On The Road
http://www.avclub.com/articles/on-the-road,38422/
by Steven Hyden
February 22, 2010
Someday I am going to die, and when I do, at least 30 percent of what
I'll see flashing before my eyes will be taken from road trips I went
on between the ages of 21 and 26. I know this is true, even if it
seems faintly ridiculous, considering all the things I should be
thinking about as I draw my final breaths. It's not as if these trips
were particularly important in shaping my life. I don't think I'm a
different person because I once stayed up for 32 hours straight while
driving from Eau Claire, Wisconsin to Memphis, then up through
northern Arkansas to Branson, Missouri. (My buddy Joe and I
mistakenly thought Branson was the Las Vegas of the Midwest. This is
only the third dumbest assumption I've ever made in my life.)
A young man piling into a car with other young men and hitting the
open road with only a vague destination in mindwhich, in my case,
meant places like Graceland or "that crappy sports bar in
Indianapolis where Guided By Voices is playing on Saturday night"is
not necessarily an act of spiritual exploration rife with heavy
significance. I definitely don't think I learned anything about
myself from doing this, nor did I gain any insight into the meaning
of existence.
And yet these road tripseven the shitty ones, or maybe especially
the shitty onesare some of the most cherished times of my life, in
part because they allowed me to step outside of my life for a while.
I was far from home and seeing places I'd never visited or even
imagined visiting, with no plan for where I'd be eating my next meal
or sleeping that night. I was still "me," but I had become a tourist
in my own life. The automatic-pilot routine of regular everyday
experience had been shut off, and I was left to wander aimlessly on
the fringes.
So I guess you could say I had absorbed the essence of Jack Kerouac's
On The Road years before I finally got around to reading it. On my
trips, as Kerouac describes, "I was just somebody else, some
stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, like a ghost." You
could even say I was "at the dividing line between the East of my
youth and the West of my future," though I'd rather you didn't,
because, really, you're starting to embarrass yourself.
Kerouac's iconic Beat Generation novel has so infiltrated our
national consciousness that reading it almost seems unnecessary. Few
people who aren't American history scholars or hermetic
anti-government nutjobs have read the Declaration Of Independence
from preamble to John Hancock, and yet we all know about (and demand)
our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Similarly,
you don't have to read Sal Paradise's worshipful descriptions of Dean
Moriarty's considerable bad-assitude and unrepentant assholery to
understand that the rootless, rambling lifestyle that On The Road
personifies is exciting and inherently American. Thomas Jefferson and
Kerouac made vitally important contributions to our collective
concept of the American Dream; it's not so much a matter of reading
their works as effortlessly pulling them out of the atmosphere and
breathing them in.
Still, considering how much trouble we as a society have gotten into
because too many people think they know the Bible without actually
reading it, I figured it might be a good idea to sit down and immerse
myself in the nitty-gritty of the Bible Of Beat. Surely I was
depriving myself by not reading about Kerouac's cross-country
sojourns to Denver, San Francisco, Mexico, and numerous points
between with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and
Neal Cassadythe basis for Dean, and Kerouac's larger-than-life
musein the late '40s.
I'm glad I did read On The Road, if only because it confirmed that
what the book signifies is far more important than the book itself,
which I found surprisingly dull and inert for a core building block
of the counterculture. Kerouac's self-styled form of "spontaneous
prose"which was rapidly pecked out on a massive scroll of
taped-together sheets of paper measuring 12 stories longis
intentionally misshapen and manic, hurriedly describing a rush of
events in a way that's intended to be exhilarating. It clearly was
for many readers at the time (and beyond), but for me, it didn't
offer anything particularly interesting or insightful. Take this
passage, where Kerouac (as his stand-in Sal) recounts a (probably
drug-fueled) conversation between "child of the rainbow" Dean and
Carlo Marx, the nom de plume Kerouac gave his friend Ginsberg:
Then they got down to business. They sat on the bed cross-legged and
looked straight at each other. I slouched in a nearby chair and saw
all of it. They began with an abstract thought, discussed it;
reminded each other of an abstract point forgotten in the rush of
events; Dean apologized but promised he could get back to it and
manage it fine, bringing up illustrations.
Carlo said, "And just as we were crossing Wazee I wanted to tell you
about how I felt of your frenzy with the midgets and it was just
then, remember, you pointed out that old bum with the baggy pants and
said he looked just like your father?"
"Yes, yes, of course I remember; and not only that, but it started a
train of my own, something real wild I had to tell you, I'd forgotten
it, now you just reminded me of it…" and two new points were born.
They hashed these over. Then Carlo asked Dean if he was honest and
specifically if he was being honest with him in the bottom of his soul.
"Why do you bring that up again?"
"There's one thing I want to know"
I'm going to stop here, even if it is an awkward break, because I
think you probably get the point. (Plus, this passage goes on
for-fucking-ever.) Much of On The Road consists of loopy
conversations that probably seemed profound before they were
transcribed on paper and dried out, without all the chemicals; on the
page, they made me regret not downing a handful of bennies and
chasing it with a bottle of rotgut wine before picking the book up.
The rest of On The Road details encounters with hitchhikers, cowboys,
hobos, poets, and other free-spirited ne'er-do-wells who never seem
as captivating or significant as Kerouac's easily excitable Sal
thinks they are. Whether it's matter of nothing much happening, or
Kerouac's convoluted, inconsistent prose failing to bring the events
to life, reading On The Road was like being stuck in a car with a
blowhard with a vast repertoire of rambling anecdotes without
punchlines. I appreciated the storyteller's enthusiasm, and
desperately longed for an ejector seat.
Maybe I'm just too old. Surely I would have liked On The Road more
had I read it when I was 16 instead of 32. Instead of relating to
Sal, I ended up siding with the fuddy-duddies at The Saturday Review,
which dismissed On The Road as a "dizzy travelogue" when it came out in 1957.
Even if I am out of touch with the kids and that kooky jazz racket
they listen to, I'd like to think even my 16-year-old self would have
cringed when Sal wishes "I were a Negro" as he wanders through a
black neighborhood in segregated, pre-civil-rights-era Denver. When
Kerouac gushes that "the best that the white world offered was not
enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music,
not enough life," its feels like his heart is in the right place, but
his naïveté about the crushing subjugation of his honorary
African-American brothers makes his wide-eyed idealization silly at
best, and patronizing at worst.
The most problematic part of On The Road for me is the portrayal of
Dean, the book's hero. Dean represents everything men want to be as
they enter adulthoodhe's strong-willed, self-assured, impervious to
the downsides of excessive drug and alcohol consumption, and always
out to have a good time. Oh, and he also has an "enormous dangle," as
Sal dreamily reports. In real life, Cassady was no less mesmerizing;
he was a Zelig figure and drifter who palled around with Kerouac and
Ginsberg in the early days of the Beat movement, then ingratiated
himself with Ken Kesey and the Grateful Dead in the '60s, driving the
"Furthur" bus across the United States as the Merry Pranksters played
Johnny Appleseed with LSD. Seemingly everybody who ever met Cassady
worshipped the ground he walked on, imbuing him with mystical powers
that are not of this Earth. "He seemed to live in another dimension,"
Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir once said of Cassady, "and in that
dimension time as we know it was transparent."
Apparently living in a different dimension can turn you into sort of
a prick. At least that's how Dean came off to me as I was reading On
The Road. In spite of Sal's protestations to the contrary, Dean seems
less like an all-powerful oracle for the coming age than a selfish,
self-absorbed misogynist who equated getting his joint worked with
spiritual fulfillment. For Dean, nirvana is a brothel in Mexico
stocked with underaged whores. When he's finally called out for
abandoning one of his many wives, Sal gives him an appropriately
childish defense:
I longed to put my arm around Dean and say, Now look here, all of
you, remember just one thing: this guy has his troubles too, and
another thing, he never complains and he's given all of you a damned
good time just being himself, and if that isn't enough for you then
send him to the firing squad, that's apparently what you're itching
to do anyway…
There was a time in my life when I have gladly let a guy like Dean
sleep on my couch; now, I'd just shut off the light and pretend I
wasn't home. But even if On The Road as a book is rife with hokey,
misguided romanticism, as an idea it remains potent, timeless, and
quantifiably great. Amid the passages that made my eyes roll were
lines that have appeared in Tom Waits and Hold Steady songs,
reminding me that Kerouac's restless spirit inspired legions of
artists to follow their own idiosyncratic paths. On The Road is
clearly much bigger than my relatively insignificant feelings about
it; it might even be bigger than Neal Cassady's dangle, which is
praise Kerouac himself surely would have appreciated.
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