is the drunken Sal's introduction to his friend Remi Boncoeur's step is not father. What's but the way Sal steps on what might the funny joke have been one. "The doctor was perplexed. I had already screwed up Remi. He blushed at me." Kerouac's sentences contract around incidents and seal them off in order to preserve charm. This is a their hermetic world where every revelation is disposable?and everything prized for its disposability?because as the road itself. revelations are as unending One comes back to On the Road, now fifty years after its composition, oneself that Kerouac wrote this book and did not just talk reminding it into this form. The prose is still rich and excitable, breathless, and, if no longer revolutionary, it is the outcome of much still unconventional; over how tomaster the energy of live speech with revision and worrying out losing some of its electricity and confusion. The result is the voice of Sal Paradise and his deliberately flat intonation. "I first met Dean not line, is never going to long after my wife and I split up," Sal's opening seduce by its music and will never put Twain ( "You don't know about out of business. me, without you have read a book . .." ) or Hemingway His voice is rootless and disembodied and as rinsed of regionalism? a newscaster's. is Sal from??as where Kerouac's goal was Apparently the richness and banality of Sal's experi prose tough enough to master ence without or overdeliberating either quality. The result, qualifying
no matter the book's humor, is a narrative that seems powerless to con

it cannot forget?the of film noir. novelistic equivalent And, for all the book's deadpan humor, On the Road is neither con sistently comic nor an exuberant affirmation of "the road." If anything it's a muted reflective elegy hedged from beginning to end by Sal's con fused estimation of Dean, who even at the novel's end remains a prob lem for Sal as a psychological reminder of how impasse, a fabulous can the American it fails to grow male become when warped identity the men are always leaving the up. This is, after all, a book in which women for other men?Sal leaving an unnamed woman for Dean, Dean several wives for for Dean, then Sal, Ed leaving Galatea Dunkel leaving none of then Sal Dean in and and the road?and which Tommy Snark,

trol what

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them is worthy of our respect until Sal rejects the best friend he ever had for Remi ( "He blushed at me" ) and a limo ride. By the book's end it is Sal who is blushing, and why not? Whatever insight he had into Dean took several cross-country trips (the last to Mexico, where Dean into conviction, abandons him ) to mature and Sal is saved by the very commercialism he had rejected for Dean. For the question is how much Sal understands about his situation. In On the Road it is always safe to assume that human intuition will outstrip human intellectual potential. The argument, which is heard throughout the novel, seems to be that we always know more than we will ever be
able to articulate. It's the same retro-romantic investment in the inarti

culate

found

in contemporary

Ginsberg

poems

like "Sunflower

Sutra":

[Dean] was out of his mind with real belief. "And of course now no one 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 wanted Chad King to teach me about Nietzsche. You see how long ago? since the is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything Everything Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can't make itwith geometry his and geometrical systems of thinking. It's all this!" He wrapped in his fist. finger this The sentiment is Blake ("Man is born a garden ready and planted; world is too poor to produce one seed"); the elliptical syntax, with idea rather than logi in an order dictated by verticality after idea following the back cal contiguity, is pure Emerson; and the history, especially into its finds handed dismissal of Euclidean way geometry (which to is the Beats' bequest in Apocalypse Dennis Hopper's dialogue Now), a in is version it ends the second half of the twentieth century. But where of moral nihilism that scares even Sal. As part three begins, Dean Mo but now he also riarity, Sal says, "no longer cared about anything... in principle." cared about everything Sal wises up probably long after the reader, who sees in Dean Moriarty another figuration of American another one of those male desire prolonged too far past adolescence, and Jay Gats enthusiastic like Tom Sawyer, Amaso Delano, blockheads for mistakes. cannot their and the to force who world pay grow up by, in how Kerouac has tilted the conse The novel's genius is embodied into one of the quences and turned what might have been a travelogue more profound American meditations on coming of age. Sal finally sells whom he begins to his book, puts distance between himself and Dean ( think of as "a rat"), and grows up; it can be argued that Sal even sells out. The success he finds at the end of the book surely has a cockeyed, a tacky hand to it. For there is Remi again wearing glitzy quality for Dean, and there is painted necktie and refusing to open his Cadillac our last glimpse of Dean, who "couldn't talk any more and said nothing,

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and Remi turned away," because Dean had always been a mere "idiot," a sentiment to dispel. "So Dean Sal may not share but does nothing couldn't ride uptown with us and the only thing I could do was sit in the back of the Cadillac and wave at him." Not even the "bookie at the in the car. Off goes Dean, wheel" wants Dean all alone, "ragged in a overcoat he brought the motheaten for freezing temperatures specially of the East," while Sal, Laura, and Remi head to the concert. And abruptly the book is over: 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 in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the dreaming children 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 is star must be drooping and shedding her Pooh Bear? the evening on is before the which the coming of dims just prairie, sparkler all darkens that the blesses rivers, cups the earth, complete night 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, the I even think of Old Dean Moriarty, I think of Dean Moriarty, father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. that There is enough going on here to leave one confused, a confusion the powerful closing cadences and literary echoes only prolong. While Sal seems to be having a vision of the dark fields of the Republic rolling than Scott into historical night, this sounds tinnier, more Otis Redding in that And there is something oddly, stickily sentimental Fitzgerald. is like the view reference to Pooh and kids crying in Iowa. The passage from a small plane that can't seem to get above the ground clutter. Yet this is Sal's point of view, and if the father that Sal finally finds, Remi, this may be pre is more corporate Chronos, sponsor than Olympian a loss of to in Sal's Kerouac's vanishing paradise?the cisely point hymn is tragic everywhere but in America, where innocence every loss can innocence without like Dean we embody always be exploited. Either or and full we cease enter to the be it, children, wage-stream knowing as book's consciousness the and, image suggests, culminating political that before the novel ends leave our bags at the door. Is it any wonder is aphasie, or that he cannot remember Sal says at least twice that Dean is all that Sal what he wants to say? The theft of Dean's voice, which ever wanted, is complete; Dean is left with the experience of innocence, sound of profit. and Sal with its sound?the

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