Dialect Anthropol (2010) 34:395417 DOI 10.

1007/s10624-010-9157-y

Traveller or tourist? Jack Kerouac and the commodication of culture

Roger Bill

Published online: 13 February 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract Jack Kerouac, the author of On The Road, was a central gure of the Beat Generation, a generation which rebelled against middle-class conformity in postWorld War II America. Kerouac described himself as a religious wanderer (Kerouac 2006: 2), but an examination of his texts and life suggest his travels may also be understood as tourism. Viewed through the prism of tourism, this study will argue, for example, that MacCannells notion of the tourists quest for reality and authenticity (MacCannell 1989: 3) provides some insight into why Kerouac wrote that just south of Macon, Georgia, he and his travelling companion Neal Cassady stopped and got out of the car, and suddenly both of us were stoned with joy to realize that in the darkness all around us was fragrant green grass and the smell of fresh manure and warm waters (Kerouac 1957: 115). As Kerouac rebelled against being, as one of his protagonists in The Dharma Bums put it, imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume (Kerouac 2006: 73) he travelled across America on a rapidly improving network of highways, turning mobility into a retreat (Holladay and Holton 2009: 42). Kerouac alternately identied himself as a hobo (Kerouac 1973: 181) and not a real hobo (Kerouac 1973: 173), but this article asks whether Kerouacs travels were those of the last in a line of wanderers rebelling against conformity and modernization or a precursor of mobile mass tourism in America. Keywords Culture Tourism Authenticity Leisure Kerouac

R. Bill (&) Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. Johns, NL, Canada e-mail: rogerbill@nf.sympatico.ca

123

396

R. Bill

Introduction Whooee! yelled Dean. Here we go! And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her; he was back in his element, everybody could see that. We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind, and performing our one and noble function of the time, move. And we moved! We ashed past the mysterious white signs in the night somewhere in New Jersey that say SOUTH (with an arrow) and WEST (with an arrow) and took the south one. New Orleans! It burned in our brains. From the dirty snows of frosty fagtown New York, as Dean called it, all the way to the greeneries and river smells of Old New Orleans at the washed-out bottom of America; then west. Jack Kerouac. On The Road. (Kerouac 1957: 111) In describing the making of the car society, Orvar Lofgren argues that Speed totally reorganized the tourist landscape (Lofgren 1999: 61). I suggest the same can be said for the impact of steamship technology, rail, and air transport, but there is nothing original in this observation. Both Deitch and Neumann, for example, note that the Sante Fe Railroad was instrumental in the early 20th century development of tourism in the southwestern United States (Smith 1989: 226 and Coleman and Crang 2003: 41). Also, Lofgrens history of vacationing notes that the expansion in mass travel in Europe following the Second World War started with bus travel and spread to charter ights (Lofgren 1999: 170). Indeed, Lofgren notes that postwar mass tourism remapped the Mediterranean (Lofgren 1999: 184) according to how easily an area, specically one with guaranteed sun and sandy beaches, could be reached from northern European airports. What research has demonstrated is how innovations in transportation have changed what, according to MacCannell, has become the worlds largest industry (MacCannell 2001: 388) and the ground for the production of a new global culture (MacCannell 2001: 389). What the issue of transportation innovation does not speak to, however, is why Jack Kerouac describes the roads he travelled as spaces of purity (Kerouac 1957: 110). As he was following the sign that said SOUTH and the 1949 Hudson held to the white line of the holy road (Kerouac 1957: 115), was Kerouac some kind of contemporary pilgrim (Urry 1997: 8)? Does MacCannells notion of the tourists quest for authenticity (MacCannell 1989: 105), where reality is elsewhere, in other cultures, in purer, simpler lifestyles (MacCannell 1989: 3), offer any insight into why Kerouac wrote that just south of Macon, Georgia, he and Dean Moriarity (a pseudonym for another counter culture icon Neal Cassady) stopped and got out of the car and suddenly both of us were stoned with joy to realize that in the darkness all around us was fragrant green grass and the smell of fresh manure and warm waters (Kerouac 1957: 115)? Does the idea of the commodication of culture and the concept of the tourist gaze, where tourists wield power through the way they look at locals and

123

Jack Kerouac and the commodication of culture

397

expect them to appear and behave and locals acquiesce to the gaze by mirroring back images they hope will please tourists (Stronza 2001: 271), help explain Kerouac and Cassadys choice of music on their car radio as they approached New Orleans? We were suddenly driving along the blue waters of the Gulf, and at the same time a momentous mad thing began on the radio: it was the Chicken Jazzn Gumbo disk-jockey show from New Orleans, all mad jazz records, coloured records, with the disk jockey saying, Dont worry bout nothing! (Kerouac 1957: 116). Several years later while hitchhiking on the west coast, Kerouac wrote that a fat cowboy in a gravel truck with a malicious grin on his face deliberately tried to run over my rucksack in the road (Kerouac 2006: 167). Was Kerouac expressing a resistance to conformity and modernization in postWorld War II America later that day when he made camp in a grove of trees on the edge of a city as nightfall approached and wrote I spread my bag out under a pine in a dense thicket across the road from cute suburban cottages that couldnt see me and wouldnt see me because they were all looking at television anyway (Kerouac 2006: 167)? Holton describes On The Road as one of the central literary works of the postwar period (Holladay and Holton 2009: 4). My $1.25 paperback copy is the nineteenth printing of a version copyrighted in 1957. I dont recall if it is the rst copy of On The Road I owned and it has accompanied me on my travels or if it is a copy I bought at a garage sale at a stop along the way. Maybe it is a used copy I bought for one of my children that they read and returned to me. When I was a wandering young man I hitchhiked. Today, my wandering children y on no-frills charter airlines, carry backpacks, and stay in hostels. Now, looking back at Kerouac as he criss-crossed America on a rapidly improving network of highways my question is, was he among the last of the hobos or the rst of a new kind of American tourist, a forerunner of the coming of mass tourism in a consumer society? Was Kerouac a traveller or a tourist even if his pursuit of real experiences were a kind of antitourism (MacCannell 2001: 382)? When the US president Harry Truman delivered his State of the Union address to Congress on January 6, 1947, America was experiencing a period of unprecedented prosperity (McCullough 1992: 531). Eighteen months after the rst atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and the Second World War ended, money was plentiful and business was booming. Food production was at a new high. The national income was higher than ever before in peacetime. We had virtually full employment, Truman announced with satisfaction. (McCullough 1992: 531532). In January of 1947, Jack Kerouac was 24 years old and by July of that year he had met Neal Cassady and set off on his rst trip across the United States.

123

398

R. Bill

Kerouac and the road Urry argued that acting as a tourist is one of the dening characteristics of being modern (Urry 1997: 2/3), and while Kerouac may have been a romantic (and I will argue that he was), and while he may have thought of himself a hobo (and I will argue he was not), he did not identify himself as a tourist in On The Road. Kerouac identied himself as belonging to a different tradition. In the Introduction to Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac said that he read the life of Jack London at 18 and decided to be an adventurer, a lonesome traveler (Kerouac 1973: vii), and in The Dharma Bums, he said he considered himself a religious wanderer (Kerouac 2006: 2). One of Kerouacs biographers, Ann Charters, argues that Kerouac thought of himself as a modern day Thoreau (Charters 1974: 109) who was deeply sincere about leaving the main highway of American life and turning his back on the stresses of civilization (Charters 1974: 250). It is when Kerouac leaves America, however, that he does describe himself as a tourist. Kerouac describes visiting France in search of his familys genealogical roots in Satori In Paris (1966). Even though Kerouac studied a map of Paris before arriving in France, he found it necessary to ask a Paris policeman for directions to the National Library, and it is in the context of this encounter that Kerouac identied himself as a tourist. The policeman gave Kerouac directions which Kerouac thought were incorrect, and he wrote, Here he is some kind of sergeant or other who certainly oughta know the streets of Paris giving an American tourist a bum steer (Kerouac 1966: 29). A second reference to being a tourist is found in Kerouacs account of trying to nd a hotel in Brest at 3:00 AM after the bars have closed. Worried that hoodlums were xing to mug me (Kerouac 1966: 74), Kerouac found his way to a police station. He wrote I walk right into the precinct, take my American green passport from out of my breast pocket, present it to the gendarme desk sergeant and tell him I cannot wander these streets all night without a room, etc., have money for a room etc., suitcase locked up etc., missed my plane etc. Am a tourist etc. And I am afeared. (Kerouac 1966: 7576). There is a third reference to being a tourist or, more precisely, to not being a tourist found in Kerouacs account of a visit to Morocco published in a short story titled Big Trip to Europe (Kerouac 1973: 135171). Kerouac was visiting writer Bill Burroughs, another major gure of the Beat Generation, whose residences were often destinations for Kerouac. One day Kerouac and Burroughs took a walk on the outskirts of an Arab town, and Kerouac wrote, Then, we walked down the hill to a place where a holy man or that is, a devout Mohammedan, kneeled praying to the setting sun towards Mecca and Bill turned to me and said: Wouldnt it be wonderful if we were real American tourists and I suddenly rushed up with a camera to snap his picture? (Kerouac 1973: 142).

123

Jack Kerouac and the commodication of culture

399

If carrying a camera and snapping souvenir photos is one of the dening characteristics of being a tourist, then it could be argued Kerouac was not a tourist since it appears he did not carry a camera during his travels. Dr. Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library and author of Beatic Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road (2008), says in an email correspondence, I know of no reference to Kerouac taking pictures. Dr. Gerwitzs view is that Kerouac might better be called a traveller or journeyer, if the latter is a word. As he journeyed from coast to coast, Kerouac was situated on the front edge of the coming of mass, mobile tourism in America in the 1960s, but his presence on the road may have had more to do with a rejection of the burgeoning postWorld War II consumer society than being an example of it. Holton contends that the Beat subculture transformed itself into a counterculture which grew exponentially over the next decade (Holladay and Holton 2009: 4), a transformation which Kerouacs travelling companion Japhy Ryder (a pseudonym for the Beat Generation poet Gary Snyder) anticipates in The Dharma Bums. According to Kerouac, Snyders vision of the future included a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums, refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didnt really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you nally see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume (Kerouac 2006: 73). Gary Snyder may have foreseen a generation of young people in the 1960s who would gather for a music festival in Woodstock, New York, and retreat to rural communes, or he may have foreseen a generation of young people with backpacks who would travel the world on-the-cheap (two of those young people wrote the rst of the Lonely Planet tour guides in 1972), but in the mid-1950s, hitchhikers could still draw the unwanted attention of small town sheriffs. For example, after an experience of mountain climbing in California with Gary Snyder in 1955, Kerouac bought a backpack and sleeping bag and set off on a journey to his mothers home in North Carolina for Christmas. Twenty-ve miles outside of Los Angles as nightfall approached, Kerouac found himself in the town of Riverside where he risked getting arrested if he slept outdoors. In another expression of rebelling against modern life, Kerouac wrote, The only alternative to sleeping out, hopping freights, and doing what I wanted, I saw in a vision would be to just sit with a hundred other patients in front of a nice television set in a Madhouse, where we could be supervised (Kerouac 2006: 92). Television for the Beats was their generations version of an opiate of the masses. In her memoir of living with Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, Carolyn Cassady described their style of television watching. One evening after dinner Kerouac, poet Gregory Corso and Neal and Carolyn Cassady sat on a low bed in the Cassadys dark bedroom watching television. According to Carolyn Cassady, Neal Cassady

123

400

R. Bill

sat on the edge ready to pilot the machine from channel to channel. Gregory didnt understand the game and bellowed, How can I see the show? but Neal explained that since you always know whats going to happen next, this way you could watch all the shows. Jack added: Its all one show (Cassady 1991: 281). It can be argued that Kerouac and the Beats symbolized the rebellion of a generation, but it is my view that Kerouac and his circle of friends also behaved in ways that resemble travellers we call tourists. Larsen notes that tourist attractions may be nearly absent in Kerouacs journeys (Holladay and Holton 2009: 39), but the themes of escape and searching for the real repeatedly emerge in Kerouacs texts, and I suggest they reect what Stronza describes as modern tourists desire to reconnect with the pristine, the primitive, the natural, that which is untouched by modernity (Stronza 2001: 265 citing Cohen, Dobkin de Rios, Harkin, and Redfoot). For example, in a short story titled Mexican Fellaheen, Kerouac described crossing the border into Mexico as an escape. He wrote, the moment you cross the little wire gate and youre in Mexico, you feel like you just sneaked out of school when you told the teacher you were sick and she told you could go home at 2 oclock in the afternoon (Kerouac 1973: 21) In Mexican Fellaheen, Kerouac also described Mexico as the Pure Land where you can nd it, this feeling, this fellaheen feeling about life, that timeless gayety of people not involved in great cultural or civilization issues (Kerouac 1973: 22) A further example of this desire to escape and nd a place untouched by modernity is found in a letter Kerouac wrote from Mexico City to Neal and Carolyn Cassady. Kerouac wrote, Eventually I want to go to Ecuador where the mangos, orchids and wives grow wild, no want, no phone hassels [sic], no anger and all that kind of shit ad innitum (Cassady 1976: 64). Interestingly, Kerouac did not write this letter while he was living in a metropolitan US setting like New York City or San Francisco, but instead he wrote it while he was living on the adobe roof of an apartment house where Bill Burroughs lived in Mexico City. In another letter to Neal and Carolyn Cassady, one would have thought Kerouac had already escaped. He wrote, I took a little dobe block up on Bills roof, 2 rooms, lots of sun and old Indian women doing the wash. Will stay here awhile even though $12 a month is high rent. But perfect place to write, blast, think, fresh air, sun, moon, stars, the Roof of the City (Cassady 1976: 81). Kerouacs desire to leave phones, hassles, anger, and all that kind of shit ad innitum would appear to place Kerouac rmly among the moderns for whom, MacCannell argues, reality and authenticity are thought to be elsewhere (MacCannell 1989: 3). Boniface and Fowler, on the other hand, argue that

123

Jack Kerouac and the commodication of culture

401

Tourism feeds on the colonial impulse (Boniface and Fowler 1993: 19), which would suggest the motives for Kerouacs foreign travel are less innocent. Observed from this vantage point Kerouac, the foreign traveller, could be seen as a forerunner to the tourists Bruner describes as privileged Westerners who see themselves as elite members of the civilized world who have the resources, leisure time, adventurous spirit, and discriminating taste to travel to see less developed, more primitive populations (Bruner 2005: 21). Kerouac biographer Ann Charters argues that Mexico had two things Kerouac could not easily get in the United States: dope and women (Charters 1974: 120). Long before Amsterdam popularized marijuana coffee shops, Jack Kerouac had discovered their Mexican counterparts. In the story Mexican Fellaheen, Kerouac describes a trip on an old bus to Mexico City, and when the bus stopped in the town of Sinaloa, Kerouac and his travelling companion Enrique slept the night in a grass hut (Kerouac 1973: 28). Kerouac wrote that their host and his witchdoctor sprinkled red pinches of pure opium into huge cigarettes of marijuana the size of a cigar (Kerouac 1973: 28). Kerouac wrote In the morning I bought a quarter pound of marijuana but as soon as the deal was done in the hut a le of Mexican soldiers and a few seedy policemen came in with sad eyes, - I said to Enrique: Hey, are we going to be arrested? He said no, they just wanted some of the marijuana for themselves, free, and would let us go peaceably (Kerouac 1973: 29). According to Ann Charters, Kerouac purchased opium and marijuana in Sinaloa. The price for the marijuana was three dollars for two ounces (Charters 1974: 152). Kerouacs destination in Mexico City was Bill Burroughs apartment. Burroughs had eventually moved to Mexico after eeing Louisiana because of the threat of being jailed for narcotic offences (when the 1949 Hudson carrying Kerouac and Cassady reached its destination in Louisiana, which was Bill Burroughs house across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, the drug menu included marijuana, benzedrine, morphine, and alcohol (Charters 1974: 104)). Tempting as it may be, it would be a stretch to describe Burroughs travels as tourism as he searched for someplace where I am a virgin on the police blotter (Charters 1974: 154), but a key attraction of Mexico City for Burroughs was that heroin cost $30 a month versus $300 a month in the U.S. Hanging out with Burroughs in Mexico City would lead Kerouac to observe in Tristessa that the Worst (?) sensation in the world, to take morphine when you are drunk (Kerouac 1992: 19). Long before, the Southeast Asian sex industry (Urry 1997: 62) became a popular tourist attraction for North American men, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady had already found its Mexican counterpart. In Visions of Coady, Kerouac wrote that he and Cassady blasted a great rugged cigar of marijuana and then drove to town for our afternoon in the whorehouse, and money in our pockets, and no place to go, and in a foreign land, and high, and in the sun (Kerouac 1972: 297). In On The Road, Kerouac describes more fully the visit to the Mexican whorehouse and his experience with a prostitute where he claims we made the bed

123

402

R. Bill

bounce a half-hour (Kerouac 1957: 236). The price? Thirty pesos, or about $3.50 at the time (Kerouac 1957: 236). Mexico was not the only foreign country that offered Kerouac access to dope and women. Several years after the Mexican whorehouse visit, Kerouac commented on the availability of dope, specically marijuana, or t as he called it, and women in Morocco in a letter he wrote the Cassadys. He wrote you should see Morocco and all North Africa to believe it, imagine a whole culture of t-smokers-and those lil ole Arab gals with veils, that charge 3 bucks & pant and puff boy-(no disrespect to Ma, wholl read this (Maw) but wow what goils) (Cassady 1991: 288). Kerouacs interest in drugs and women is also on display and at the same time shrouded in Tristessa, which is an account of Kerouac falling in love with an exotic Indian woman in Mexico City who was a junkie and a prostitute. It was in Tristessas bedroom (where Kerouac had gone to buy drugs) that he realized the implications of taking morphine when you are drunk, but Kerouac, who professed love for Tristessa, wrote that theirs was a chaste relationship. However, according to Kerouac biographer Ann Charters, while Kerouac idealized Tristessa as his Madonna in print, he later told friends, I nally nailed her. You know? I did. I nally nailed herShe said Shhhhh! She gave herself a shot and I said, Ah nows the time. And I got my little nogood piece (Charters 1974: 233). Kerouac may have ranted about progress and civilization and the interference of bureaucracy in private lives (Cassady 1991: 280), he may have fantasized about living under a tree by the railroad tracks, or moving into an abandoned hut in Mexico, sitting and letting it all drift past him (Charters 1974: 193), and his foreign travels may be interpreted as a search for reality in other cultures, in purer, simpler lifestyles, but it is clear his foreign travels also included an element of exploitation. On Kerouac and Cassadys rst visit to Mexico, they gazed and gazed at our wonderful Mexican money that went so far (Kerouac 1957: 225) in a smoky border bar in Nuevo Laredo. Further south, Kerouac and Cassady spent some of the wonderful Mexican money they had gazed and gazed upon on marijuana and prostitutes. When they stopped for gas near Gregoria, a kid came across the road on tattered feet, carrying an enormous windshieldshade, and wanted to know if Id buy. You like? Sixty pesos. Habla Espanol? Sessenta peso. My name Victor. Nah, I said jokingly, buy senorita. Sure, sure! he cried excitedly. I get you gurls, onnytime. Too hot now, he added with distaste. No good gurls when hot day. Wait tonight Dean leaped out of the car and clapsed Victors hand Victor, you got gurls? Where? A donde? he cried in Spanish. Dig that, Sal, Im speaking Spanish. Ask him if we can get any tea. Hey kid, you got mar-ree-wa-na? The kid nodded gravely. Sho, onnytime, mon. Come with me (Kerouac 1957: 230231).

123

Jack Kerouac and the commodication of culture

403

Kerouac was not unaware that he was the guest who enjoyed some advantages in the power relationship with his hosts. Kerouac, who described Mexico as the magic land at the end of the road (Kerouac 1957: 225), wrote that the old men are so cool and grand and not bothered by anything. Theres no suspicion here, nothing like that. Everybodys cool (Kerouac 1957: 228). Everybody may have been cool, but compared to the Indians on the side of the road, Kerouac knew he was relatively wealthy, the Indians were not, and that the power relationship favoured the visitor. For example, he wrote that he bought pineapples from those Indians, for fractions of a penny: no fair exchange at all (Kerouac 1972: 380). The Indians, Kerouac wrote, with hands outstretched expect us three galoots goong in an old V-8 to come over and give them dollars; they dont know we discovered the atom bomb yet, they only vaguely heard about it. Well give it to them, alright (Kerouac 1972: 380). Kerouac also makes a reference to the atom bomb in his account of his 1955 journey from California to North Carolina to join his mother for Christmas. Kerouac said he had a strange vision as he drove along looking at the Alamogordo Mountains. In 1945, at an American Air Force base in Alamogordo, New Mexico, the rst nuclear explosion in history occurred. The light from the explosion was seen 180 miles away and the sound carried 100 miles. A massive cloud rose 41,000 feet (McCullough 1992: 430). Kerouac wrote in The Dharma Bums that he looked at the clouds above the mountains and saw the words as if imprinted in the sky: This Is The Impossibility of the Existence of Anything (Kerouac 2006: 98). Kerouac may have had a vision of Armageddon as he passed through the New Mexico desert, but my view is that discovering the bomb (it has always struck me as an odd choice of words for what was an act of creation or invention) became part of Americas imperial swagger, a swagger which Kerouac revealed a glimpse of in his encounter with the Indians beside the road in Mexico. It could be argued that Kerouac was sexist, racist, homophobic, and a neocolonialist for whom foreign travel was some kind of colonial quest (Lofgren 1999: 100) or a form of imperialism (Smith 1989: 3752). It is obvious there is evidence to support each of those contentions. Notwithstanding that Kerouac may have been sexist, racist, homophobic, and a neo-colonialist whose travels often involved the pursuit of drugs, it was Nostalgia, according to Allen Ginsberg, that dominated Jacks soul (Charters 1974: 53). Ginsberg, another central gure of the Beat Generation, wrote an introduction to Visions of Coady titled The Great Remember (Kerouac 1972: ixii) where he argued that Visions of Coady was a dirge for Americaan America of pioneers and generosity (Kerouac 1972: xii). Overton argues that nostalgia for a golden age, a past which can be transformed into a dreamed of future (Overton 1996: 9) is at the centre of Romanticism, and a romantic worldview is at the very heart of much tourism and tourist promotion (Overton 1996: 10).

123

404

R. Bill

Kerouacs nostalgia is on display in a description of what he called A GREAT AMERICAN INTERSECTION. Kerouacs imaginary great American intersection included a White Tower on one corner, diner (new blue cute kind with woman proprietorwaitress says Come on lets go to half-drunk eccentric) opposite, small beat white Mobilgas station on another corner (topped by red neoned ying redhorse, becluttered, white curbs soiled, car for sale, sign says Complete wheel alignment service and Brakes relined, tires for sale, used, including one vast graypainted truck tire), outdoor vegetable and fruit stand on the other (ice cold watermelon, red like re, we plum em) (Kerouac 1972: 37). Kerouacs romanticism is also seen in contrast to others who visited and described some of the same stops Kerouac made on the road. For example, in Kerouacs South, the moon was as bright as a bucket of ice (Kerouac 1972: 263), and in New Orleans the air was sweet. Kerouac wrote, At dusk we were coming into the humming streets of New Orleans. Oh, smell the people! yelled Dean with his face out the window, snifng. Ah! God! Life! He swung around a trolley. Yes! He darted the car and looked in every direction for girls. Look at her! The air was so sweet it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of Northern winter. We bounced in our seats. And dig her! yelled Neal, pointing at another woman (Kerouac 1957: 116). The poet Charles Bukowski also described the rst time he arrived New Orleans. Bukowski, who always distanced himself from the Beats, said, I never went on the road like Kerouac as a fullling experience (Miles 2005: 57). In contrast to Kerouacs account of his arrival in New Orleans, the streets hummed a different tune for Bukowski, and his account of his arrival cannot be confused with a script for a tourism ad. Bukowski wrote, I arrived in New Orleans in the rain at 5 oclock in the morning. I sat around in the bus station for a while but the people depressed me so I took my suitcase and went out in the rain and began walking The rain stopped and the sun came out. I was in the black district. I walked along slowly. Hey, poor white trash! I put my suitcase down. A high yellow was sitting on the porch steps swinging her legs. She did look good. Hello, poor white trash! I didnt say anything. I just stood there looking at her. Howd you like a piece of ass, poor white trash? She laughed at me. She had her legs crossed high and she kicked up her feet; she had nice legs, high heels, and kicked her legs and laughed. I picked up my suitcase and began to approach her up the walk. As I did I noticed a side

123

Jack Kerouac and the commodication of culture

405

curtain on a window to my left move just a bit. I saw a black mans face. He looked like Jersey Joe Walcott. I backed down the pathway to the sidewalk. Her laughter followed me down the street (Bukowski 1975: 11). There is another contrast between Bukowski and Kerouac in addition to the relative absence or presence of romanticism in their descriptions of their rst arrivals in New Orleans. They both criss-crossed America, but Bukowski really did live the life of a hobo, working at menial jobs as a member of the reserve army of labour for years. The same cannot be said for Kerouac.

Kerouac and the Hobo Kerouacs romanticism is also on display in a short story titled The Vanishing American Hobo (Kerouac 1973: 172183). Kerouac wrote that Proud was the way the hobo walked through a town by the back doors, where pies were cooling on window sills (Kerouac 1973: 181) and Theres nothing nobler than to put up with a few inconveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom (Kerouac 1973: 173). It was The Jet Age that was crucifying the hobo, lamented Kerouac, because how can he hop a freight jet (Kerouac 1973: 175). It can be argued that Kerouac was the rst in a new generation of American tourists, but Kerouac identied himself as part of a dying tradition, wanderers who were being squeezed out of an increasingly urban and modernizing America. Though Kerouac alternately claimed that he was not a real hobo, but a hobo of sorts (Kerouac 1973: 173), he obviously identied with the mystique of the transient outsider who dees societys watchdogs (London 2004: 159) and lives only in the present moment (London 2004: 52). Though Kerouac may have identied with hobos, Kerouac biographer Ann Charters says his travels usually didnt last long. A few weeks, a few months, and he was back with his mother writing it all down (Charters 1974: 92). Kerouac described himself as dressing in hobo pants and two bit hobo shirts (Kerouac 1992: 51), but compared to Jack Londons description of hobos in his book The Road (2004), Kerouac was being most honest when he said he was not a real hobo. In The Road, London describes begging for food at the back doors of houses in Reno, Nevada in 1892 when he was 16 years old. There were no pies cooling on the window sills when London wrote At one house they did not open the door. I stood on the porch and knocked, and they looked out at me through the window. They even held one sturdy little boy aloft so that he could see over the shoulders of his elders the tramp who wasnt going to get anything to eat at their house (London 2004: 13). In 1894, when Jack London was 18 years old, he joined Kellys Army, a contingent of 2,000 unemployed men who set out to march from California to Washington, D.C. to demand jobs in the midst of an economic depression. It was, literally, a reserve army of labour on the march. In a short story titled Two Thousand Stiffs, London describes a mob of tramps (or stiffs) taking over a train in Council

123

406

R. Bill

Bluffs, Iowa and General Charles Kelly later threatening to turn his hungry, desperate army loose upon the town of Red Rock if the towns committee of safety failed to provide food for the invaders (London 2004: 151). Jack London lived as a hobo and was arrested for vagrancy in Niagara Falls, New York. He was jailed in the Erie County Penitentiary where he witnessed things he said were unbelievable and monstrous (London 2004: 85). For example, London described an incident where eight men threw an inmate, who had the insane idea that he could stand up for his rights, down ve ights of steel stairs. London wrote that every convict within those walls who heard him scream had learned a lesson. So had I learned mine. It is not a nice thing to see a mans heart broken in a minute and a half (London 2004: 9394). In contrast, Jack Kerouac imagined what it was like to be a hobo. For example, in The Subterraneans, Kerouac falls in love with a woman named Mardou who had a Negro mother and an unknown Cherokee-halfbreed hobo father (Kerouac 1971: 22) he never met. Kerouac wrote, I kept imagining that Cherokee-halfbreed hobo father of hers lying bellydown on a atcar with the wind furling back his rags and black hat, his brown sad face facing all that land and desolation. At other moments I imagined him instead working as a picker around Indio and on a hot night hes sitting on a chair on the sidewalk among the joking shortsleeved men and he spits and they say, Hey hawk Taw, tell us that story again about the time you stole a taxicab and drove it clear to Manitoba, Canada-djever hear him tell that one Cy? (Kerouac 1971: 27). Jack Londons description of hobos reected a class consciousness that was lacking in Kerouac. For example, London described the wanderings of hobos as the circulation of this great mass of human beings (Raskin 2008: 71) resulting from a larger ebb and ow of our army of unemployed (Raskin 2008: 73). London wrote, Every spring the slums of the cities, the jails, poor houses, hospitals the holes and dens in which the winter has been spent give up their denizens who take to the Road. This is the ux. All summer they wander, covering thousands upon thousands of miles, and with fall, crawl back to their holes and dens again the ebb (Raskin 2008: 71). Kerouac may have identied with the downtrodden, and he and Neal Cassady may have been broke on more than one occasion, but Kerouac was hardly a member of the underclass. His father was a printer, and his mother worked in a shoe factory. Kerouac attended Columbia University on an athletic scholarship, and his periods of unemployment were more by choice than circumstance. In contrast, in an essay titled What Life Means To Me, Jack London wrote, I had been born in the working-class, and I was now, at the age of eighteen, beneath the point at which I had started. I was down in the cellar of society, down in the subterranean depths of misery about which it is neither nice or

123

Jack Kerouac and the commodication of culture

407

proper to speak. I was in the pit, the abyss, the human cesspool and charnelhouse of our civilization (Feied 2000: 25/26). No matter how malleable the concept of tourism is for anthropology I would argue the 1894 travels of Jack London and the hobos he marched with in Kellys Army could not be described as tourism. The same, I submit, cannot be said for the travels of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. The hobos of Jack Londons era rode across the country in empty boxcars. In contrast, when Jack Kerouac made his rst journey from New York to Denver to San Francisco in 1947, Kerouac wrote that he and another hitchhiker got stranded in Stuart, Iowa (Kerouac had taken a bus as far as Chicago), and they did not know how to hop a freight: wed never done it before; we didnt know whether they were going east or west or how to nd out or what boxcars and ats and de-iced reefers to pick, and so on. So, when the Omaha bus came through just before dawn we hopped on (Kerouac 1957: 17/18). Ironically, at dawn, the Omaha bus Kerouac had hopped on arrived in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the gathering spot for Kellys army of hobos in 1894, a fact that Kerouac did not note in his account of the bus stop in On The Road. Instead, Kerouac noted that he had read that Council Bluffs was a place where wagon parties held council before hitting the Oregon and Santa Fe trails (Kerouac 1957: 18). For Jack London, who would also be accused of romanticism on occasion, Council Bluffs was a major centre on the transcontinental railway where General Kelly, mounted on a magnicent black charger, and with waving banners, to the martial music of fe and drum corps, company by company, in two divisions, his two thousand stiffs (London 2004: 143) marched out to capture a train. In the 1890s, Jack London and the hobos like those in Kellys Army crisscrossed America on train tracks. Fifty years later, Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac made the journey on highways and mostly in cars. By the time Jack Kerouac met Neal Cassady in 1947, Cassady boasted that he had stolen over 500 cars in the period from 1940 to 1944 (Cassady 1990: 96). At one point Cassady worked in a parking lot and said, I was real crazy, Id steal cars every night, when I closed the lot at midnight Id take the best car on the lot and go joyriding (Kerouac 1972: 222). With Cassady behind the wheel and Kerouac in the passenger seat with his notebook, it is little wonder then that Kerouac biographer Ann Charters argues that No book has ever caught the feel of speeding down the broad highway in a new car, the mindless joyousness of joyriding like On The Road (Charters 1974: 104). Larsen argues correctly, in my view, that Kerouac and Cassady turned the road into a playground and mobility into a retreat (Holladay and Holton 2009: 42). They drove at ninety-mile-per-hour speeds, and a few years later Congress approved a network of interstate highway freeways with a design speed of seventymiles-per-hour socially sanctioning, in Larsens view, the kind of connectivity, speed, and mental space desired by Kerouac and Cassady (Holladay and Holton 2009: 55).

123

408

R. Bill

The image of Kerouac and Cassady speeding down the broad highway in a new car is hardly consistent with the image of two hobos hopping a freight train and making their way to California to pick fruit in the orchards. Regardless, whether Kerouac and Cassady were two hobos or a new kind of American tourist, a new transcontinental highway system would soon replace the transcontinental railway system in America and reorganize the tourist landscape. Researchers may disagree on what marks the beginning of the era of modern mass tourism in North America, but between 1945 and 1950 the number of registered vehicles in the United States increased by seventy per cent (Holladay and Holton 2009: 56), and Larsen citing Pierson notes that by 1953 seventy-two million Americans, or one-half the country, were devoting at least part of their vacation trips on the road (Holladay and Holton 2009: 37). Kerouacs rst crosscountry journey was in 1947, and by the time On The Road was published ten years later and Kerouacs wandering days were largely over, the rst Disneyland was open, Dwight Eisenhower was the President of the United States, and Congress had approved the National Defense Highway System, a network of 41,000 miles of divided, high-speed highways (Holladay and Holton 2009: 55). It is my view that Kerouac used Americas highway network and its tributaries into Mexico in a search for authenticity and that he was a kind of contemporary pilgrim (Urry 1997: 8). Among the issues that view raises are choice of theoretical starting points from which to examine the notion of authenticity and the arguments surrounding what is meant by authenticity. I wish to address those questions with some thoughts about the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of lonely crowds and some comments on the literature of authenticity.

Kerouac and the lonely crowds Kerouac and the Beats rejection of suburban conformity and their spirit of rebellion was captured in Allen Ginsbergs landmark 1955 performance of the poem Howl, which was published a year later. In The Poem That Changed America: Howl Fifty Years Later (2006), Jason Shinder describes Howl, as perhaps the critical outsider poem of the modern era (my emphasis) (Shinder 2006: xxii). For Kerouac being on the inside meant living in a suburb. Being on the outside meant travelling across the country. Kerouac illustrated this sense of inside and outside in the account of a 1955 journey from California to his mothers home in North Carolina for Christmas. In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac wrote that he was hitchhiking, and a truck driver picked him up in Yuma, Arizona. First, they made a side trip to Mexico where Kerouac took the truck driver to the good old saloons of real Mexico where there were girls at a peso a dance and raw tequila and lots of fun (Kerouac 2006: 97) and then to visit a whorehouse. Following the side trip to Mexico, they drove almost non-stop to Ohio. Kerouacs rejection of middle class, suburban life is obvious in his account of the truck drivers comments after Kerouac cooks a two-inch T-bone steak over an open re in the desert that the truck driver claims is the best steak I ever et (Kerouac 2006: 9798). The truck driver, according to Kerouac, said,

123

Jack Kerouac and the commodication of culture

409

Here I am killin myself driving this rig back and forth from Ohio to L.A. and I make more money than you ever had in your whole life as a hobo, but youre the one who enjoys life and not only that but you do it without workin or a whole lot of money. Now whos smarter, you or me? And he had a nice home in Ohio with wife, daughter, Christmas tree, two cars, garage, lawn, lawnmower but he couldnt enjoy any of it because he really wasnt free (Kerouac 2006: 98). It could be argued that the truck drivers frustration illustrates what Debord calls the alienation of the spectator (Debord 2006: 16). The point where the outsider Kerouac and his rebellion against being a mass person could be said to intersect with Debords theory of the Spectacle is, I suggest, in Debords notion of the lonely crowds (Debord 2006: 15). In Thesis 28 of Society Of The Spectacle, Debord argues that the reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation reinforcing the conditions that engender lonely crowds (Debord 2006: 15emphasis in the original). In his only specic reference to tourism in The Society of the Spectacle, Debord describes tourism as human circulation packaged for consumption (Debord 2006: 94). In the lm version of The Society of the Spectacle, the visual image that accompanied Debords reference to tourism being human circulation packaged for consumption is that of touristic sightseeing boats on the Seine with guides commenting on the sights (Knabb 2005: 67). Kerouac and Cassady did not join sightseeing tours. They were travellers and they gravitated to two places: New York City, where Kerouac and Cassady met while Kerouac was a student at Columbia University, and San Francisco, the two centres of the Beat counter-culture in the United States. Kerouac also returned to his mothers home throughout his life, but the two men were in some ways nomadic. For example, in On The Road, Kerouac described a moment when he and Neal Cassady arrived in Denver and unloaded their luggage Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But, no matter, the road is life (Kerouac 1957: 175). In another example of ninety-mile-an-hour travel and mobility as a retreat in Visions of Coady, Kerouac described a 1949 journey from San Francisco to New York with Cassady: a trip that was so frantic and so crazy that it has a beginning and an end, began in the heat of the wildest excitement, great jazz, fast driving, women, accidents, arrests, all night movies, and ended all petered out in the dark of Long Island, where we walked a few blocks around my house just because we were so used to moving (Kerouac 1972: 350). Alienated though they may have been, Kerouac and Cassady do not neatly t into Debords notion of the lonely crowd. Unfortunately, given Debords advocacy of plagiarism, it may not be appropriate to credit him with originating the notion of lonely crowds or his use of the concept.

123

410

R. Bill

Plant, in her analysis of the Society Of The Spectacle, notes that much of the book consists of passages plagiarised and subtly rewritten (Plant 1992: 8). Plants observation is not a matter of conjecture, as Debord asserts in Thesis 207 of Society Of The Spectacle that Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it (Plant 1992: 113). Thesis 207 is called Ideas Improve, and Debord acknowledges that his notion of improvement involves deleting an authors false idea and replacing it with the right one (Plant 1992: 113). Not only does Debord appear to have purloined the concept of lonely crowds, some argue he also borrowed his justication of plagiarism almost word for word from Isidore Ducasse who wrote in 1870, Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress (Knabb 2005: 229 and Merrield 2005: 18). A reasonable suspicion is that Debord may have taken the concept of lonely crowds from Riesmans 1950 analysis of the new American middle class, The Lonely Crowd (1961), and improved it to suit his project. It is Riesmans lonely crowd that may be a better t for Kerouac and Cassady. The Lonely Crowd, like the Society Of The Spectacle, was concerned with the shift from the age of production to the age of consumption (Riesman et al. 1961: 6), and both analyses came to similar conclusions about leisure. In Thesis 27, Debord states what is referred to as a liberation from work, namely the modern increase in leisure time, is neither a liberation of work itself nor a liberation from the world shaped by this kind of work (Debord 2006: 15). While not an optimist, Riesman is less a determinist. He concluded that leisure itself cannot rescue work, but fails with it, and can only be meaningful for most men if work is meaningful (Riesman et al. 1961: xiv). When addressing the question, Who really runs things? (Riesman et al. 1961: 220) Riesman and his colleagues (credit for The Lonely Crowd is shared with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney) say, while they can learn from Marx, we are not satised with the answers (Riesman et al. 1961: 220). In contrast, Debord contends in Thesis 6 that the spectacle is both the result and the goal of the dominate mode of production (Debord 2006: 8). Riesman and his colleagues, on the other hand, noted that many social scientists have concluded that individual and social character may become of decreasing importance as factors of production in the modern world; that indeed to interpret society one need not enquire into the motives of men, but rather notice that the situations they face are much alike, that the power of modern technology and science, modern economic organization, modern ideological and party organization is such that a single style of society becomes possible everywhere (Riesman et al. 1961: xxiii). Riesman and his colleagues, however, said they were reluctant to accept these versions of determinism (Riesman et al. 1961: xxiii). The signicance of the distinction, I believe, is that Riesmans continues to have condence in individual and social character as factors of production and writes with what he says is a hopefulness for a society which accepts rather than rejects new potentialities for leisure (Riesman et al. 1961: 160). One can argue about what meaningful means, but I would argue that the stops on Kerouacs journeys locates him in Riesmans lonely crowd rather than Debords version of the lonely crowd. For example, Debord describes tourism as

123

Jack Kerouac and the commodication of culture

411

the opportunity to go and see what has been banalised (Debord 2006: 94). Interpreting Kerouacs travels from this perspective, if spectators prefer the banal, then it should follow that Kerouac would have travelled from one shopping mall and theme park and phony heritage site to another. Instead, Kerouacs travels took him to jazz joints, to the hideaways of the postmodern writer William Burroughs, in search of drugs in Mexico, and to jobs on railroads and at sea rather than monotonous jobs in ofces or on factory assembly lines. Whether Kerouac represented the end of an old tradition of travellers or the beginning of a new tradition of travellers, his travels were clearly a search for the real rather than the fake.

Kerouac and authenticity MacCannells theory of the leisure class is premised, in part, on the view that for moderns, reality and authenticity are thought to be elsewhere (MacCannell 1989: 3). Yet, in an article published twelve years later, MacCannell acknowledged that there are problems with the notion of authenticity and asked, Can faraway places be experienced as authentic and natural when they are constructed, articial habitats made entirely for tourists to visit? (MacCannell 2001: 380). Postmoderns have also identied other problems with MacCannells premise. Rather than tourism being a journey of discovery, some argue that holiday makers want hyper-reality: We want extra-authenticity, that which is better than reality (Boniface and Fowler 1993: 7). Regardless, there are different meanings, Bruner argues, for the word authentic. He argues, it can mean accurate, genuine, or true to a postulated original (Boniface and Fowler 1993: 96), but Bruner concludes that tourists enter into a willing suspension of disbelief and what research should focus on are the mechanisms which make the tourist performance believable, in effect collapsing the problem of authenticity into the problem of verisimilitude (Bruner 2005: 209). The question of what does authenticity mean can be illustrated in two tourist experiences in Mexican drinking settings. One is an account by Kerouac and the other an account by Bukowski. In Tristessa, Kerouac describes going to the home of El Indio (the Black Bastard) (Kerouac 1992: 69) in a Mexico City slum to buy morphine. Kerouac waits in a crazy courtyard full of screaming children and drunks and women with wash and banana peels (Kerouac 1992: 69), where a man offers him a glass of pulque, a Mexican liquor. Kerouac writes I offer money for the pulque but they wont take it It starts to grow dark in the courtyard More fellows appear and they invite me into a big room where a big white table is covered with pulque cups and on the oor open urns of it and theres an old singer with a guitarand a big fat hostess woman like out of Reabelais and Rembrant Middle Ages who sings later I give twenty pesos to a big fat guy to go out and get some marijuana for the whole crowd meanwhile in a blind dazzle of ecstasy I throw fty pesos on the oor to prove something Later I throw two pesos on the oor saying Its for the music

123

412

R. Bill

They end up feeding that to the two musicians but Im too proud after reconsideration to start looking around for my 50 pesos too but you will see that this is just a case of wanting to be robbed, a strange kind of exultation and drunken power, I dont care about money, I am the King of the world (Kerouac 1992: 7172). In a poem titled sometimes you go a bit crazy (Bukowski 1990: 143144), Charles Bukowski wrote that after a lucky day at the horse track and a lucky night at the dog track and not giving a shit about anything and feeling brave instead of driving back to L.A. I drove around the streets of Tijuana until I found a bar that I liked. I parked, gave 3 street urchins a dollar a piece, with more promised later, to guard my car. I went in, sat down and ordered a tequila. there were 4 or 5 natives in there, real cool, man. I drank the tequila and ordered another. everything was all right until a toreador song came on over the jukebox (at least I considered it to be one) and I got up and I grab a chair and pretended I was holding off a bull. I made giant leaps and spins and also worked in some fancy dance steps. the song ended and the men applauded. I bowed, sat down and ordered another tequila. hey, senor, one of the men asked, can you do that again? sure, I drank the tequila. put the song on again. I got up and did the same thing all over again only not as good for I was nally getting drunk. but still the gentlemen were generous with their applause. I sat down, bought drinks all around

123

Jack Kerouac and the commodication of culture

413

and had a nal tequila. it was a pleasant parting outside my car was still there and the urchins too. I didnt have any ones so I gave them a ve and let them ght over it. (Bukowski 1990: 143144) What distinguishes the two accounts of American visitors drinking in Mexico is that the setting for Bukowski is a commercial bar, or what Goffman would characterize as a front region (MacCannell 1989: 92), and the setting for Kerouac was some sort of a private space off of a courtyard in a slum, or a back region. Bukowski listened to what sounded to him like a toreador song on a jukebox and then, leaping and spinning to the applause of the men in the bar, he fought an imaginary bull. It could be argued that the Tijuana bar was part of an industry which had been developed to meet the tourist gaze (Urry 1997: 40), and Bukowskis account is one of a staged authenticity. Kerouac, on the other hand, went backstage where local musicians appeared and pulque was dispensed from urns on the oor and theres a lot of knocking of cups and arm-around-chugalugs down, and song (Kerouac 1992: 72). If real lives can only be seen backstage, then, romanticized or not, Kerouacs experience, I suggest, was the more authentic. There is an interesting body of research to support the notion that authenticity is in the eye of the beholder, and I am comfortable arguing that perspective (Bruner 2005, Fife 2004, Jewesbury 2003, Stronza 2001), but I would also concur with Bruner and that authenticity today is becoming a matter of the politics of connoisseurship of power, of who has the right to authenticate (Bruner 2005: 163). In Culture on Tour (2005), Bruner argues there are fundamental problems with the essentialist vocabulary of originals and copies, of the authentic and inauthentic (Bruner 2005: 163), and his project is to distinguish tourist realism (Bruner 2005: 49) from authenticity and view tourist productions for what they are in the present, not for what they are assumed to represent when seen through the lens of simulation, hyperreality, authenticity, or orientalism (Bruner 2005: 28). Bruners research in Africa also led him to speculate about the impact of looking at things differently. He concluded that Tourism changed life as lived our stories merge with theirs (Bruner 2005: 23). Bruner dismisses the idea that the homogenization of world cultures is inevitable, but based on his research in Kenya he wondered, Where does Maasai culture begin and Hollywood image end? (Bruner 2005: 92). In a separate publication focused on the same research site, Tucker suggests part of an answer to Bruners query about where Maasai culture begins and Hollywood imagery ends is found in the concerns of researchers in the developing world who see the relations between tourists and their hosts as taking

123

414

R. Bill

place through the same general power idiom which always ultimately favors the guests (Tucker 2001: 468). In his Mexican travels, Kerouac sometimes claims to have been innocent (Kerouac 1972: 379). He wrote that he and Cassady were no different than the Indians beside the road with their hands outstretched, All the Indians along the road want something from us. We wouldnt be on the road if we had it. (Kerouac 1972: 380). In almost the same breath, however, Kerouac acknowledges that he is very much aware that he and Cassady were different from their hosts. He wrote, Whooee, lets go, lets have a ball, some cunts in the hay, some Tahitian misses in disguise, pay for the father and run off with the house and kick the dog, make the brothers mad, ruin Mexico for Americans forever (Kerouac 1972: 378). Nunez argues that acculturation theory explains the process of mutual borrowing that occurs when two cultures come into contact, but that the borrowing between tourist and host is asymmetrical, as tourists are less likely to borrow from their hosts than their hosts are from them, thus precipitating a chain of change in the host community (Smith 1989: 266). MacCannell goes even further to argue that this change in the host community is self-destructive. In his Remarks on the Commodication of Culture, MacCannell argues that in trying to be distinctive for tourists local culture is destroyed by an emergent culture of tourism (MacCannell 2001: 384).

Conclusion I would argue that the road Kerouac travelled was a quest for authenticity, or at least a romantic American version of authenticity. For example, Kerouac wrote in On The Road that his life on the road began with the coming of Dean Moriarity, and his rst impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry - trim, thin-hipped, blueeyed, with a real Oklahoma accent a sideburned hero of the snowy west (Kerouac 1957: 6). Neal Cassady may have been a car thief from Denver with a 16-year-old wife, but to Jack Kerouac he was a western kinsman of the sun (Kerouac 1957: 11). Kerouac biographer Ann Charters contends that Kerouacs vision of Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarity) in On The Road centred in one of the most vital fantasies of America, the dream of the cowboy, free and footloose, become a drifter with the crowding and commercialization of modern life (Charters 1974: 289). To be free of the crowding and commercialization of modern life underlies MacCannells contention that tourists are engaged in a quest for authenticity. Kerouacs search, however, was closer to what MacCannell characterized as a kind of antitourism (MacCannell 2001: 382) where the object of the search was real as opposed to tourist experiences.

123

Jack Kerouac and the commodication of culture

415

When Kerouac met his western kinsman of the sun, he wrote that his mother (Kerouac identied her as his aunt in On The Road) warned me he would get me in trouble (Kerouac 1957: 11). Kerouac did not heed the warning. He wrote Somewhere along the line I knew thered be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me (Kerouac 1957: 11). Kerouacs search for the pearl was a search for the real, but it was also a search for something left behind in Americas mythical past. His was a search fuelled by a combination of alienation and nostalgia that would also fuel another journey more than twenty years after Kerouac rst set off for San Francisco in 1947. In 1968, Robert Prisig and his 11-year-old son Chris travelled from Minneapolis, Minnesota to San Francisco on a motorcycle, and their journey was captured in Prisigs book Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (A year ago, I gave it and a copy of Andy Merrields The Wisdom of Donkeys to one of my children when they left St. Johns, Newfoundland on a ight to Paris). On the fth day of their journey, Prisig wrote The heat just slams into us (Prisig 1999: 102), as he and his son and their travelling companions, John and Sylvia Sutherland, crossed into Montana. They stopped at a restaurant in the town of Baker, and the temperature in the sun was 120 degrees. As they made their way west, they entered a canyon and began to follow a meandering road as it slowly rose. Prisig wrote Some shrubs appear. Then small trees. The road goes higher still into grass, and then fenced meadows. Overhead a small cloud appears. Rain perhaps? Perhaps. Meadows must have rain. And these now have owers there are trees, pines, and a cold wind comes down with pine smells from the trees. The owers in the meadow blow in the wind and the cycle leans a little and we are suddenly coolI look at Chris and he is smiling. I am smiling too. Then the rain comes hard on the road with a gust of earth-smellmy clothes become wetwe reach the top of the climb dry again but cool now and stop, overlooking a huge valley and river below. I think we have arrived, John says. Sylvia and Chris have walked into the meadow among the owers under pines through which I can see the far side of the valley, away and below. I am a pioneer now, looking onto a promised land (Prisig 1999: 110111). In 2008, forty years after, Robert Prisig looked through the eyes of an American pioneer out onto a promised land, journalist, Mark Richardson published Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Prisig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (2008). Zen and Now was Richardsons account of getting on his motorcycle and retracing Prisigs route from Minneapolis to San Francisco. As Richardson prepared for the journey, he met John Sutherland, who told Richardson he is sought out every year by Prisigs Pilgrims retracing the route of Prisigs journey (Richardson 2008: 18). I submit that a line can be drawn from Jack Kerouacs travels through to Robert Prisigs travels and onto Mark Richardsons travels. For Kerouac, the road became a playground, and mobility itself was the escape, both being characteristics, I would

123

416

R. Bill

argue, of the wave of automobile tourism that accompanied the creation of Americas interstate freeway network in the 1950s. The irony in making a case for Kerouac as a precursor for coming of mass tourism in America is that Kerouacs travels could also be fairly described as an example of what MacCannell called antitourism, or the search for real as opposed to tourist experiences. Kerouacs quest was a search for the real rather than the fake, and his was a rebellion against the inauthenticity of everyday life in postWorld War II America. The irony in that is highlighted by a coincidence in timing. In 1952, the year Kerouac joined Bill Burroughs in Mexico City, the Holiday Inn motel chain (promising no surprises) was started (Holladay and Holton 2009: 56), and in 1955, the year Allen Ginsberg performed the monumental poem Howl at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, Ray Kroc opened the rst McDonalds franchise restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois (Holladay and Holton 2009: 56).

References
Boniface, Priscilla, and Peter J. Fowler. 1993. Heritage and tourism in the global village. New York: Routledge. Bruner, Edward M. 2005. Culture on tour: Ethnographies of travel. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Bukowski, Charles. 1975. Factotum. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press. Bukowski, Charles. 1990. Septuagenarian stew: Stories and poems. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press. Cassady, Carolyn. 1976. Heart beat: My life with jack and neal. Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company. Cassady, Carolyn. 1991. Off the road: My years with cassady, kerouac, and ginsberg. New York: Penguin Books. Charters, Ann. 1974. Kerouac: A biography. New York: Warner Paperback. Coleman, Simon, and Mike Crang. 2003. Tourism: Between place and performance. Oxford: Berghahn. Debord, Guy. 2006. Society of the spectacle. New York: Rebel Press. Feied, Frederick. 2000. No pie in the sky: The hobo as American cultural hero in the works of Jack London, John Dos Passos, and Jack London. San Jose: Authors Choice Press. Fife, Wayne. 2004. Penetrating types: Conating modernist and postmodernist tourism on the great northern peninsula of Newfoundland. Journal of American Folklore 117 (464): 147167. Gewirtz, Issac. 2008. Beatic soul: Jack Kerouac on the road. New York: Scala Publishers. Holladay, Hilary, and Robert Holton. 2009. Whats your road, man? critical essay on Jack Kerouacs On The Road. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Jewesbury, Daniel. 2003. Tourist:pioneer:hybrid: London Bridge, the Mirage in the Arizona Desert in Visual culture and tourism, ed. D. Crouch and N. Lubbren, 223239, Oxford: Berg. Kerouac, Jack. 1957. On the Road. New York: Viking Press (Signet). Kerouac, Jack. 1966. Satori in Paris. New York: Grove Press. Kerouac, Jack. 1971. The Subterraneans. New York: Grove Press. Kerouac, Jack. 1972. Visions of Cody. New York: McGraw-Hill. Kerouac, Jack. 1973. Lonesome Traveler. New York: Ballantine Books. Kerouac, Jack. 1992. Tristessa. New York: Penguin Books. Kerouac, Jack. 2006. The Dharma Bums. New York: Penguin Books. Knabb, Ken. 2005. Guy Debord: Complete cinematic worksScripts, stills, documents (translated and edited by Ken Kanbb). Oakland, CA: AK Press. Lofgren, Orvar. 1999. On holiday: A history of vacationing. Berkeley: University of California Press. London, Jack. 2004. The Road. Faireld, IA. 1st World LibraryLiterary Society. MacCannell, Dean. 1989. The tourist: A new theory of the leisure class. New York: Schocken Books. MacCannell, Dean. 2001. The commodication of culture. In Hosts and guests revisited: Tourism issues of the 21st century, ed. Valene E. Smith and Maryann Brent, 380390. New York: Cognizant Communications Corp.

123

Jack Kerouac and the commodication of culture

417

McCullough, David. 1992. Truman. New York: Simon and Schuster. Merrield, Andy. 2005. Guy Debord. London: Reaktion Books. Miles, Barry. 2005. Charles Bukowski. London: Virgin Books. Overton, James. 1996. Introduction, and promoting the real Newfoundland: Culture as tourist commodity, in Making a world of difference: Essays on tourism, culture, and development in Newfoundland, 142 and 101123. St. Johns: ISER Books. Plant, Sadie. 1992. The most radical gesture: The situationist international in a post modern age. New York: Routledge. Prisig, Robert. 1999. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: An inquiry into values. New York: Harper Torch. Raskin, Johan. 2008. The radical Jack London: Writings on war and revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press. Richardson, Mark. 2008. Zen and now: On the trail of Robert Prisig and the art of motorcycle maintenance. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Riesman, David, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney. 1961. The lonely crowd. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shinder, Jason. 2006. The poem that changed america: Howl fty years later. New York: Farrar Straus, and Giroux. Smith, Valene L. 1989. Hosts and guests: The anthropology of tourism, 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stronza, Amanda. 2001. Anthropology of tourism: Forging new ground for ecotourism and other alternatives. Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 261283. Tucker, Hazel. 2001. Tourists and troglodytes: Negotiating for sustainability. Annals of Tourism Research 28 (4): 868891. Urry, John. 1997. The tourist gaze: Leisure and travel in contemporary societies. London: Sage Publications.

123