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What’s Your Road, Man?
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EDITED BY
HILARY HOLLADAY AND
ROBERT HOLTON

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY PRESS / CARBONDALE

Copyright © 2009 by the Board of Trustees,
Southern Illinois University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

12 11 10 09 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

What’s your road, man? : critical essays on Jack Kerouac’s On
the road / edited by Hilary Holladay and Robert Holton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8093-2883-3 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8093-2883-6 (alk. paper)
1. Kerouac, Jack, 1922–1969. On the road. 2. Autobiographical
fiction, American—History and criticism. 3. Beat generation in
literature. I. Holladay, Hilary. II. Holton, Robert, [date].
PS3521.E735O55 2008
813'.54—dc22 2008014766

The editors wish to thank the Virginia Foundation for the

Humanities for generous support during the final stages of
this book’s composition.

Permission to reprint materials has been granted by the Gins-

berg Trust; the Estate of Stella Kerouac, John Sampas, literary
representative; the Newberry Library; Robert Cowley; Chris
Jennison; Dave Moore; and Berghahn Journals.

Printed on recycled paper.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum re-
quirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1992. ∞
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Hilary Holladay

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So much of what Jack Kerouac wrote in On the Road (1957) seemed to spring
full-blown from the collective unconsciousness of post–World War II
America. The yearning for personal relevance, the awkward infatuation with
cultures other than his own, that restless desire to get up and move—these
feelings were not Kerouac’s alone, though he perhaps better than anyone
else of his generation knew how to put them into words. And when Ker-
ouac (in the guise of his protagonist Sal Paradise) wrote about the bulging
landscape and riddling roadways of the United States and Mexico, he was
not just taking his readers on one long trip or another: he was document-
ing the physical, social, psychological, and religious strands of experience
that make up any real journey. Kerouac’s readers, even his detractors, have
always understood that the road trip stands for the life trip.
By the time one reaches the last page of On the Road, it is clear that the
casual, the silly, and the spectacular moments in Sal Paradise’s travels all
add up to something life-changing and life-affirming. And yet, what is
that something? The significantly named Paradise does not say. We are
left to figure out his journey’s meaning for ourselves and to apply its les-
sons—whatever they are—to our own lives. Like Henry David Thoreau,
whom Kerouac admired, the novel’s narrator implicitly asks us to think
about who we are, what we want to do, and with whom we want to spend
our time. Not only does Paradise’s meandering tale invite this sort of deep
reflection; it also inspires interaction. In an age when many people prefer

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their cell phones and laptops to the person right in front of them, reading
On the Road in public can get a face-to-face conversation started. It is a book
that commands eye contact.
In 2007, the year marking its fiftieth anniversary, On the Road and its
charismatic author garnered the sort of worldwide media attention that
warrants some comment in itself. Kerouac, who was remarkably prescient
when it came to imagining his future reputation, would have been pleased
but not entirely surprised by all the publicity. Since he had gone to the
trouble of saving his 120-foot-long scroll manuscript of On the Road—the
single-spaced, single paragraph that he typed rapidly in April of 1951—even
the international traveling exhibit of the scroll and the publication of On
the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking, 2007) might have seemed perfectly
natural to him. But for those of us who teach Kerouac and write about him
and his books, and for those who have loved On the Road ever since they first
read it, the year was nothing short of extraordinary. Rarely a week—rarely a
day—went by in 2007 that Kerouac’s name did not show up in a newspaper
or magazine, or on TV or radio.
Now more than ever, it seems, reading Paradise’s tale brings out the
questing young wanderer in many a reader, no matter one’s age, gender,
nationality, or predilection for all things Beat. Paradise extends his hand and
we reach for it: our fingers not quite touching his, we dream of his travels,
our travels, and all the love, excitement, and sorrow in between. The public
acclaim, thankfully, has not diminished the private yearnings that many
people feel when reading this gentle-hearted, dizzyingly solipsistic book.
It may seem that scholars are arriving late at the Kerouac party, but as my
coeditor, Robert Holton, points out in this volume’s introduction, that is not
entirely true. A handful of dedicated critics published important books about
Kerouac’s writing within two decades of his death in 1969, and a number of
biographers have filled in the details of Kerouac’s life. Without these books,
current Kerouac scholarship would still be in its infancy. But it is neverthe-
less true that most scholars of twentieth-century American literature have
long overlooked the Beat writers with whom Kerouac is always grouped. The
questions that naysayers have posed about the value of Kerouac’s writing and
the seriousness of the Beat Movement probably dissuaded many a graduate
student from writing a dissertation on this compelling and prolific author.
That is a shame but not a tragedy, since scholars both young and advanced
in their careers are now turning their full attention to Kerouac and finding
his books ripe for critical exegesis of many kinds.
The volume that Robert Holton and I have assembled examines On the
Road from ten different perspectives. These essays collectively represent an

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enormous amount of research into On the Road’s literary, social, cultural,

biographical, and historical contexts. In several of the essays, the applica-
tion of critical theory illuminates the novel in ways that neither Kerouac
nor his contemporary critics could have foreseen. Other essays enhance our
understanding of the book through comparisons with a novel by a female
contemporary (Sylvia Plath) and with Kerouac’s alternative versions of On
the Road (including Visions of Cody). Kerouac’s portrayal of Mexicans is
specifically addressed in one essay, while several others analyze issues of
race, ethnicity, and sexuality in support of larger arguments. Still others
reevaluate the novel’s place in American literature and comment on its
continuing relevance.
The first essay is Matt Theado’s “Revisions of Kerouac: The Long, Strange
Trip of the On the Road Typescripts.” Through painstaking biographical
and historical research, Theado has reconstructed Kerouac’s composition
of his famous 1951 scroll manuscript of On the Road. Theado’s essay goes
on to discuss the subsequent drafts of the novel that was finally published
in 1957. From this documentary essay we turn to Lars Erik Larson’s “Free
Ways and Straight Roads: The Interstates of Sal Paradise and 1950s America.”
This essay examines Sal’s adventures in relation to the evolving interstate
highway system of the late 1940s. As Larson writes, “Kerouac’s roads grant
his protagonists freedom on a great number of different levels, including
departures from capitalism, family kinships, adult conduct, heterosexuality,
race, and nationality. Yet the novel’s desires run both ways, for it also stages
a backlash against many of these liberations.”
These roadways into the novel lead us to Robert Holton’s “The Tenement
Castle: Kerouac’s Lumpen-Bohemia.” This essay, in its examination of the
historical underpinnings of the bohemian label so often applied to Kerouac
and his friends, helps us see both text and author in an entirely new light.
“The positions occupied by Kerouac and the Beats can be located in terms
of debates that arose more than a century before, when Parisian bohemians
emerged from the tumult of the French Revolution brimming with artistic
imagination, radical ideas, and oppositional attitudes,” Holton writes.
On the Road is, among many other things, a novel about two footloose
young men trying to define themselves not as Beats or bohemians but simply,
and significantly, as men. As Mary Paniccia Carden shows in “‘Adventures
in Auto-Eroticism’: Economies of Traveling Masculinity in On the Road and
The First Third,” the works of Kerouac and Neal Cassady invite a comparative
reading. Both books, Carden argues, “construct economies of masculinity in
which male travelers negotiate and trade the markers of manhood encoded
in Cassady’s ‘auto-erotic’ ideal. These forms of exchange, however, ultimately

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serve to destabilize connections that Kerouac and Cassady want and need
to make between mobility, masculinity, and power.”
I take a comparative approach of another kind in “Parallel Destinies in
On the Road and The Bell Jar.” Although On the Road and the 1963 novel by
Sylvia Plath are quite different on the surface, I argue that in their preoc-
cupation with dying and their fundamental lack of direction, Sal Paradise
and Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood have a great deal in common and are,
in effect, equally beat. I show, furthermore, that The Bell Jar can be profitably
read in the context of the Beat Movement, even though Plath chose not to
ally herself with that movement.
In an essay that looks at On the Road’s publication history from a per-
spective very different from Theado’s, we have “‘Dedicated to America,
Whatever That Is’: Kerouac’s Versions of On the Road” by R. J. Ellis. Here,
Ellis compares two versions of On the Road (the scroll manuscript and the
published book) with the two published editions of Visions of Cody. Noting
that the posthumously published 1972 edition of Cody functions “as a para-
textual commentary upon Road’s aspirations, highlighting the inevitability
of Sal’s failures and failings,” Ellis portrays On the Road as a fluid endeavor,
which neither begins nor ends with the 1957 text.
To date, scholars have only begun to respond to the novel’s conflicted
portrayals of ethnicity and race. Rachel Ligairi advances the discussion
considerably in her essay “When Mexico Looks like Mexico: The Hyper-
realization of Race and the Pursuit of the Authentic.” Drawing on the
writings of Jean Baudrillard, Ligairi reveals how Sal Paradise’s perceptions
of what is real and what is only simulated determine his response to the
unfamiliar people and places he encounters on his journeys in the United
States and especially in Mexico. “Sal and Dean don’t recognize the gap
between the simulation they project onto [the Mexican] people and the
people themselves,” she writes. “Voiceless, they are relegated to the realm
of the hyperreal, which Sal and Dean mistake for the authentic. And this
is the novel’s final irony—at the very moment when IT seems attainable,
simulacrum reigns supreme.”
Sal Paradise’s perceptual difficulties have a lot to do with his tenuous
sense of his own identity. So Michael Skau reveals in “The Makings of
Paradise.” Given the confluence of political oppression and social experi-
mentation that marked the Beats’ coming of age, Skau observes that Kerouac
and his cohorts formed the “conviction that the personal identity of the
individual was besieged; therefore, the integrity of that identity must be
preserved at all costs. For Sal Paradise of On the Road, that means a quest
for the idiosyncratic and often ambivalent identification of selfhood and

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nostalgia for the security and irresponsibility of childhood in a world that

seems to promise only the guarantees of aging and mortality.”
The last two essays in this volume are by critics whose groundbreaking
studies helped create the foundation for all subsequent Kerouac scholarship.
In “Typetalking: Voice and Performance in On the Road,” Tim Hunt takes a
new look at the novel he examined in his 1981 study, Kerouac’s Crooked Road:
Development of a Fiction. Returning to the novel he first encountered in 1971,
Hunt asks, “[W]hy are we still able to read On the Road rather than just study
it? And how might some understanding of this help us not only better ap-
preciate the novel’s achievement but also better understand its significance
as a cultural document, be clearer about the cultural work it has done, and
more adequately assess the cultural work it can and cannot do?”
Regina Weinreich’s essay, “Can On the Road Go on the Screen?” con-
cludes this collection. The author of Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics: A Study
of the Fiction (1987) addresses the challenges of filming a novel whose effect
depends largely on the transformative power of its language. Though the
book’s central friendship and its travelogue element beg for a Hollywood
rendition, Weinreich argues that a new filmic vocabulary is needed in order
to convey the novel’s ineffable spirit.
Kerouac did not begin to receive his critical due in his lifetime. When he
died in 1969, the vocabulary and theoretical structures didn’t yet exist to de-
scribe and probe all of what he was doing in On the Road. From our current
vantage point, we are able to discuss his 1957 breakthrough in ways that were
not available to earlier generations. In answer to the enigmatic question that
Dean Moriarty poses to Sal Paradise—“What’s your road, man?”—scholars
can go down many different critical paths. Although one collection cannot
take on the full range of themes and issues that On the Road invites us to
consider, the breadth of approaches in this volume indicates just how rich
and nuanced Kerouac’s most popular novel really is.

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L=6IÉHNDJGGD69!B6C4
>CIGD9J8I>DC
Robert Holton

The publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in September 1957 was an

event whose significance must be considered on a number of levels. In the
first place, of course, it was important for Kerouac himself. After many years
of bohemian marginality, Kerouac was transformed, literally overnight,
from an obscure coterie figure to a major American author. With the appear-
ance of Gilbert Millstein’s adulatory New York Times review on September
5, Kerouac was vaulted into literary celebrity. Not only was the novel “an
authentic work of art,” according to Millstein, its appearance amounted to
nothing less than “a historic occasion.” On the Road, he declared, “is the
most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance
yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and
whose principal avatar he is” (27).
This review was itself an unlikely stroke of fortune: Millstein was substi-
tuting for the regular Times reviewer, and he was well aware of the Beats and
already positively disposed toward their work. It was Millstein, for example,
who had arranged for the publication in the Times of John Clellon Holmes’s
“This Is the Beat Generation” in 1952, five years before Kerouac’s novel
came out. To receive such a review in the Times guaranteed that Kerouac’s
book would become a focus of national attention in the literary world. In
addition, Millstein’s insistence that the author was himself his generation’s
“principle avatar,” combined with the fact that the novel stayed so close to
his actual life, ensured that Kerouac himself was to become the object of
intense scrutiny. For some writers, those possessing the appropriate social
and media skills, this sudden celebrity might have constituted a welcome
ticket to the wide world of American literary fame, privilege, and prestige.

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Kerouac was not that kind of person, however, and things did not ultimately
work out that way.
While recognition as a serious and legitimate artist certainly constituted
the fulfillment of one of Kerouac’s deepest ambitions, the immediate sat-
isfaction that the Times review might have generated was to be somewhat
short-lived. The laudatory responses dwindled as critics elsewhere, as though
reacting against the initial celebration, began to take aim at him and at his
novel, questioning his talent, his artistic integrity, and even his intelligence.
The country’s major print media began to line up against Kerouac, against
his book, and against the Beat vision they understood it to represent. The
Atlantic, the Chicago Tribune, Time, the Nation, Harper’s, and others all
issued condemnations. The book was variously panned for its writing style,
its structure, its tone, its intelligence, and its morality. The New York Times,
where Millstein’s laudatory review had appeared, published a second review
in the Sunday paper, a review in which the original praise was reversed and
the novel dismissed. Among the postwar cultural establishment, a con-
sensus began to emerge that, far from being an important statement about
American modernity and the cultural possibilities it afforded, the book was
a descent into pointless decadence produced by a naïve author who was both
out of his intellectual depth and lacking in basic talent.
Although Kerouac had long lived the life of a bohemian and a rebel, he
had nonetheless harbored dreams of a more traditional literary success,
of winning respect in the world of intellectuals and artists. As the son of
working-class French-Canadian immigrants, a man whose first language
in childhood was not English and who grew up without access to the forms
of cultural capital available in more middle-class communities, Kerouac
may have been even more sensitive to the criticism and rejection of the es-
tablishment once it began. His desire to write arose at a very early age and
was perhaps his life’s most stable point even throughout all the periods of
transience and substance abuse. Not only was he a committed writer; his
letters make it clear that he also remained a voracious and serious reader.
The literary world, however, passed judgment on him and on his work.
While his subsequent publications continued to attract loyal readers, he
remained more of a succès du scandale than a serious literary figure, and,
during his lifetime at least, he was never again to have such a brush with
that particular combination of fame and respect.
The attacks were inevitably personal as well as literary. Rather than main-
taining fiction’s traditional separation between characters and author, On
the Road was known to be very close to autobiography. People who loved
the book and people who loathed it thus had one thing in common: they all

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expected Kerouac to be one of the characters he described, to be one of the

characters he had imbued with almost legendary stature. To make matters
worse, many were unable to remember that Dean Moriarty was not the
narrator and they expected Kerouac to be some version of a hyperkinetic
Neal Cassady. While at one time he might at least have been able to present
himself legitimately as the model for Sal Paradise, a space of several years
separated the events recounted in the novel and book’s eventual publication.
At thirty-five, he was no longer the young adventurer whose wanderings
and explorations are narrated there, whose mythic American vision seam-
lessly blended the innocent and the decadent, the aspirations of a romantic
dreamer and the experience of a street-smart hustler. The intervening years
of hard living had taken a physical and emotional toll on Kerouac. According
to Joyce Johnson, his lover at that time, the immediate result was a celebrity
swirl that left him dazed and confused: “All the men wanted to fight him,”
she recollects, and “ [a]ll the women wanted to fuck him” (Gifford and Lee
241). Meanwhile, he began to retreat more and more into alcohol, a strategy
that of course inevitably compounded his difficulties.
Complicating all this, the novel quickly became swept up in the beatnik
fad that erupted briefly in popular culture and, as a result, it was taken no
more seriously by many readers (and nonreaders) than any other subcultural
accessory. The search for a new attitude and a new aesthetic, undertaken
by Kerouac and Ginsberg as Columbia undergraduates, had culminated in
national attention and an astonishing influence, but much of this attention
trivialized what Kerouac had intended as a serious set of critical positions,
aesthetic choices, and cultural attitudes. Suddenly there were “beatniks”
all over the country and the media spotlight did nothing to illuminate the
novel’s more substantial intentions. While this success may have exceeded
their wildest dreams in some ways, much of it nonetheless alienated and
confused Kerouac himself. Ginsberg was always more adept at navigating
the perilous waters of celebrity, but Kerouac lacked that set of skills: he could
be earnest and frank when a glib sound-bite might have been more effective,
embarrassingly drunk at moments when he should have maintained his
self-possession, disarmingly honest when he should have remained on his
guard. When the beatnik craze exhausted itself through media overexpo-
sure, On the Road, like other cultural ephemera of the period, was packed
away, leaving Kerouac somewhat abandoned, denied the serious reader-
ship he so desperately desired. In the minds of much of the reading public,
On the Road and his other novels were condescendingly consigned to the
ranks of the naïve and the passé. Instead of garnering the cultural respect
he had hoped for and worked for, he had become “King of the Beats”—a

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title that seemed to mock his real ambitions—and his novel was brushed
aside both by many critics and by much of the literary readership he had
hoped to reach.
This bleak summary may overstate the negative, but it is hard to find much
to celebrate in Kerouac’s life following September 1957. Despite periods of rela-
tive calm and productivity, his general trajectory appears to have been more
or less set, and few people familiar with his situation could have been entirely
surprised when he died in 1969, at the age of 47, as a result of complications
due to alcoholism. Among the hippie generation, the heirs of the Beats, he was
still admired, despite his attempts to distance himself from many aspects of
that phenomenon. As a literary figure, however, his reputation was at a low
ebb. Some had declared the novel to be passé almost as soon as it appeared
because it was thought to be tied a specific bohemian subculture whose prime
had already passed when the book came out in 1957.
Such confidence was, however, misplaced. Not only did the subculture
transform itself into a counterculture and grow exponentially over the next
decade or so, the novel outlived all this. His work, particularly On the Road,
began to take on a life of its own, not only in bohemian enclaves such as
Greenwich Village, where the hip alternative scene continued to flourish and
evolve, but on university campuses across the country. As a new postwar
sensibility began to emerge, On the Road remained one of its key texts. It
was both a catalyst and a signifier of generalized dissent for a broad range
of (mostly) young people from the political New Left to cultural rebels such
as Bob Dylan and prominent literary figures such as Thomas Pynchon, who
has characterized it as “a book I still believe is one of the great American
novels” (xvi).
For many years, interest in Kerouac’s life and legend far outstripped criti-
cal interest in his writing, and a number of ambitious biographies appeared
over the decades following his death, including books by Ann Charters (1973),
Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee (1978), Dennis McNally (1979), Gerald Nico-
sia (1983), and Tom Clarke (1984). Indeed, biographies of Kerouac proliferated,
with some straying toward hagiography. This public fascination with his life
demonstrates his elevation into the pantheon of bohemian heroes rather than
any deep and widespread engagement with his work. Critical studies were
much rarer, as the literary establishment and academic critics continued to
resist On the Road for many years. Indeed, to work on Kerouac was, at one
time, a choice that could put an academic career in jeopardy. The work of
critics such as Robert Hipkiss (1976), John Tytell (1976), Tim Hunt (1981),
Warren French (1986), and Regina Weinreich (1987) stands out against the
general current of neglect during the 1970s and 1980s.

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In recent years, however, interest in Kerouac and the Beat Generation

writers has blossomed, and On the Road now appears more regularly than
ever on bookstore shelves and university English course reading lists.
Websites devoted to Kerouac and the Beats continue to appear, expressing
interests ranging from those of devoted fans to those of sophisticated crit-
ics. The Gap’s use of Kerouac in an ad for khakis registers his importance at
one cultural level, while the attention paid to his work in academic journals
registers another. On one hand, first editions fetch up to $10,000; in paper-
back, on the other hand, On the Road is still reputed to be one of the most
stolen books. Not many novels manage to remain in print for five decades,
but, despite its many detractors, On the Road has done so—and it continues
to attract avid new readers still today. It is a credit to Kerouac’s vision and
artistry that the book’s readership today still arises at least as much from
personal, word-of-mouth recommendations as from the requirements of
university English professors.
My own first contact with Beat writing came when, in my early teens, I
picked up a copy of The Beats, Seymour Krim’s 1960 anthology, at a garage
sale. I had heard of the Beats and had a vague idea that they were “noncon-
formists” but had no clear idea what that designation entailed. I knew that
respectable people disapproved of them, but beyond that I had little sense
of what they actually did or wrote. Still, this combination was sufficient to
arouse my interest, and I began reading as I walked home. I no longer re-
member which pieces I read first, but by the time I reached home, something
like a minor version of what Althusser calls “interpellation” was underway.
My understanding of myself as a subject and of my subjective relation to
the world had begun to shift. Soon, I was reading everything I could find
by the Beats, particularly by Kerouac, whose On the Road seemed to be a
definitive work—although what exactly it defined remained vague in my
mind at that point. Novelist Robert Stone described his youthful reaction
in similar terms:
On the Road floored me. . . . Here in this book with its primordially
American title, by a young man with a semipronounceable name, was
the World. . . . On the Road was the narrative of someone I imagined as
not much older than myself and so like myself that—he was me! Me, and
out occupying my rightful place in the lost World.

Stone also cites an interesting comment by distinguished journalist

Michael Herr: “There are two kinds of things guys like us do,” according to
Herr. “The things we do because we read Jack Kerouac and the things we do
because we read Hemingway.” The gravitational pull of Kerouac’s writing

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on a particular segment of the generation coming of age in that post-war

milieu was exceptionally powerful.
In the early 1990s, long after my first encounter with On the Road, I
was putting together a reading list for a course titled “Twentieth-Century
American Fiction.” Since entering the world of academic literary studies,
I had become interested in modernism and postmodernism and all the
theoretical debates that surround these fields, but I had not given the Beat
writers much attention for years. Reading On the Road for this course after
so many years was fascinating. Not only was I considerably older and altered
in my thinking after years of literary study, but cultural attitudes toward
fundamental social issues such as race and gender had changed drastically.
While this reading was not the transformative experience it had once been,
it was certainly no less engaging, and its interest now was both personal and,
on another level, academic. The personal level provided a window onto some
aspects of the young man I had once been, a matter of some importance to
me perhaps but not to anyone else. More interesting though was the fact
that while I had imagined myself to be uniquely individual in my neo-Beat
trajectory, I was of course one among many thousands of young people
exploring that terrain. Studying the novel from such a distance—temporal
and academic—permitted an entirely new access to text and context, an
access now shaped by an acquired sense of American history—literary and
political—and of the theoretical concerns that had by then come to inform
all my reading.
This return to Kerouac was fascinating for what it revealed about the
period, about the remarkable cultural trajectory that developed around
Kerouac and the other Beats, and that then overlapped with the rise of the
New Left and all the tumult that made the 1960s such a charged decade. On
the Road has emerged as one of the central literary works of the postwar
period. From a distance of five decades, it is hardly surprising to find that
some of the attitudes articulated in the novel appear dated, even as others
appear remarkably prescient. But, fifty years after its publication, while
the impulse behind my own renewed interest in On the Road sprang from
sources that could hardly have been more different than those that animated
my original encounter, it is gratifying to find that the book still retains its
ability to be interesting, thought-provoking, and pleasurable. These are,
after all, some of the primary criteria of good literature.

Ldg`h8^iZY
Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Ker-
ouac. New York: St. Martin’s, 1978.

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 >cigdYjXi^dc

Krim, Seymour. The Beats. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Gold Medal Books,
1960.
Millstein, Gilbert. “Books of the Times.” New York Times. Sept. 5, 1957: 27.
Pynchon, Thomas. “Introduction.” Slow Learner. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.
Stone, Robert. “American Dreamers: Melville and Kerouac.” New York Times.
Dec. 7, 1997. <http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/04/26/specials/stone-
melville.html>. Accessed 30 Sept. 2006.

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 1

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Just after sunset on Sunday, January 21, 1951, Jack Kerouac was all set to ride
in style to the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. Situated in the
back seat of a Cadillac limousine outside his friend Henri Cru’s apartment,
Kerouac sat beside his new wife, Joan, at the outset of what promised to be a
big night on the town. Cru had gotten them all tickets to a concert featuring
the legendary jazz musician Duke Ellington and his orchestra. The concert,
a benefit for the NAACP, marked only the second time that the Metropolitan
Opera House had hosted a jazz band of any kind and would be recorded by
the Voice of America radio network. In addition to performing old favorites,
such as “Take the ‘A’ Train,” Ellington would debut a new piece, “Harlem,”
a tone-poem commissioned for the NBC Symphony as part of a New York
Suite (“Duke Ellington”; “Ellington Heard”). Cru had sprung for the tickets,
at $1.50 apiece, a gesture that reached back to his days in San Francisco when
he had tried to indulge Kerouac in a fine time, sharing his house, his money,
his good nature—everything but his fetching girlfriend. Tonight’s foursome,
including Cru’s current girlfriend, were stylishly attired; Cru had arranged the
limousine and even wore a commemorative tie painted for the occasion.
As the limousine pulled away from the curb to head to Thirty-ninth Street
and Broadway, Neal Cassady came jogging up to the car, toting his packed
bag and hoping to hop a ride to Penn Station so he could catch a train to
begin his return trip to San Francisco. Less than a week earlier, Kerouac
had been jubilant at his old buddy’s unexpected arrival, but this time, he
offered little in the way of a greeting. Cru refused to allow Cassady to ride

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with them downtown, and Kerouac sullenly waved goodbye to his friend
through the window from the back seat. This pensive moment provided
the closing scene of Kerouac’s On the Road, which he would begin typing
in earnest ten weeks later.
The weekend had dawned as if spring were rolling into Manhattan in
midwinter, with record-setting temperatures on Saturday soaring to sixty-
three degrees Fahrenheit. People all across the city headed out to parks,
and those in the boroughs who owned cars rolled up their garage doors
and drove out into the country, instigating serious traffic jams that were
exacerbated by the morning fog (“62.9 Sets Record”). Cassady returned by
train from upstate on Friday evening, having spent several days wrangling
with Diana Hansen, his third wife, over their future and the welfare of their
son, Curtis, who had been born on November 7, and whom Cassady was
seeing for the first time. Although Kerouac would write in On the Road
that he did not know why Cassady-based character Dean Moriarty had
made the long trip east, except to see his friend, Cassady in fact had several
complicated purposes for coming, the main one being to settle issues with
Diana, currently in Tarrytown, before returning to San Francisco and his
second wife, Carolyn, and the children they had together. Cassady had
concluded his discussions with Diana by Friday afternoon (Cassady wrote
to Carolyn that “every little thing is completely & perfectly & absolutely
OK—i.e. we have come to an understanding,” while Kerouac would write
of Moriarty “he spent one night explaining and sweating and fighting, and
she threw him out” [Cassady 274; On the Road 305]), and he rode the train
back into Manhattan. He had other friends in the city besides Kerouac; in
fact, Cassady wouldn’t leave town on that Sunday evening train after all,
opting to spend another night in the city. However, Kerouac recognized the
poignancy of the moment, and he knew intuitively that this bleak farewell
with its conspicuous contrasts—one friend in a limo with his sweetheart on
his way to the Metropolitan Opera House and the other bending solo to the
cold road in his “motheaten overcoat” (306)—would serve to close the most
important novel he ever wrote. Fittingly, the temperatures had dropped to a
bracing thirty degrees by sundown on Sunday evening, and the springlike
weekend ended in darkness and return to winter.
There is no correspondence in Kerouac’s book to the fact that when Neal
arrived, he and Joan were living at his mother’s apartment in Queens, at
94–21 134th Street, Richmond Hill. Gabrielle Kerouac’s apartment was a
model of decent middle-class life, a dominion she ruled over while provid-
ing cooking, cleaning, and nurturance for her son when he was not on the
road or living it up in the city. In the small living room, cushioned chairs

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were arranged around the television, and even Kerouac’s writing desk was
positioned so that he could swivel his chair to see the TV. Joan was not
happy, to say the least, about the living arrangements; she did not get along
with Gabrielle, who spoke French with her son, and her hasty marriage was
falling far short of her expectations. Within a week or two after Cassady
returned to San Francisco, Joan quietly found a waitressing job at Stouffer’s
restaurant and moved back into the city, renting a studio apartment in the
Chelsea district at 454 West Twentieth Street without telling Kerouac. When
the movers arrived with her belongings, though, Joan was taken aback to
see that Kerouac had ridden along with them, bringing his writing desk
(Joan Kerouac 191). He must have brought something else, too—some long
sheets of paper he had found in the loft he and Joan had shared in the weeks
following their wedding. This paper apparently had been the possession of
Bill Cannastra, a mutual friend, who had been killed in a subway mishap
in October 1950. Shortly after his death, Joan rented his loft, preserving it
as a kind of shrine to his memory, and that is where she was living on No-
vember 3, when Kerouac hollered up to her windows (there was no buzzer
or doorbell) and introduced himself. They were married on November 17
and shared the loft for a brief time.
By leaving Cannastra’s things just as they had been, Joan conserved his
personal effects that included, by some crucial fluke, a supply of paper that
Kerouac happened to find one day while poking through the various cup-
boards. Joan later recalled that he immediately hit on the idea of rolling the
paper through his typewriter so that he could write continuously without
having to roll in a new sheet after filling the previous one (Joan Kerouac
141). Kerouac must have brought the paper with them to Richmond Hill,
and then he must have grabbed it again as he dashed out of his mother’s
apartment to hitch a ride on the moving truck. Thus it was that Kerouac,
his writing desk, his typewriter, and long sheets of paper were deposited
into a pleasant Chelsea neighborhood as the winter season receded and the
coming spring promised to warm the tree-lined streets.
Chelsea is a neighborhood steeped in literary history. Malcolm Cowley,
who would later play a vital role in publishing On the Road, had lived nearby
on West Twenty-second Street in the 1930s, and poet Edwin Arlington Rob-
inson had lived on the top floor of a West Twenty-second Street tenement
from 1901 to 1905. One neighborhood landmark still stands much as it did
throughout the twentieth century; built in 1883, the Chelsea Hotel was New
York’s tallest building until 1902. Mark Twain, O. Henry, Edgar Lee Mas-
ters, Dylan Thomas, and Tennessee Williams all spent time there. Thomas
Wolfe wrote Look Homeward, Angel there, and later, Bob Dylan would write

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“Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” there. In his Chelsea apartment, Kerouac
continued an extraordinary exchange of letters with Cassady. These letters
mark the genesis of Kerouac’s On the Road as readers would come to know
it (Kerouac had been working for years on various versions of a book he
called “On the Road”) and also contain the seeds of his later works.
For a time, the newly wed couple lived the reasonably calm and har-
monious life that Kerouac had long pined for and would look back on in
later years with a warm reverence. Friends who rang them up at CHElsea
2–9615 or just dropped by their apartment were pleasantly surprised by the
domestic tranquility (Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters: 1940–1956 314). Joan
found a better waitressing job at The Brass Rail, and Kerouac supplemented
their income by writing movie script synopses for Twentieth Century Fox,
earning between twenty-five and thirty-five dollars per week. The main issue
for him, though, was not how to support his household but how to write
the novel that he had been plugging away at for years. Fueled by inspiration
from Cassady’s long letters; by competition with his friend John Holmes,
who had just put the final period to the first “Beat Generation” novel, Go;
by his wife’s curiosity and by lifelong literary aspirations, Kerouac simply
ignited. In twenty-one days in April he punched his typewriter keys onto
the lengths of paper and produced a long unparagraphed strip of text that
would define him as a writer and an American icon.
Almost immediately, however, the actual facts of the composition were
blurred by rumor, misstatement, and faulty memory, creating a nebulous
chronicle that is mixed parts fact, yarn, and legend about the distinctive
characteristics of the scroll typescript, the subsequent typescripts that were
produced from it, and the whole journey from inception to publication of
one of America’s greatest novels. The most significant of the long-lasting
myths are these: that Kerouac wrote the novel while he was high on Benze-
drine; that he wrote the scroll on teletype paper; that the typescript’s prose
was unpunctuated; that Kerouac was unwilling to revise; that the reaction
of his editor, Robert Giroux, upon seeing the scroll format caused Kerouac
to withdraw the novel, refusing to change a word; and that the prose style of
the scroll was significantly different from Viking’s 1957 publication. Getting
the facts on the stages of On the Road’s publication is no easy matter, and
the entire path may never be completely retraced.

Æ6A^\]ic^c\Ine^hiÇ
Even in his youth, Kerouac was an excellent typist; he possessed an almost
athletic prowess for typing. Such dexterity and endurance were essential
elements of a typist’s skill, though, for producing text on a typewriter

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is a physical act, much more so than typing on a computer keypad. The

typewriter’s keys have to be punched downward rather than tapped in order
to imprint the page with the ink, and one frequently catches references to
typists hammering at their machines. Looking back from today’s perspec-
tive of word processing, one might conclude that Kerouac’s tremendous
feat in typing—some 125,000 words in twenty-one days—stands at the apex
of typewriting, a climax at the intersection of typing and literature, the
occasion of an artist approaching the peak of his ability while driving the
available technology to its limits. Though it hailed from sputtering, clanking
prototypes, the modern typewriter eventually transformed business and
literature. Compared with today’s word processors, typewriters demanded
more exacting discipline as they turned out an instant permanence in their
pages, their product imbued with finality. Whereas earlier writers once could
produce only handwritten leaves, by the 1950s even amateurs at the kitchen
table cranked out pages that approximated the patina of published work.
Typewritten pages provide a windfall for textual scholars: the early “drafts”
of today’s word-processing authors evaporate in the airstream of recursive
writing as typeovers and one-keystroke cuts remove all traces of previous
wordings, while a typewriter’s drafts survive and even the mistakes often
are preserved under a row of xxxxxx’s.
During the period of boosterism and high hopes of the post-Depres-
sion era, the typewriter was one ticket to success, and Remington, Royal,
L.C. Smith, and Underwood—among others—battled for the home-use
typewriter market by promising free trials, easy monthly payments, and
free typewriting courses. When Kerouac was growing up, he read boys’
adventure magazines, such as Thrilling Detective, Weird Tales, Star Western,
or Doc Savage, which regularly featured advertisements aimed at the young
man who wanted to gain social and financial achievement. A November
1937 issue of Dime Western, published when Kerouac was fifteen years old,
displayed several typewriter ads, including this sensational ad for the Royal
Portable: “The world is looking for men who can put their ideas down in
clear, straight-forward type. Can you? Get our new 32-page book, Free, that
gives valuable tips on getting ahead.” The ad concludes, “68% of the men
who answer this ad will be on their way to success.” Hyperbole aside, by the
1950s, the typewriter was an essential tool in both business and literature.
Kerouac’s father, Leo, worked first as a newspaperman, then as a printer
in Lowell, before working as an itinerant linotypist in New Haven and
elsewhere. Jack grew up in a world of type, galleys, and proofs; he recalled
many boyhood afternoons spent in his father’s print shop (Nicosia 23–24).
When his Spotlight Print shop went out of business in 1938, Leo brought his

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typewriter home to 35 Sarah Avenue (Visions of Cody 94). Leo had written
news copy, editorials, and letters on this typewriter; immediately, Jack used
it for writing his own stories as well as his latest baseball fantasy league
news. If his account in Visions of Cody is reliable, he later used the same
typewriter to prepare his first published novel, The Town and the City (94).
This typewriter from his father’s shop was probably the very typewriter that
he used for On the Road. He claims that he used it after the composition of
On the Road for typing up early sections of Visions of Cody. Incidentally, in
Hartford, Connecticut, in 1941, Kerouac rented the typewriter he used for
composing his collection of short stories, Atop an Underwood; his family
had moved to New Haven, he himself had been traveling, and it is likely that
his own Underwood was unavailable to him (Jack Kerouac, “Here I Am”
130–32; Vanity of Duluoz 96–97).
Kerouac loved to type. He repeatedly expressed in his letters and journals
the satisfaction he gained from seeing the neat lines of print on a growing
stack of pages. He once wrote in a job application letter that as a teenager
he had operated a “one-man typing agency” and held paying jobs for typing
agencies (Jack Kerouac, “Background” 5, 65). When he was nineteen years
old, Kerouac wrote, “My heart resides in a typewriter, and I don’t have a
heart unless there’s a typewriter somewhere nearby, with a chair in front
of it and some blank sheets of paper (“Today” 167). In 1947 Kerouac wrote
to Cassady that he was enjoying “the first time at a typewriter for weeks,
and you being an old typist, and you know the feeling you get, just writ-
ing anything that comes to your head, ‘scribbling away,’ etc. you just like
to see the words come out on the page, small and neat and all in straight
lines” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 113). Kerouac’s close friend and writing
confederate John Clellon Holmes witnessed Kerouac’s typing feats and
said that Kerouac “just flung it down. He could disassociate himself from
his fingers, and he was simply following the movie in his head. Jack was
a lightning typist” (Gifford and Lee 156). Holmes went on to describe how
Kerouac could type conversation-paced dictation with complete accuracy.
Kerouac reportedly could type at the rate of one hundred words per minute;
at that pace he would have to stop frequently to roll fresh sheets of paper
into his typewriter. His typed letters reveal that he sometimes typed right
off the bottom of the page. Although Kerouac frequently wrote by hand, for
him the performance of typing was one with the act of writing—to be an
expert typist meant that he excelled beyond others, that he was a writer, in
the way that his physical speed, strength, and recklessness defined him as
a football athlete. He once pondered, “I wonder what working people think
of me when they hear my typewriter clacking in the middle of the night”

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(Visions of Cody 259–60). Kerouac valued rhythm, a syncopation that could

be enacted by a jazz musician or sounded on a typewriter keyboard. This
sense of rhythm then carries over into the rhythmic meters of the language,
the cadences of the narrative, and the pace and flow of the story itself. At
the height of Kerouac’s popularity, Truman Capote uttered the long-lasting
epigram belittling Kerouac’s work: “That’s not writing . . . it’s just typing!”
(Cook 95–96). The comment would be more appropriate had Capote simply
said, “Now that’s typing!”

7diidbaZhh8jehd[8d[[ZZVcY:cYaZhhH]ZZihd[EVeZg
As winter turned to spring in 1951, newspaper headlines recounted the
recent flooding in New Jersey, the spring-training baseball games being
played in Florida, and the continuing imbroglio of the Korean War. Times
Square movie marquees flashed the latest Hollywood fare; for fifty cents,
filmgoers could enjoy Operation Pacific, starring John Wayne and Storm
Warning, featuring Ronald Reagan, Ginger Rogers, Doris Day, and Steve
Cochran. Television programming offered The Gene Autry Show as well as
Groucho Marx as the host of You Bet Your Life, among numerous variety
shows and westerns. The year’s biggest advertising campaign might have
buoyed Kerouac’s spirits as he commenced to type his novel: “See the U.S.A
in Your Chevrolet.”
After a near-freezing night, sunshine broke through the clouds over
Manhattan on Monday morning, April 2, 1951, and temperatures rose into
the fifties during the afternoon. Twenty-nine-year-old Kerouac, wearing a
fresh T-shirt and a pair of sheepskin slippers, sipped from the first of many
cups of coffee and rolled an eleven-foot, eight-inch strip of paper into his
typewriter. Apparently the paper initially had been too wide to fit in the
typewriter platen, so Kerouac trimmed the right edge with scissors; in a few
places, pencil marks remain, perhaps indicating that he measured before
cutting. The translucent paper is somewhat rattly or crackly (but not so
much as waxed paper), with a surface that resists ink absorption so that as
Kerouac adjusted the paper—it tended to slant to the right as he typed—he
left some smudgy thumbprints.
Kerouac set his coffee cup beside his typewriter on a large roll-top desk
that he described as “an old Faulknerian desk from a Southern mansion”
given to him by his sister and brother-in-law as a birthday gift in 1950. In an
autobiographical novel written the following year, he noted that he preferred
certain items by his side when he wrote: several erasers, pencils, a pair of
reading glasses, and his father’s pipe rack (Visions of Cody 94). Like millions
of college students and hard-pressed office workers, Kerouac drank coffee

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as his drug of choice throughout his typing session. Just after he finished
the novel, he recommended “COFFEE” to Cassady as the best performance
enhancer for writing: “I wrote that book on COFFEE . . . remember said
rule. Benny, tea, anything I KNOW none as good as coffee for real mental
power kicks” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 318).
“Benny” is a nickname for the drug Benzedrine, an amphetamine mar-
keted by Smith, Kline, and French, beginning in 1928, which could be abused
by people who would break open the inhaler and eat the paper strip inside.
Biographer Gerald Nicosia suggests that Kerouac had first tried Benzedrine
as early as his prep school days at Horace Mann. Kerouac claimed that he
and his friends used the drug in order to explore heightened consciousness,
and also—as did many writers and musicians—he relied on the euphoria
and stimulation associated with it to boost his imagination and stamina as
he wrote. For decades, in countless publications, Kerouac’s 1951 typing ses-
sion has been described as “Benzedrine-fueled” and “Benzedrine-drenched”
and so on. This is not likely the case. In a private letter, Kerouac corrected
Ginsberg when, years later, he wrote an article for the Village Voice saying
that Benzedrine boosted Kerouac’s typing feat. Kerouac told Ginsberg in
definite terms that “Road was not written on benny, on coffee” (Jack Ker-
ouac, Letter to Allen Ginsberg 184).
Through his career, both before and after the composition of On the
Road, he wrote many words while high on Benzedrine, but his statements
to Ginsberg and Cassady indicate that he did not write On the Road while
under its influence. Why is this important? Kerouac faced a troubling recep-
tion by the public and by the critics. He was popular, though “notorious”
might be a better word. However, from the very beginning of his fame, he
battled to maintain that he was foremost a serious writer, an artist, even as
his subject matter drew him into an underground world, one that brought
associations of drugs and hoodlumism. Although coffee is a drug, it is widely
accepted, even celebrated, and finds a welcome place in middle-class life.
An illicit stimulant such as Benzedrine, however, evokes connotations of
indiscipline, seediness, and addiction. For many readers, the influence of
Benzedrine may serve to disparage the artistic creation. A novel written
under the influence of drugs registers that association to the detriment of
discussions of serious artistry, giving birth to, for example, Capote’s derisive
remark. Coffee is simply more all-American, rendering the scene of the
old-fashioned, clamped-down writer at work. It is true that Sal Paradise,
Kerouac’s alter ego, smokes marijuana in the novel, but he does not ingest
harder drugs; rather, he presents the character as a college boy who rides
the road for experience before settling down at the end of the novel.

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Kerouac’s urgent desire to tell his story meshed with his typewriting
skill as he began recounting his on-the-road life. Casting aside novelistic
convention, he used his friends’ real names and located the story’s genesis in
Neal Cassady’s initial appearance four years earlier. As April sun filled the
windows of his Chelsea apartment, Kerouac mistyped the very first words
of the scroll: “I first met met Neal not long after my father died.” But this
accidental repetition of “met” was just a warm-up for the torrent of prose
that he was to pour forth onto the paper, for he went on to type thousands
of lines precisely and neatly and with very few errors. Kerouac’s fingers must
have been a blur as he typed and typed, drinking coffee and sweating while
the scroll stretched to ten, twenty, thirty feet and beyond. The style of the
novel has been called “spontaneous prose,” but that is a misnomer. In later
years, Kerouac perfected the method he dubbed spontaneous prose, but
he wrote On the Road before he produced in that style. To be sure, On the
Road’s prose is fast and energetic with a no-holds-barred rush-of-storytell-
ing feeling, but the prose is essentially in the standard narrative style. Like
many other writers, Kerouac worked from notes and other materials as he
drafted this novel. For instance, numerous passages match up word-for-word
with the “Rain and Rivers” journal, begun January 31, 1949. Editor Douglas
Brinkley notes that “most of the trips and observations in this journal” find
their way into the novel (Windblown World 283). For one example, in the
section of the scroll that corresponds to pages 156 through 158 (the start of
part 2, section 8) of the published first edition, Kerouac adapted the journal
for his novel. This passage is from his journal:
And what is the Mississippi river? It is the River we all know and see. It is
where Rain tends, and Rain softly connects us all together, as we together
tend as Rain to the All-River of Togetherness to the Sea. For this is mor-
tal earth we live on, and the River of Rains is what our lives are like—a
washed clod in the rainy night, a soft plopping from drooping Missouri
banks, a dissolving (Ah—a learning), a spreading, a riding of the tide
down the eternal waterbed, a contributing to brown, dark, watery foams;
a voyaging past endless lands & trees & Immortal Levees (for the Cities
refuse the Flood, the Cities build Walls against Muddy Reality, the Cities
where men play golf on cultivated swards which once were watery-weedy
beneath our Flood)—down we go between shores Real and Artificial—
down a long by Memphis, Greenville, Eudora, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port
Allen, and Port Orleans, and Port of the Deltas (by Potash, Venice, and
the Night’s Gulf of Gulfs)—down along, down along, as the earth turns
and day follows night again and again. . . . (Windblown 329)

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This is the way the journal entry appears in the typescript scroll and the
published novel:
What is the Mississippi river?—a washed clod in the rainy night, a soft
plopping from drooping Missouri banks, a dissolving, a riding of the
tide down the eternal waterbed, a contribution to brown foams, a voyag-
ing past endless vales and trees and levees, down along, down along, by
Memphis, Greenville, Eudora, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port Allen, and Port
Orleans and Port of the Deltas, by Potash, Venice, and the Night’s Great
Gulf, and out. (On the Road 156)
This segment is typical of the way Kerouac transformed his private, evoca-
tive journal language to construct the wording of the novel. Many pages of
the journal are converted in this way.
Some journal sentences are inserted nearly word-for-word. The journal
contains this: “Then, with the radio on to a mysterious mystery program
(and as I looked out the window and saw a sign saying ‘USE COOPER’S
PAINT’ and answered: ‘Allright, I will.’) . . .” (Windblown 330; On the Road
156). In the next portion of the published novel, Dean narrates his adven-
tures in Houston with Carlo and Hassel (158). Kerouac had noted in the
“Rain and Rivers” journal that their passage through Houston reminded
Neal of his time there with Herbert Huncke (Windblown 331). As he typed
the scroll, Kerouac sketched the scene. Then, when he retyped the scroll as
a subsequent draft, Kerouac lifted the scene directly from Cassady’s letter
to him from September 9, 1947, along with much of his phrasing, including
the line, “Her beautiful body was matched only by her idiot mind.” Kerouac
also slotted in other letters to him from Cassady (July 3, 1949, and July 16,
1949), relating adventures that correspond to pages 185 and 186. At these
points, Kerouac simply included whole passages of Cassady’s letters as
Dean’s dialogue. Much of the scroll’s text flowed from Kerouac’s celebrated
memory; many of his friends lauded his ability to recall past events and even
to recreate entire conversations. But it is evident that as Kerouac typed, he
had before him various journals, notes, and letters that found their way into
the novel. Close scrutiny of available material indicates that he drew from
these previously written materials when he typed the scroll, and then he
incorporated additional and specific details from these materials when he
retyped subsequent drafts of the novel later.
After filling the first long sheet with text, Kerouac installed a new
typewriter ribbon. As far as the construction of the scroll goes, he prob-
ably finished typing each sheet of paper before taping them together into
a continuous scroll. For one thing, there is an inch or so of blank space

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at the end of one sheet and again at the beginning of the subsequent one.
If the sheets had been taped together before typing, then Kerouac would
have simply typed continuously onto the subsequent sheet. Scrutiny of the
scroll also indicates that in adhering the sheets together, Kerouac stretched
clear tape over words that he had already typed, further substantiating that
the sheets were typed first, then taped together. Kerouac first explored the
technique as a youngster when his father brought his typewriter home in
1938. Sixteen-year-old Kerouac typed up a sports page called “Jack Lewis’s
Baseball Chatter Number 3,” which clearly shows he fastened two regular
sheets of typing paper together to form one long sheet. It appears that in this
case, Kerouac adhered the sheets together first, then typed onto them. (A
photograph of the sports page is featured in the Jack Kerouac ROMnibus,
a CD-ROM packaged by Penguin in 1995.)
In a letter to Cassady soon after completion of the scroll, Kerouac stated
that he averaged 6,000 words per day, typing 12,000 words the first day and
15,000 words on the last day, April 22 (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 315). The first
sheet of paper ran out on Kerouac as he worked on what would become part
1, section 5, after he typed the words, “got me a rich thick milkshake at the
roadhouse to put some freeze in my hot, tormented stomach” (36). The second
sheet ran out during what would become part 1, section 11: “suddenly I real-
ized there was [sheet ends] a great hum of activity in the usually quiet night”
(65). The third sheet ends during the scene of the “Ghost of the Susquehanna”
during this sentence: “’But this ain’t the road to [sheet ends] Canada . . . ’”
(105). Each of the first two sheets measures eleven feet, eight inches, leading
the scroll’s curator, Jim Canary, to wonder if the sheets were not originally
one wide sheet, sheared down the middle by Kerouac so they would fit into
the typewriter. The remaining sheets also pair up in approximate length and
could feasibly have been made by cutting one wider sheet in two.

Sheet Number Sheet Length

1 11' 8"
2 11' 8"
3 16' 9 ½"
4 16' 10 ½"
5 15' 7"
6 15' 9"
7 15' 6 ½"
8 15' 7 ½"

When he finished the story by describing Dean’s lonely departure from

New York the night of the Duke Ellington concert, Kerouac had produced

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a magnificent 125,000 words by his own reckoning, on a roll of paper 120

feet long. Writing to his road buddy on May 22, 1951, Kerouac announced to
Cassady that he had just written a book about him on a “strip of paper 120
foot long (tracing paper that belonged to Cannastra.),” completing it on April
22 (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 316). This typescript scroll can be designated
T1. Then Kerouac told Cassady something that most of his readers, fans
and critics alike, did not realize for decades to come and would have been
completely shocked to discover: he said that he had been “typing and revis-
ing” the novel for thirty days since the scroll’s completion (Selected Letters:
1940–1956 317). He also told Cassady that Robert Giroux, the Harcourt, Brace
editor who had worked with him on The Town and the City, Kerouac’s first
published novel, was still waiting to see the book (Selected Letters: 1940–1956
315). In a subsequent letter dated June 10, Kerouac tells Cassady that he is
“waiting for the word from Giroux,” indicating that sometime after April
22 and before June 10, he had typed the scroll’s text onto regular pages and
submitted the typescript to Harcourt, Brace (Selected Letters: 1940–1956
318). Speaking to his bibliographer and future biographer, Ann Charters,
in 1966, Kerouac said that after typing the scroll version, he “typed it up
double-space on the typewriter with made-up names” (Charters 5). In an
interview published in 1978, John Holmes recalled that immediately after
completing the scroll, Kerouac “was typing it up. Typing to Jack—in Jack’s
career—meant rewriting. That’s how he rewrote. . . . So it must have been a
week after that that he finished and took it to Giroux and Harcourt, Brace”
(Gifford and Lee 157).
These details reveal that the great literary anecdote of Kerouac unfurling
the freshly written scroll across Giroux’s desk, dramatically proclaiming a
great new American novel—while Giroux scoffed, demanding how such a
book could be edited—is greatly overemphasized as the official submission-
and-rejection. Variations abound on the basic account of Kerouac ascending
triumphantly to the Harcourt, Brace offices, announcing that his new work
was divinely inspired, only to storm down moments later, dejected after
his cool reception. Giroux recounted his version in a 1980 article written
by poet Donald Hall:
Mr. Giroux looked at the manuscript, as thick as a roll of paper towels,
which had come uncorrected from the typewriter. Mr. Giroux suggested
that “even after you have been inspired by the Holy Ghost, you have to sit
down and read your manuscript.” In outrage Kerouac swore that nobody
was going to change a single word, and, denouncing Mr. Giroux as a crass
idiot, he left the office. Mr. Giroux says now: “I realized later that he was
floating on a cloud. It was stupid of me. I should have said, ‘My God,

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you’ve just finished a book! This is a great occasion! Put the MS. on my
desk and let’s go and have a drink to celebrate.’ Instead, reacting to his
ultimatum, I came out flat-footedly with the most deflating statement I
could have made.”( 22)

The plausible chronology begins with this dramatic gesture, but was almost
certainly followed by a more traditional submission of a customary type-
script. The thirty-day stint of “typing and revising”—nine days longer than
was required to type the scroll—represents Kerouac’s creation of a regular
typescript on sheets of paper so that he could make a proper submission
to his publisher. Clearly, Giroux had not made a decision by June 10 and
apparently had not even read the novel. Kerouac may have been deflated by
his editor’s reaction, but his next move was to retype the novel. Two weeks
later when Harcourt, Brace declined to publish the novel, it was a regular
typescript, not the scroll typescript, that was considered, and this typescript
can be designated T2.

ÆIne^c\VcYGZk^h^c\Ç
At some point, Kerouac worked on the typescript scroll or T2 or both at
Lucien Carr’s loft on West Twenty-first Street, right next door—and con-
nected by a fire escape—to Cannastra’s loft, where the scroll paper origi-
nated. However, it is difficult to determine exactly when Kerouac worked
there, and this determination may be important in determining the stages
of composition of On the Road. A dog belonging to Lucien Carr chewed up
the end of the scroll while Kerouac was staying with Carr in his loft, prob-
ably while Kerouac was producing T2. Potchky, the dog, bit into the Mexico
scene, corresponding to the middle of page 301 in the first published edition.
Potchky’s misadventure may help today’s textual scholars put together a
few pieces of the puzzle.
Writing thirty years after the fact, Joan claimed that Kerouac stayed with
her on West Twentieth Street until June 1951; when he found out that she was
pregnant and that she wanted to keep her baby, according to Joan, he moved
out to Lucien Carr’s loft (Joan Kerouac 204–5). However, these dates do not
jibe with the chronology outlined above. Kerouac likely worked at both the
Twentieth Street apartment and Lucien’s Twenty-first Street loft intermit-
tently, perhaps moving over to Carr’s at times so that the commotion of his
typing would not keep Joan awake. To further complicate matters, Kerouac
used his mother’s Queens address for his return address when he wrote to
Cassady on May 22, and he also penciled this address onto the reverse side
of the scroll typescript.

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Why is it so important to know where and when Kerouac typed? Kerouac

worked intensely, energetically, but professionally and with focus. After
several years of grappling with his road material, he made a conscientious
effort to create a prose form matching the fluidity of his road experiences,
and he did so while his marriage collapsed around him and as he typed in
various locations. These twenty-one days in April reveal Kerouac’s faults
as well as his genius. He had expected his wife to coddle him and supply
him with a cozy home environment as his mother had done. In the end, his
single-minded focus on art cost him his marriage. To make matters worse,
he did not receive accolades as a writer, either, and critics tended, at first,
to fault his methods and work ethic—or lack thereof.
Rumors and mistruths have circulated through the years about the On
the Road typescript scroll that have hurt Kerouac’s reputation as a profes-
sional writer. The most damaging rumor concerns the scale of editing done
in-house at Viking. Some early critics purported that since Kerouac did not
possess the talent to write the book, Viking’s editors had to take over the job.
Other readers have mused over the language of the scroll, believing that the
Viking publication sacrificed the loose, jazzy form of the original by subject-
ing the text to house styling and extensive cuts. Allen Ginsberg, who was
among the first people to read the scroll typescript, would later complain
that On the Road “was never published in its most exciting form—its origi-
nal discovery—but hacked and punctuated and broken—the rhythms of it
broken—by presumptuous literary critics in publishing houses” (“Review”
3). The confusion began with Kerouac’s own purported description of the
scroll in an interview conducted by Alfred Aronowitz and published in the
New York Post on March 10, 1959: “[I]t took me 21 days to write ‘On the Road.’
I wrote it on one long roll of paper with no periods, no commas, no para-
graphs, all single-spaced.” The interview was widely read and subsequently
widely quoted. Kerouac scholar Dave Moore wondered why Kerouac would
have said such a thing, since he knew it to be untrue. Yes, the scroll is un-
paragraphed, but the sentences are all punctuated in the conventional way,
meaning that Viking would have had neither to save Kerouac’s prose from
illegibility nor to emasculate its raw, jazzy texture. Kerouac’s prose was clear
and grammatical when first written. Moore examined the extended version
of this interview, published ten years after the Post first ran the expurgated
version. In the extended version, Kerouac says, “I wrote On the Road on a roll
of Cannastra’s drawing paper . . . It was all no paragraphs, single-spaced—all
one big paragraph. I had to retype it so they could publish it.” If the Post had
printed Kerouac’s exact words the first time around, there would have been
no confusion and one less myth to contend with.

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Another prominent interview gave life to a different myth: On November

16, 1959, Kerouac appeared on The Steve Allen Show to read from On the
Road, and he told thirty million television viewers that he used teletype
paper for typing his long narratives—implying that On the Road had been
typed on such paper. In front of the studio audience and under the glare of
the lights and live cameras, Allen shared some light banter with Kerouac,
relaxing his guest for the reading that was the main event. Allen casu-
ally mentioned Kerouac’s habit of rolling long sheets of paper through his
typewriter and gave his guest an opening to comment on this technique.
Maybe it just seemed much simpler for Kerouac to say that he used teletype
paper (which by that time he had used for composing The Dharma Bums).
The misleading story received substantial corroboration in Bruce Cook’s
The Beat Generation in 1971, when facts concerning the early Beat life were
still tough to come by. In this popular book, Cook states that Lucien Carr,
who worked for United Press in 1951, stole a roll of teletype paper from his
office. Cook quotes Carr recounting that he heard Kerouac typing all day
long; Carr also mentions that his dog ate the last few feet of the teletype roll,
and therefore this was by necessity the only section that Kerouac retyped.
Cook does not mention Joan or any location other than Lucien’s Twenty-first
Street loft, neither does he refer to tracing paper nor any regular typescript.
And so for years, many readers assumed that Kerouac had typed onto a
teletype roll. Kerouac later wrote The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and Vanity
of Duluoz on teletype rolls, but he wrote nothing on such paper in regard
to On the Road.
T2 consists of 295 sheets of paper that are somewhat longer than stan-
dard eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch typing paper sheets; the paper may
be described as resembling unlined legal-pad sheets. The typescript is
double-spaced and paginated to 297, but pages 136 and 166 are skipped. Close
scrutiny indicates the same typewriter that produced T1 likely produced
T2. Kerouac’s claim that he had been “typing and revising” is corroborated
by numerous significant differences between T1 and T2. Most immedi-
ately evident are the changes in characters’ names from the scroll. Here,
Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg are Dean Pomeray and Justin Moriarty,
respectively. Kerouac would change these names again in the subsequent
typescript, but other names would make the transition from T2 to the pub-
lished version: Marylou, Tim Gray, Chad King, Tommy Snark, Roy Johnson,
Roland Major, and others. Kerouac also changed the location of Neal/Dean’s
reform school from Colorado to Wyoming in an effort to disguise the char-
acter. In the subsequent typescript, Kerouac had the opportunity to access
his source material and work in greater detail. For example, on page 6 of T2,

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he inserted verbatim a letter Neal Cassady had written to him on March 7,

1947, describing his attempted seductions on his bus ride from New York to
Denver (see Cassady 17–19). T2 contains numerous pencil emendations in
Kerouac’s hand as well as black crayon excisions of words, lines, and whole
passages. One cannot determine at what point in the composition process
these emendations were made—they may have been made at a much later
time—but it is clear that Kerouac undertook the name changes, the addition
and deletion of material, and even the toning down of sexual language on
his own while typing in Lucien Carr’s loft, before he ever formally submitted
the novel for a publisher’s consideration.
This is important to note as one traces the stages of On the Road’s
composition because the second typescript represents Kerouac’s official
submission to Harcourt, Brace, and thus to the professional publishing
industry. Following Harcourt, Brace’s rejection, T2 then embarked on a
wide-ranging voyage through the turbulent seas of New York publishers. In
addition to sailing through Harcourt, Brace offices, the stack of pages also
navigated Ace Books; Criterion; Bobbs Merrill; Scribner’s; Viking; Farrar
Straus Young; Little, Brown; and Dutton. According to various reports,
the scroll did surface at a number of these Madison Avenue publishing
offices. Carl Solomon, an editor at Ace Books, recalled that Kerouac “sent
us this long scroll. My uncle [A. A. Wyn] said it looked like he took it from
his trunk. . . . I don’t know where he got it, but we were used to these neat
manuscripts, and I thought, ‘Gee, I can’t read this’” (Tytell 55). But its emer-
gence was most likely for show; T2 was undoubtedly the official submission
for most publishing houses. Farrar Straus Young editors did not reject the
book outright; they suggested revisions, and Kerouac, despite his reputa-
tion for refusing to do revisions of any kind, agreed. In fact, in July 1951,
only two months after completing T2, he wrote to a friend, Frank Morley,
“When I started revising it, I realized that I’d rather write the whole thing
all over again, which I’m about to do; figure I’ll be finished in two months”
(Selected Letters: 1940–1956 226; in the volume cited, the letter to Morley is
mistakenly dated July 1950, and is therefore misplaced chronologically in
that collection). Whether Kerouac did in fact “write the whole thing over
again” is unclear but unlikely. There is no textual evidence to support a
revision in the summer of 1951.
One important point here to avoid confusion: in October 1951, Kerouac
did determine to write a new version of his road story based on a new style
of writing that he called spontaneous prose. He fully intended the new
version to replace his scroll version. The two versions were entirely discrete
entities; the version that Kerouac began in October 1951 would be published

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as Visions of Cody (1972). In a letter to Kerouac written in July 1953, Ginsberg

refers to “On the Road I and II” (Ginsberg, unpublished letter).

?VX`@ZgdjVXVcYBVY^hdc6kZcjZ
After Harcourt, Brace’s rejection of On the Road, John Holmes suggested
that Kerouac place the book with Holmes’s agent, Rae Everitt, of MCA,
which he had done by July 1951. Then, in August 1951, he spent three weeks
in the veteran’s hospital in the Bronx for treatment for phlebitis in his
legs. While there, apparently, he continued to write movie script synopses
to earn his living while he waited for his book to sell. But something else
was happening, too. As Kerouac lay in the hospital sheets, freed from any
responsibility to care for himself, he had a series of long days to mull over
his writing career. The accomplishment of the scroll opened a new door for
him, and he began to comprehend his entire opus, to see for the first time
just how he might create his whole legend in literature, how the disparate
parts of his life and experience might be fitted into a master plan. He began
to write to his friends of a “huge epic Road” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 490).
The scroll typescript’s location in the grand scheme is unclear today, but
clearly Kerouac was opening up to his life’s work, and this new stage of his
literary awareness may well have doomed any chance for an early publica-
tion of On the Road.
During this time, Everitt tried to place the novel with a publishing house;
although she saw Kerouac as a potentially great writer, she had some res-
ervations about his book. She had some difficulty discussing these qualms
with Kerouac, though, because, interestingly, the two had developed some
sexual chemistry. Their paths had entwined the previous year in the social
swirl of writers and literary people in Manhattan, and Kerouac had at-
tempted to woo her with smoldering long gazes. Everitt was not entirely
unreceptive, and now that she was Kerouac’s agent, she was unsure of how
best to negotiate with him. Ginsberg conveyed Everitt’s ideas to Kerouac
in 1951, in an undated letter, and his language discloses a good deal about
the nature of the agent’s relationship with her client and her awareness of
his volatile personality:
[Everitt] would like to tell you what she thinks, but afraid of your reaction;
afraid you’ll start to curse her to yourself and reject her efforts without
listening . . . Doesn’t want to strain relations with you by criticism or
suggestions which she thinks are commercially and possibly realistically
and possibly spiritually valid; somewhat upset not knowing how to deal
with you, afraid to scare you off, but respects you, knows your worth,
but is afraid to disagree not knowing how you’ll react; afraid you’ll think

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she’s against you when she isn’t and would (I guess) like to lay you if she
could only talk to you without your acting defensive and mysterious.
(unpublished letter, 1951)

As this letter makes clear, Kerouac could be a difficult person to deal with,
both professionally and personally. Everitt also insisted that the typescript,
which she estimated would comprise 450 standard sheets, would have to
be cut by a third.
In December 1951, Everitt finally convinced Ace Books to sign Kerouac
to a contract for On the Road, and pay him a thousand-dollar advance. Ace
would pay $250 up front and then dole out a hundred dollars per month while
Kerouac worked on revisions. Unfortunately for all concerned, Kerouac had
a whole different deal in mind, including a refusal to edit On the Road. He
had already developed artistically beyond the scroll typescript’s prose style,
and he began to minimize its literary significance in the grander design
of his life’s work. Kerouac was an idealist of the purest sort; he concerned
himself wholly with literary art and had no constitution for reckoning with
the business realities of Madison Avenue. He kept meticulous files of all his
letters, manuscripts, journals, and notes, and he devoted his life to the perfec-
tion of his art and the profession of authorship. But when it came to dealing
with editors and publishing houses, Kerouac was a disaster. Kerouac once
remarked that “publishers make me feel uneasy, I feel as if not publishers but
Dwight D. Eisenhower of the serious countenance and manly fists is looking
at me across the lunch table and it’s all going to be wash down the saturday
review drain” (unpublished letter to Carolyn Cassady, May 14, 1955).
His closest relationship to an editor was also his first relationship with
one. Giroux and Kerouac had spent many evenings working over the type-
script of The Town and the City in Harcourt, Brace offices, shirtsleeves rolled
up, Chinese food in cartons on the desks. Five years later—and nearly three
years after Harcourt, Brace had rejected On the Road—Kerouac wrote a
touching letter to his former editor in which he expressed admiration for
Giroux along with regret for the growing distance in their relationship,
concluding with these lines: “What has happened to our friendship or was
it just based on business? . . . I really have no interest in business and that’s
why I’m confused about what happened I guess. . . . Maybe I’ve gone crazy
but by God I like to remember the times we talked about Yeats and watched
pigeons” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 446). During Kerouac’s turbulent nego-
tiations with Ace Books, Everitt left MCA for reasons unrelated to Kerouac
or to Ace Books, and ultimately the deal fell through. Phyllis Jackson would
take over as Kerouac’s agent at MCA. Jackson did not make a convincing
effort to place Kerouac’s post–On the Road material, and she soon reported

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that Kerouac had simply gone away, muttering that he did not care to be
published (Jackson).
In late 1953, Sterling Lord of Lord and Colbert became Kerouac’s liter-
ary agent and would represent him or his literary estate from then right
up to the present day. On October 12, 1954, Lord sent an inquiry letter to
Mrs. Blanch W. Knopf in Knopf’s Madison Avenue offices. Fortunately, the
entire exchange of letters between Knopf’s editors and Kerouac’s agent are
extant, in the archives of the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom
Research Center. These letters shed light on what may have been a typical
dialogue between Kerouac’s agent and various publishers and may reveal
the publishers’ position on Kerouac and his much-talked-about novel. Lord
prefaced his pitch by noting that Malcolm Cowley, who was serving as a
literary advisor at Viking, had touted Kerouac’s On the Road (which at that
point was alternatively titled The Beat Generation) in an August 21 Saturday
Review article. Knopf senior editor Joseph M. Fox replied to Lord’s letter,
saying that he had, in fact, been trying “to track down the whereabouts of
Jack Kerouac” and that he would gladly consider the manuscript. Lord sent
the manuscript to him, but Fox was clearly not impressed with its condi-
tion when he received it, for he sent it right back to Lord’s office with the
stipulation that it be retyped. One can only imagine the condition of the
stack of pages after its journeys through as many as ten publishing houses,
and through the hands of Kerouac’s Beat friends in various lofts and apart-
ments across New York City. It is also possible that T2 already bore Kerouac’s
pencil and crayon emendations. Maybe its final rejection by Knopf editors
was foreshadowed by its shabby appearance on its first arrival—Kerouac was
difficult to contact, first of all, and now had submitted a less-than-profes-
sional looking manuscript.

6cdi]ZgIneZhXg^ei!6cdi]ZgIg^ei]gdj\]CZlNdg`EjWa^h]^c\=djhZh
Kerouac spent most of November 1954 back in his mother’s apartment in
Richmond Hill, cranking the story through his typewriter for the third
time—although a different typewriter than previously used. This fresh
typescript on standard-sized sheets can be designated T3. As he typed the
story again, Kerouac would have the opportunity for altering, deleting, and
adding passages. In fact, it seems that he relied on T1 as his base text while
selectively including emendations from T2. This typescript was delivered to
the Knopf offices on December 2. Knopf’s office memo states that the type-
script comprised 347 pages. On December 30, four weeks after it had arrived,
Knopf rejected T3 and sent it by special delivery back to Sterling Lord. A few
days later, Lord received Joe Fox’s assessment: “Kerouac does have enormous

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talent of a very special kind. But this is not a well made novel, nor a saleable
one nor even, I think, a good one.” In his intraoffice memo, Fox related that
his reluctance to accept the novel was spurred in part by his estimation that
“Kerouac personally is almost impossible to deal with—evidently he refuses
to change this in any way, and it would have to be changed.”
Kerouac wrote in a January 11, 1955, journal entry that he had just learned
of Knopf’s rejection of The Beat Generation (he handwrote “On the Road”
above this title), but his disappointment was tempered by his newly discov-
ered Buddhist contention that the book was not one of his “enlightened”
works. Even during the November typing stint, he admitted his doubts about
his motivations, claiming that he no longer valued “fame and fortune” (Some
of the Dharma 220, 162). On January 18 he wrote to Ginsberg that after all
his late-night labors in producing a new typescript, Knopf had reject “Beat
G” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 457).
And so T3 embarked on a road of its own, making appearances in the
offices of Knopf; Ballantine; Dodd, Mead; and then, by circuitous happen-
stance, Viking. Malcolm Cowley had already read the typescript (T2) when
it was submitted to Viking back in 1953, when Phyllis Jackson offered the
novel there; Ginsberg helped establish a relationship between Cowley and
Kerouac, who met several times beginning in February of that year. Cowley
expressed great interest in Kerouac’s work. However, he could not develop
any enthusiasm among other Viking editors at that time: “I was surprised,
impressed, and talked about it at a Tuesday editorial meeting. But others
read it and turned thumbs down” (Gussow 295). Cowley was not daunted.
In 1954, he submitted an excerpt from the novel to Arabelle Porter at New
World Writing; her acceptance of “Jazz of the Beat Generation” marked the
first professional success of On the Road and paid Kerouac $120. “Jazz of
the Beat Generation” includes sixty-eight lines of prose from Kerouac’s Vi-
sions of Cody blended seamlessly into the prose from On the Road. Cowley
also submitted another excerpt, titled “The Mexican Girl,” to Paris Review,
where it was accepted, and a third excerpt, “A Billowy Trip in the World,”
was published later in New Directions. Cowley mentioned Kerouac’s name
favorably in an August 1954 Saturday Review article, “Invitation to Innova-
tors,” explicitly pointing out the Beat Generation: “it was John Kerouac who
invented the phrase, and his unpublished long narrative ‘On the Road’ is the
best record of their lives.” Cowley included these lines in his Viking book,
The Literary Situation. Cowley was establishing Kerouac’s reputation and
paving the way for the novel’s acceptance at Viking Press.
On July 12, 1955, Cowley wanted to see the book again because Viking had
hired a new editor, Keith Jennison, who Cowley thought would be more re-

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ceptive. According to a July 19 letter from Kerouac to Cowley, the typescript

(T3?) was currently under consideration at Dodd, Mead and would have to
be returned before it could be submitted to Viking; Viking had received it
by early September. Acknowledging their first encounters when he had been
far less willing to revise his work to suit the demands of the marketplace,
Kerouac now wrote to Cowley on September 20, “Any changes you want to
make okay with me. Remember your idea in 1953 to dovetail trip No. 2 into
Trip No. 3 making it one trip? I’m available to assist you in any re-arranging
matters of course” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 519). He also detailed the ways
that he already had changed the typescript scroll in order to avoid libelous
references, by changing not only the characters’ names but also their profes-
sions and hometowns. While Cowley and Jennison worked to gain Viking’s
acceptance of the novel, Kerouac exhibited a solid willingness to revise the
text, but the nature of these revisions and their effect on the final novel are
indeterminable. In later years, Kerouac would attack Cowley in letters and
interviews for having cut the heart out of On the Road and for emasculat-
ing it by ruining the rhythms of his sentences. In response, Cowley told an
interviewer that he had had no problems with the prose of the book; rather,
he had wanted Kerouac to tighten the structure of the story. Even though
Kerouac insisted to Cowley and to others that he did indeed “dovetail” some
trips and consolidate some material, apparently he did not.
Except for some fairly large cuts of adventures that were extraneous to the
central narrative, the published version is the same structurally as the scroll
version. Still, Cowley emphasized that these cuts were made by Kerouac’s
hand, not his: “Well, Jack did something that he would never admit to later.
He did a good deal of revision, and it was very good revision. Oh, he would
never, never admit to that, because it was his feeling that the stuff ought to
come out like toothpaste from a tube and not be changed, and that every
word that passed from his typewriter was holy. On the contrary he revised,
and revised well” (Gifford and Lee 206). Kerouac’s negative reaction to his
experience with Viking editors (technically, Cowley was a literary advisor
to Viking, not an editor) stemmed from the fact that Kerouac never saw
the book in galley proofs. The text underwent several changes, including
house styling, without Kerouac’s knowledge; he saw the final text for the
first time when he received a box of advance copies in the summer of 1957.
Helen K. Taylor, and not Cowley, was the Viking editor who oversaw the
final changes. Taylor and Kerouac would battle again a year later over the
text of The Dharma Bums.
In any case, the story of how the text’s final changes came to pass is typical
Kerouac. As one might expect from Kerouac’s peripatetic nature, the biggest

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obstacle in working with him was often just locating him. He had corre-
sponded with Cowley from Mexico City in the summer of 1955, and from
there he went to San Francisco for a season. Cowley was booked to teach
a creative writing course at Stanford University in the winter session, and
so when he went west in the winter of 1955, he brought the typescript (T3?)
with him. By the time he arrived, though, Kerouac had already returned
east to his sister and brother-in-law’s place in North Carolina. In January
1956, Kerouac traveled from North Carolina to New York City to “see after
arrangements for my manuscripts with agent,” and he wound up spending
fifteen days there (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 544, 546), leading some observ-
ers to contend that Kerouac revised his typescript during this visit.
In February, Kerouac complained to Carolyn Cassady that publication
had been slowed by six months, because he hadn’t been there when Mal-
colm Cowley had come to the Bay Area intent on completing the final edit
of the manuscript (Jack Kerouac, unpublished letter, February 11, 1956). He
makes no mention of having edited the book in New York City, and it is not
likely that he could have done so, if Cowley had been in fact in California
with the typescript. The possibility of the January editing job is even less
likely considering what happened next. In March, Kerouac came up with
a great idea: he decided to meet Cowley at Stanford University after all.
Kerouac would return to California, work with Cowley, and spend time
with friends before beginning a summer-long fire-watching job high up
in the Cascade Mountains of Washington. Together, Kerouac and Cowley
would go over the typescript and add whatever finishing touches would be
needed, bringing back memories of the fine times that Kerouac had shared
with Robert Giroux as they pored over the thousand-plus-page typescript
of The Town and the City.
The idea of working with Cowley in sunny California brought joy and
optimism into Kerouac’s life, and he hitchhiked out of Rocky Mount, North
Carolina, on March 17, bound for the West Coast. The concept was fabulous.
Less than a week after his thirty-fourth birthday, Kerouac was hitchhiking
west across the United States so he could work with a legendary literary
adviser to the eminently respectable Viking Press and his novel—the great
book about hitchhiking and life on the road—would be polished into its
final form. Kerouac was proud of the setup he had arranged: “It was my own
idea, it’s at my own expense, I’m borrowing money from my mother, but
the time has come to get that thing on the presses” (Jack Kerouac, Selected
Letters: 1940–1956 571). The gleaming coast promised acceptance, money,
and the literary recognition he had longed for during six years of steady
writing without publication. But there was one crucial detail that Kerouac

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had overlooked; Stanford operated on a trimester academic calendar, and

when Kerouac arrived, the school session was ended and Cowley had already
returned to New York.
He was crushed. That summer, Kerouac went up into the Cascade Moun-
tains for twelve weeks, then returned to spend a week in San Francisco
(where the picture that would become the author’s photo on Viking’s first
edition of On the Road was taken by Mademoiselle magazine) before head-
ing back to Mexico City. So Kerouac and Cowley apparently never did get
together to polish On the Road, and meanwhile, Viking still had not accepted
the novel for publication.
Now Viking’s big concern was over the possibility of libel; Kerouac’s char-
acters could be recognized as real people who might decide to sue Viking
over their depictions. Viking worked with Nathaniel Whitehorn, of Hays,
Sklar, Epstein and Herzberg, who determined that the changes that Ker-
ouac had made on his own were not enough, and he would have to further
disguise the characters’ real identities. Justin Brierly is the character whose
presence fades the most from scroll typescript to published novel because
he is the most publicly recognizable person characterized in the novel and,
according to Viking’s lawyer, a respectable citizen whose portrayal might
lead him to pursue a defamation lawsuit. The scroll typescript introduces
him thus: “Then Justin W. Brierly, a tremendous local character who all his
life had specialized in developing the potentialities of young people, had in
fact been tutor to Shirley Temple for MGM in the thirties, and was now a
lawyer, a realtor, a director of the Central City Opera Festival and also an
English teacher in a Denver high school, discovered Neal” (On the Road:
The Original Scroll 140). Several funny scenes—Brierly meeting Neal, Brierly
meeting Jack, Brierly meeting Allen—did not make it into On the Road. In-
stead, Denver D. Doll appears rather suddenly, without much introduction,
and exits without explanation. Kerouac altered Brierly’s identity without
prompting from Viking’s legal advisors when he typed T2 and changed
it further when he typed T3. As he wrote to Cowley in September 1955, “I
changed all his titles and professions and so legally it isn’t Justin W. Brierly
but the fictitious Doll” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 518). Nonetheless, further
cuts would have to be made. It is uncertain when these additional Brierly cuts
were made, but it is highly likely that Kerouac did the excision himself.
Other significant cuts from the scroll include a reference to Ginsberg’s
(Carlo Marx) homosexuality, as well as a homosexual scene involving Cas-
sady (Dean Moriarty). Several lengthy scenes were cut probably because they
were extraneous to the action and interrupted the pace of the novel. These
included a description of Cassady and Ginsberg visiting William Burroughs

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(Bull Lee) in Texas, for which the narrator was not present; a big party
scene in the desert near Tuscan at Allen Harrington’s home; and scenes in
which Kerouac (Sal Paradise) and Cassady visit Kerouac’s first wife, Edie, in
Detroit. A delightful scene in which Dean and Sal describe themselves and
their Beat friends in terms of Wild West characters did not make it into the
published novel. On the other hand, some phrases and short passages were
added during revisions, in some cases to help introduce characters and to
flesh out descriptions. For example, the scroll describes Louanne (Marylou)
simply as “pretty” (Original Scroll 110), while the published novel contin-
ues the line this way: “with immense ringlets of hair like a sea of golden
tresses; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her hands hanging in
her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a wide stare because she
was in an evil gray New York pad that she’d heard about back West, and
waiting like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman in a seri-
ous room” (2). In another instance, Kerouac added a sentence of dialogue,
an early speech made by Cassady: “In other words we’ve got to get on the
ball, darling, what I’m saying, otherwise it’ll be fluctuating and lack of true
knowledge or crystallization of our plans” (3). Kerouac lifted much of this
phrase from a letter Cassady had sent him in 1947 (Cassady 55). All in all,
the novel is not significantly shorter than the scroll typescript, follows the
original structure, and is not stylistically different from the way that Ker-
ouac first put it on paper.

I]Z;^cVa9gV[i
Kerouac completed the revision job in Orlando, Florida, where his sister
had moved, during the final days of 1956. In all likelihood he worked on
T3, and in later years he affixed a note that may be taken to indicate that it
was the editors’ setting copy. He then rode a Greyhound bus from Orlando
to New York and, on January 8, 1957, carried his typescript of On the Road
into the Viking offices. Kerouac later told a friend that he chugged a pint
of bourbon on his way up the elevator (Selected Letters: 1957–1969 4). This
time, Kerouac and Cowley were together in the same room, making the
arrangements for Kerouac’s contract, which he signed on January 11, 1957.
Viking’s lawyers released the book for printing on February 8 and double-
checked the galleys on March 22. The book was put on sale on September
5, 1957, and Kerouac was suddenly famous.
In the years that followed, the scroll went from curiosity to legend to
literary artifact. At first the scroll was unfurled at On the Road publicity
parties and bandied about as an oddity. As the flash of promotion died down,
Keith Jennison wound up in possession of the scroll. Not being a collector,

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he impulsively sent the scroll to his son, Chris, who was attending Rutgers
University and living in a fraternity house. Chris and his friend unrolled
the typescript down the longest hall they could find in the frat house and
“pored over it religiously.” When Chris worried about its safety and preser-
vation, Keith suggested that Chris donate the scroll to the Rutgers library;
he offered it, but the librarian’s acceptance letter contained several spelling
errors that were hand-corrected, so Chris decided that the library did not
care enough to deserve it. He returned it to his father, who stashed the scroll
in a filing cabinet in his Viking office (Jennison).
In the mid-1960s, Kerouac was largely a forgotten figure. His books
(eighteen were published during his lifetime) no longer sold well, and many
of them were not being reprinted. As a cultural figure, he seemed out of his
element in the midst of the hippies and peaceniks, whom many observers
credited him with spawning. He moved many times, never realizing the
income he had dreamed would come from his writing. For the most part,
he lived with his mother. In March 1965, Jennison attempted to donate the
scroll to the Morgan Library, located on Madison Avenue in New York City.
Sterling Lord figured that Kerouac would earn a tax deduction for such a
donation, and initially Kerouac agreed. The plan never materialized, and
in December of 1968, a year before he died, Kerouac wrote to Jennison,
demanding that the scroll be returned to him. He had apparently changed
his mind concerning the library donation; Kerouac hoped that the artifact
would help tide him over financially in his old age. The scroll remained in
a safe in Sterling Lord’s office for decades.
On May 22, 2001, Christie’s Auction House sold the On the Road type-
script scroll for $2.2 million. Inclusion of the buyer’s fee and required sales
tax brought the total price to $2.43 million, making Kerouac’s typescript
the highest-priced literary document ever sold, going for roughly $20,250
per foot. Scholars and fans who feared for the scroll’s future may have
been assuaged by winning bidder James Irsay’s first words: “I look at it as
stewardship. I don’t believe that you own anything in this world. It’s dust to
dust. It’s something that I take as a responsibility” (Irsay). True to his word,
Irsay has allowed the scroll to be exhibited in numerous locations around
the United States and overseas. The scroll is, in fact, on the road.

6WWgZk^Vi^dch
T1: Typescript scroll, prepared at 454 West Twentieth Street and Lucien Carr’s
loft on West Twenty-first Street in New York City, April 2–April 22, 1951
(owned by James Irsay, owner of the NFL Indianapolis Colts)
T2: Paginated to 297, with some pages skipped; prepared from T1, at 454 West
Twentieth Street and Lucien Carr’s loft on West Twenty-first Street in New

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 GZk^h^dchd[@ZgdjVX

York City, April 22–May 22, 1951. Revised in black crayon and pencil by
Kerouac and Viking editors, presumably Malcolm Cowley and Helen Taylor.
(Special Collection, New York Public Library)
T3: 347 pages; prepared from T1 and T2, retyped at the request of Knopf editor
Joseph Fox, at 94–21 134th Street, Richmond Hill, Queens, November 1954.
(Special Collection, New York Public Library)

Ldg`h8^iZY
Cassady, Neal. Collected Letters, 1944–1967. Ed. Dave Moore. New York: Pen-
guin, 2004.
Charters, Ann. A Bibliography of Works by Jack Kerouac. New York: Phoenix
Book Shop, 1967.
Cook, Bruce. The Beat Generation. New York: Scribner’s, 1971.
“Duke Ellington and His Orchestra.” Duke Ellington concert program and
flyer. Smithsonian Museum of Natural History Archives.
“Ellington Heard at Metropolitan.” New York Times. Jan. 22, 1951: 13.
Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Ker-
ouac. New York: Penguin, 1979.
Ginsberg, Allen. Letter to Jack Kerouac. [month and day unknown] 1951. Re-
printed with permission of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center,
University of Texas at Austin, and the Ginsberg Trust.
———. Letter to Jack Kerouac. July 1953. Reprinted with permission of the Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, and
the Ginsberg Trust.
———. “Review of The Dharma Bums.” Village Voice. Nov. 12, 1958: 3–5.
Gussow, Adam. “Bohemia Revisited: Malcolm Cowley, Jack Kerouac, and On
the Road.” Georgia Review 38.2 (Summer 1984): 298–311.
Hall, Donald. “Robert Giroux: Looking for Masterpieces.” New York Times
Book Review. Jan. 6, 1980: 22.
Irsay, James. Press conference at Christie’s Auction House following sale of On
the Road scroll manuscript, May 22, 2001.
Jackson, Phyllis. Letter to Malcolm Cowley. May 12, 1953. Malcolm Cowley Papers.
Reprinted with permission of the Newberry Library, University of Chicago.
Jennison, Chris. Email to author, Sept. 5, 2006.
Kerouac, Jack. “Background.” Atop an Underwood. Ed. Paul Marion. New
York: Viking, 1999.
———. “Here I Am at Last with a Typewriter.” Atop an Underwood. Ed. Paul
Marion. New York: Viking, 1999. 130–32.
———. Letter to Allen Ginsberg. November 19, 1958. The Beats: A Literary Refer-
ence. Ed. Matt Theado. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003. 184.
———. Letter to Carolyn Cassady. May 14, 1955. Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Reprinted with permission
of the estate of Stella Kerouac. Copyright 2008 by John Sampas, literary
representative, estate of Stella Kerouac.

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 BViiI]ZVYd

———. Letter to Carolyn Cassady. February 11, 1956. Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
———. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 2005.
———. On the Road: The Original Scroll. Ed. Howard Cunnell. New York:
Viking, 2007.
———. Selected Letters: 1940–1956. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking,
1995.
———. Selected Letters: 1957–1969. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking,
1999.
———. Some of the Dharma. New York: Viking, 1997.
———. “Today.” Atop an Underwood. Ed. Paul Marion. New York: Viking,
1999.
———. Vanity of the Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935–46. New York:
Putnam, 1968.
———. Visions of Cody, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.
———. Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947–1954. Ed. Douglas
Brinkley. New York: Viking, 2004.
Kerouac, Joan. Nobody’s Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of the Beats. Berke-
ley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1990.
Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. New
York: Grove, 1983.
“62.9 Sets Record, But Cold Is on Way.” New York Times. Jan. 22, 1951.
Tytell, John. “Interview with Carl Solomon.” Rpt. The Beats: A Literary Refer-
ence. Ed. Matt Theado. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003. 51–56.

()
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In keeping with its title, perhaps the most resonant image in On the Road is
the territory of its highways. The novel presents North American roads of
the late 1940s as granting deliriously liberating social, sexual, philosophical,
and spatial freedoms. Indeed, for many readers, this positive view of road-
inspired freedom—a continuation of Walt Whitman’s praise of the “open
road”—is central to the book’s ongoing appeal. Yet this characterization is
surprising when one considers the amount of melancholy, destruction, and
(ultimately) rejection Kerouac’s novel also stages along its roads. My aim in
this article is to draw more attention to what Sal Paradise comes to call “the
senseless nightmare road” of his travels (254). Doing so not only will show a
number of conservative underpinnings often overlooked in Kerouac’s free-
wheeling novel (a palpable foreshadowing of the political turn Kerouac made
not long after publishing his bestseller), but will also reveal a characteristic
tension in American attitudes toward its interstate corridors.
As I will explore, Kerouac’s roads grant his protagonists freedom on a
great number of different levels, including departures from capitalism, fam-
ily kinships, adult conduct, heterosexuality, race, and nationality. Yet the
novel’s desires run both ways, for it also stages a backlash against many of
these liberations. Its attention to the violence of motion, the ragged looseness
of road-kinships, the control desired in moments of emotional collapse, and

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the hunger for certain stabilities of home, all point toward a lingering fear
of the circulatory freedoms opened up by the highways. In the end, Sal’s
rejection of the libertine embodiment of the road, Dean, emphasizes an
explicit distancing from that part of Sal’s life you could call his “life on the
road” (1). It is an ambivalent rejection, for it vies with the exuberant libera-
tions the novel has extensively staged. But such ambivalence is part of the
process Deleuze and Guattari note about American literature’s creation of
new barriers (“fascisizing, moralizing, Puritan, and familialist territoriali-
ties”), even as it opens up new circulatory flows of desire (“deterritorialized
flows”). The novel oscillates between the extremes of desiring liberty and
desiring control, moving from what Deleuze and Guattari would call “one
type of libidinal investment to the other” (278).1 The result reveals a rich
conflict within Kerouac’s mind regarding the traffic of desire.
I go on to identify the larger significance of this paradox—of reterrito-
rializing while attempting to deterritorialize—as a characteristic response
of postwar U.S. culture to its infrastructure. In a time of increased road-
tourism and social experimentation on the one hand, and on the other
hand, decaying, outdated roads, social suspicion of flux, and the currency
of conservative values, Kerouac’s novel might be seen as part of a larger call
for a new national circulatory system. That desire, I suggest finally, can be
seen in the divided physical structure of the coming Interstate Highway
System. This forty-one-thousand-mile space (the largest engineering project
on earth) would be designed with a capacity for the Dionysian (liberatory
motion and unprecedented speeds), yet also with an Apollonian capitulation
to control (cold war defensiveness, national uniformity, and social isolation).
The two-sidedness of On the Road, a novel published just after Congress
and President Eisenhower had approved the plan for this “National Defense
Highway System,” both anticipates and explains the curiously contradictory
system of circulation that Americans live with today.

L]^i]Zg<dZhiI]dj4EdhilVg9g^k^c\
Like many young veterans after the Second World War, On the Road’s
restless protagonist is searching for a place within the nation. His choice of
the road as a space for exploring identity has deep historical and cultural
precedents, from Lewis and Clark to Steinbeck’s Joads. Yet the specific era
of Sal’s hitchhiking—1947 forward—is a time of transition for the system
of American highways. The previous network of interstates, built after the
First World War, was becoming dilapidated with age, and wartime rationing
had temporarily stemmed road maintenance. The old system’s design was
becoming outdated and unsafe due to dramatic increases in traffic flows, 2

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and a new system would not be initiated for another decade. Independent
roadside services begun in the past decades were still the majority but were
rapidly aging, particularly after years of reduced traffic during the war years.
Meanwhile, reports of murderous hitchhikers, mobile thieves, and outlaw
lovers on the lam made sensational national news.3 In a 1960 article for
Holiday magazine, Kerouac claims this media trend even put an end to his
wandering: “I myself was a hobo but I had to give it up around 1956 because
of increasing television stories about the abominableness of strangers with
packs passing through” (“The Vanishing American Hobo” 112). These fac-
tors contributed to a general social suspicion of the road’s openness and a
desire for new forms of standardizing, surveying, and regulating conduct
in its spaces.
At the same time, American industry and investment during wartime
led to enormous spending power, enticing many to use the roads for rec-
reation. By 1953, seventy-two million Americans, or one-half the country,
were devoting at least part of their vacation to trips on the road (Pierson
13–14).4 Almost a third of the roads in the United States had been surfaced
by 1941 (one million out of 3.25 million miles), making year-round travel
smoother, more dependable, and more extensive than ever before. Along
these roads, motels, diners, and gas stations could be found in even the
most remote regions of the nation. Early franchising of these services
made the road ever more commercially incorporated, a place that catered
both to the comforts and whims of travelers, and to the corporate dreams
of nationwide consolidation.5 Over the radio, Nat “King” Cole’s version of
Bobby Troupe’s song “Route 66” helped redefine Steinbeck’s grim migrant
road as a place of “kicks.”
Thus a tension between the ludic and the suspicious characterized
American roads in the period Kerouac chose to cover—a tension connected
with the larger visions of the era. As many scholars have argued, American
cultures in these postwar decades were concerned with a desire for “contain-
ment.” Alan Nadel explains that fears about communism, chaos, and dissent
made containment “a privileged American narrative during the cold war”
(2). Andrew Ross notes how the era’s “pan-social fear of the Other” extended
to biological fears of contamination by what was considered alien (45). From
this regard, with a national fixation on patrolling the internal and external
for a sense of security, the network of American roads would seem to frus-
trate the ethic of containment; its immense circulatory system would make
the national body all the more vulnerable to invasion.6 In contrast, critics
like W. T. Lhamon Jr. have argued that the era’s “cultural style” was far more
“promiscuous”—especially in terms of race, culture, and class—than the

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containment model would allow. In Lhamon’s view, the 1950s were not the
bland decade generally envisioned in the popular imagination, but rather
the origin of the complex heterogeneity of postindustrial and postmodern
America. Certainly the road’s circulatory juxtapositions would contribute
to such a national master-narrative.
On the Road, as I will argue, balances itself between these two cultural
tendencies of containment and promiscuity, without one necessarily super-
seding the other. It aims to locate an erotics of freedom along the spaces of
the American roads, while being matched by its own impulses to regulate
and chasten. The road becomes a libertine space for fulfilling fantasies
while serving an equally desired countermand. And while this tension can
be seen in such road novels of the period as Kerouac’s, in the years to come
the system of Eisenhower freeways would physically embody both these
national desires to mix and to contain.

9g^kZcWn;gZZYdb
What the existing interstate highways signify for the young narrator Sal
Paradise, and what has led On the Road to be regarded as a kind of quintes-
sential American road text, is their promise of new frontiers for personal
desire. Kerouac presents their Dionysian qualities in many forms, includ-
ing ecstasies of expression, conduct, sexuality, and race. These notions are
drawn in contrast to Sal’s home life, which involves living under the policies
of his aunt, dutifully working on his novel, taking university classes, and
participating in family gatherings that involve “talking in low, whining
voices about the weather, the crops, and the general weary recapitulation of
who had a baby, who got a new house, and so on” (109). Home life is cast as
circular, gravitationally centripetal (all of Sal’s excursions eventually lead
him back there), a place of daily routines and “weary recapitulation” of the
above-mentioned topics of conversation. In contrast, with every outward
trip the road seems to offer Sal new possibilities in perceptions of time and
space, personal relationships, and sensory ecstasies.
In spite of the commercial orientation of the American road, Sal is able
to minimize his economic participation in order to increase his circulatory
freedom. Road space offers him certain shared structures (through hitch-
hiking, staying or traveling with acquaintances, using drive-away cars, and
other noncommercial transactions), rather than the competitive ones of
capitalist consumption. Sal maintains an austerity in living that projects
the road as a place where one may make a Thoreauvian partial-withdrawal
from being identified as a consumer or a producer, and this privileges him
from the responsibilities of holding down a steady job. Of course, this char-

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acteristic is not uncompromised: loans from his aunt, veteran’s checks, and
the occasional theft also subsidize his indulgence in the economic luxuries
of alcohol and transportation. But like Thoreau’s moderately subsidized ex-
periment in the woods, Sal finds a space that enables a less commercial way
of life than that of home. In contrast with the period’s developing roadsides
(as well as other road books such as Nabokov’s Lolita), motels and tourist
attractions are nearly absent from Sal’s travels. Moreover, as it is Dean’s habit
to drive at excessive speeds, their automotive blurring of the landscape is one
way of resisting capitalist consumption, since economic transactions cannot
take place at 110 miles an hour. In a decade when the national economy had
largely transformed itself from production to consumption, Kerouac offers
the sensory ecstasies of road travel in place of commercial habits.
Among the ecstasies of Sal and Dean’s road is the unsupervised freedom
and frisson of reveling in memories. What dominates their driving discus-
sions are thoughts of childhood. They seem frustrated at their inability to
entertain such a topic in domestic spaces, because of present diversions
and responsibilities (“we couldn’t talk like we wanted to talk in front of
my aunt, who sat in the living room reading her paper” [3]). In contrast to
home, speeding down the road offers a bubble of separation from the world
and its restrictive ties to the adult present. Across the car seat, they indulge
their memories of the past: early fantasies, visions, Dean’s reform-school
antics, schemes on the street with his father. The passing sites themselves
often inspire these memories, as for Dean the drives are encounters with
the spaces of his youth. In the same way Dean uses the car for frenzied, self-
oriented reverie, Sal shares with the reader these youthful exploits, similarly
geared for their emotional appeal to a childlike excitement.
An indication of Kerouac’s idealizing of the moving car as a space of
reverie can also be glimpsed in his letters. Prior to writing On the Road
(the bulk of which was created in a three-week binge during April 1951),
Kerouac and the model for Dean, Neal Cassady, had been exchanging long
letters about childhood memories. Kerouac’s lingering fear of boring the
reader with such indulgence could be abated, as he noted in a January 8,
1951, letter to Neal, by pretending to be driving on the road: he wrote the
letters “just as though you and I were driving across the old U.S.A. in the
night with no mysterious readers, no literary demands, nothing but us
telling . . . and the miles peel off the road as we get closer to some goal that
will not bring us anything but an end” (Selected Letters 274). Thus Kerouac
idealizes the road not for its destinations but as an unpressured space for
contemplation and memory. Envisioning that space gives him the freedom
to evoke the series of past happenings that result in the letters, and shortly

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after, the novel, without having to think about their use to the listener. The
verbal freedom Kerouac celebrates the road as offering thus translates to
written freedoms on the page.
Of course, Sal and Dean find the unsupervised space of the road enables
the freedom to revel not only in memories of childhood, but also in the
behavior of childhood. Over some four years of travel, only occasionally
are they pulled over by police, and Dean’s reckless driving is miraculously
wreck-less (their drive to Chicago being the only exception). For the most
part, they drive at ninety-mile-an-hour speeds and steal provisions with
impunity. Sal understands the need for law, yet his desire for escape is
stronger; hired as a guard in Mill City, Sal can respond to an officer’s state-
ment that “[l]aw and order’s got to be kept” only with ambivalence: “I didn’t
know what to say; he was right; but all I wanted to do was sneak out into
the night and disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody
was doing all over the country” (67). While traveling (as Sal calls it) “the
protective road where nobody would know us” (224), spatial anonymity
gives them the ability to flee social responsibilities, communities, and laws
at a moment’s notice, all in the exuberant desire to find out “what everybody
was doing all over the country.” As a result of this freedom, Dean entices Sal
and his fellow travelers to indulge in the fun of social breaches: touring in
the nude, surprising other drivers with their speeds, refusing to articulate
a rational reason for their motion to all who ask. The search for “kicks” is
a key endeavor on the playgrounds of the American road, and the roads of
Mexico offer even further freedom from the kind of supervision that they
feel from home-figures like Sal’s aunt. Much of the novel seems to look favor-
ably upon the road’s offering the freedom to indulge in a kind of creativity
that is both childlike and childish.
For Kerouac, part of this creativity comes from the social mingling that
the road allows. Early on, he has Sal learn that to access this socialization,
a traveler must open up to multiplicity. Sal’s fantasy of hitchhiking a single
road (Route 6) across the continent becomes a symbolic mistake, as rain, few
drivers, and misdirection foul up this master plan: “It was my dream that
screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow
one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes”
(11). He returns home with this lesson (on a bus filled with a “delegation of
schoolteachers”[11]) and makes another start across the country, this time
with more flexibility, spontaneity, and heterogeneity in his outlook than his
previous “hearthside” ideals. This time, the whims of hitchhiking carry him
in erratic but thrilling zigzags across the nation. On one stretch, which Sal
calls the “greatest ride in my life,” he hops in a pickup filled with a motley

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group of fellow hitchers and hobos that introduce him to the communal
social carnival of the road (22). As the highway confronts him with a flux of
new people, it also loosens his grip on his own sense of self, as when he wakes
up in a Des Moines hotel not knowing who he is (“I was just somebody else,
some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost” [15]).
Sal’s first return home reveals his perceptual transformation, as he stares
at familiar New York in childlike wonder, now that the highway has given
him “innocent road eyes” (107). At least six continent-crossings later, Sal
has been acquainted with scores of characters and has likewise flirted with
multiple subjectivities (California field worker, home-wrecker, policeman,
thief, bohemian, tramp, opera-goer—at times he even identifies with people
from centuries ago). Such freedom in self-definition gives him a flexibility
not felt since childhood, a permission to engage the kind of schizophrenia
that Deleuze and Guattari find therapeutic in negotiating modernity.
Dean Moriarty also embodies such road-fostered psychic freedoms. Even
as he travels to gather together his past memories, places, and family into a
mentally unified whole, his refusal to stick to any kind of personal or spatial
loyalty makes him a Deleuzian nomad.7 This is symbolized by the cardboard
suitcase he keeps packed under his bed, ready to be taken up at any mo-
ment, as he impulsively seeks out new wives, friends, cities, at the slightest
whim: “The thing is not to get hung-up,” Dean repeatedly insists (120). Dean
is a product of circulation itself: born on the road (while his parents were
en route to Los Angeles), he was shuttled around the west by his traveling
tinsmith father and was raised unfamiliar with mainstream American
identities (responsible father, stable husband, loyal friend, breadwinner).
Circulation seems to have freed him from traditional social roles; he feels
free to engage in bisexual relationships, in cross-racial mingling within a
segregated nation, and in activities that go beyond social law (drug-taking,
bigamy, etc). Dean’s characteristic nervous gesture is to rub his belly repeat-
edly, suggesting a restless, circular motion in a place signifying appetite. He
gives rise to a hunger in others for motion because in Kerouac’s mind he is
already catalytically a part of that force.
Moreover, where one might feel alienated in the vastness of America,
Dean brings a palliative assertion of comfort and familiarity. He does this
by suggesting the power he and Sal gain from the road’s access, and how
it enables them to “know” the vast scales of national space with the same
familiarity of domestic space: “ [W]e know America, we’re at home; I can
go anywhere in America and get what I want because it’s the same in every
corner, I know the people, I know what they do” (121). This is not a denial
of the nation’s heterogeneity but an expression of feeling at home in that

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plurality, as road structures and comfort in unorthodox circulation provide

that at-home confidence. We see Dean’s dream of the highway’s permissive
pluralism in his question, “What’s your road, man?—holyboy road, mad-
man road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for
anybody anyhow. Where body how?” (251). This cryptic vision sets up the
road as catering to difference along axes of divinity, sanity, hue, and species
(though in regard to gender, “holyboy” and “madman” set the road as mas-
culine; as I discuss later, the road is also primarily white). Dean’s quixotic
dream, then, is to incorporate this vision of an “anywhere road” with his
own social condition in America. Not unlike Peter Pan, Dean’s goals are to
avoid the “hang-ups” of adulthood and to teach others to find a domestic-
like comfort in flying across the vast spaces beyond the home.
Part of the novel’s portrayal of the road-as-playground for these men
comes from its participation in the tradition of mobility as a retreat from
(white) women. Kerouac shows the modern highway as providing the spatial
role that the frontier, the raft, and the bachelor clubhouse had served pre-
vious American texts, for isolating men from women, maternal oversight,
and marriage. Spatially, the road is cast as almost exclusively masculine:
a place for the search for a father (as Dean’s subplot indicates), and for the
recovery of a certain type of assertive masculinity (which Sal sees Dean as
embodying).8 As few women travel Kerouac’s roads, the road offers Sal a
place to depart from his “weary split-up” with his wife and the controlling
influence of his aunt (1); for Dean, the road is the ever-ready channel for
his bouts of restlessness within multiplying marriages. Kerouac figures the
opposite of the road in the ritualized “sewing circle” scene, where Dean has
been kicked out of the house by his wife and is surrounded by the disap-
proving rebukes of her friends. But the scene of tension is followed by an
ecstatic drive across the country by Sal and Dean as they reunite with a
place comparatively free of the pressures of responsibility and consideration
of women. In such homosocial escapes, the men further their Fiedleresque
return to childhood.
Still, the novel’s quest for a childlike permissiveness also has a sexual side,
as Dean takes sexuality out of the domestic bedroom and pursues it freely
along the public spaces of the road. Repeatedly, he leaves settled wives in
search of trysts with waitresses, fellow travelers, and friends, often finding
new wives at the end of the road. The unsettled Dean is in constant search
for sexual novelty, and the road facilitates this need by keeping things in
motion. Pedophilic desire is one such response, for at one point Dean lusts
after a Mexican “little girl about three feet high, a midget” (218), and in the
next paragraph desires the thirteen-year-old daughter of a friend they are

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staying with. Sal feels the need to protect her as Dean sits “watching her with
slitted eyes and saying, ‘Yes, yes, yes’” (218). In addition to Dean’s seeking
out heterosexual experiences with girls, random women, and new wives,
Kerouac includes veiled hints of homosexuality, as with his all-night “talks”
with poet Carlo Marx, his hustling a gay carpooler, and his spending time
alone with a pimp he’s fond of in Mexico.9
The nervous, unspoken sexuality between Dean and Sal also figures
among the freedoms Dean explores. Critics like Oliver Harris and Robert
Holton have noted how Kerouac’s discomfort regarding his own bisexual
desires led him to repress moments of homosexuality in his semi-autobio-
graphical novel. Still, Kerouac has made the repression so visible that it is
not easy to miss, for although Sal and Dean’s sexual relation is never explicit,
Kerouac has loaded the novel with its signs. As the novel’s opening lines indi-
cate (“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up”), Dean becomes
an exciting replacement for a heterosexual relation that had failed him (1).
Early on, Dean asks Sal if he can watch him make love with his ex-wife, a
proposal that unambiguously takes place in a gay bar. Later, they enter into
a kind of marriage (after wives, distance, and distraction have kept them
apart), when Dean’s wife throws him out. When Sal suggests they go to Italy
together on his money, the penniless Dean “blushe[s]” in acceptance. As Sal
explains, it “was probably the pivotal point in our friendship . . . In me it was
suddenly concern for a man who was years younger than I, five years, and
whose fate was wound with mine across the passage of the recent years”
(190). At that moment, Kerouac has a “strange” wedding party of “eleven
Greek men and women” file by them, before Dean “in a very shy and sweet
voice” confirms their plan that they would “stick together and be buddies
till we died” (190–91).
The signifiers of their own “strange” marriage then continue as their
drive to New York serves as a kind of honeymoon. In the first part of their
trip they carpool with a man Sal calls a “tall thin fag” in a car Dean calls a
“fag Plymouth” (207), exemplifying the novel’s pattern of how their deflec-
tive homophobia serves as a marker of nervous homosexuality. In the back
seat, during the drive, Dean and Sal engage in one of their frantic talks of
childhood memories, but this is narrated to connote a kind of sexual frenzy,
with exclamations (“Yes! Yes! Yes!” “‘Oh, man! man! man!’ moaned Dean”),
as well as statements of their being “hot,” “sweating” and “excited” (208–9).
Here, Kerouac is casting the talks they can experience only on the road as a
sexual engagement, which itself can take place only on the road:
We had completely forgotten the people up front who had begun to
wonder what was going on in the back seat. At one point the driver said,

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“For God’s sakes, you’re rocking the boat back there.” Actually we were;
the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the
IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank entranced
end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking
in our souls all our lives. (209)

Such framing of this “final excited joy” that follows their marriage scene sug-
gests a long-desired consummation of something “lurking in [their] souls.”
What eventually breaks up the men in this section of the novel is the drive’s
end in New York, where Sal’s aunt refuses to house Dean (indicating the
restrictions of home space). At a time when Americans still thought of ho-
mosexuality as a psychological disease,10 what Kerouac hints is that the road
offers a space for freer experimentation in desires that are usually restricted
by traditional, noncirculatory spaces. He is not suggesting that all of these
sexual freedoms are laudable, as Sal’s discomfort at Dean’s voyeurism and
pedophilic gaze reveals, but these freedoms do allow a person to be more
expressive about the true channels of individual human desire.
Alongside a sexual pluralism, the novel stages Sal and Dean’s road-desires
in terms of a curious racialization of freedom. As has long been noticed,
the novel constructs “whiteness” as a problem, and is notorious in its es-
sentialist visions of nonwhite life that Sal projects as a solution. In contrast
to what he calls the “happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America,” Sal
finds himself at his most beat when he feels “the best the white world had
offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness,
music, not enough night” (179–80). He positions minorities as living a bliss
of emotional extremes, and while he feels he can sample this freedom by in-
habiting racialized spaces (jazz clubs, Chicano farm worker neighborhoods,
integrated neighborhoods like Mill City or parts of Denver, and the homes
of blacks), the experience is frustratingly temporary. The important irony is
that in a novel about escaping home spaces, Sal’s lingering desire is for the
home spaces of minorities. Marriage, work, and neighborhood familiarity
seem dreary to Sal—except when enacted by nonwhites. In Robert Holton’s
phrase, Sal seeks out a “liberated discursive space” in racial heterogeneity
to avoid bourgeois restraints (266). But as Sal complains, “white ambitions”
are what keep him from permanently placing himself into this settled,
racialized existence.
Instead of in racial neighborhoods and in racial heterogeneity, Sal finds
that it is the road that offers the most “liberated discursive space” he—as
a white man—can attain. The highway enables him to assume the emo-
tional status he projects onto nonwhites, for in taking him away from the
comfortable, settled space of his eastern home, the road bestows on him

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an outsider status, a freedom from “white ambitions” to pursue the fun he

sees in Others. Sal and Dean aim to make highway life approximate what
they call “spade kicks” (251): both are said to be characterized by sponta-
neity (hence no maps, explanations, or articulated goals); inclusiveness
(maintaining a nonjudgmental openness); contentedness (“kicks, joy”);
and emotional exuberance (which speeds and lawlessness foster). Tellingly,
along Kerouac’s roads themselves, there are almost no minorities to be
found.11 Roads connect the marginalized, settled spaces of racial minorities,
but for the most part, in Kerouac’s imagination engaging in the mobility
of roads remains a power for whites alone.
In Kerouac’s view, if the American highway enables white men to tran-
scend race as a way of returning to a childlike feeling of wonder, the inter-
national highway fosters this revival even further. The novel’s cyclical plot
finds Sal repeatedly crossing the continent with high expectations about his
destination on the other side, and always ending disappointed and desir-
ing to return home. A typical example of feeling spatial closure happens at
the end of his first trip to the west, where he sighs, “Here I was at the end
of America—no more land—and now there was nowhere to go but back”
(77). From the start, Sal had wanted to learn from Dean to feel “at home”
in national space, but as he achieves this goal along the roads of America,
he soon wishes to go further. Dean offers a solution by visualizing going
beyond nation and into Mexico, South America, and “the whole world” itself:
“Yes! You and I, Sal, we’d dig the whole world with a car like this because,
man, the road must eventually lead to the whole world. Ain’t nowhere else
it can go—right?” (231). The roads of the Americas and the power he feels
behind the wheel of a Cadillac give Dean this imperial vision of total, equal
access to the world.
In spite of the naïveté of this vision, it fills them with a sense of child-
like, optimistic possibility that impels their testing it out on the road to
Mexico City. Part of the interest comes from its being an unimaginable
place. They have come to “know” American space, but that knowledge ends
at the border, as Dean describes on their approach: “the end of Texas, the
end of America, and we don’t know no more” (273). Sal is also reduced to
enchantment from the seductively blank space:
I couldn’t imagine this trip. It was the most fabulous of all. It was no
longer east-west, but magic south. We saw a vision of the entire Western
Hemisphere rockribbing clear down to Tierra del Fuego and us flying
down the curve of the world into other tropics and other worlds. “Man,
this will finally take us to IT!” said Dean with definite faith. He tapped
my arm. “Just wait and see. Hoo! Whee!” (265)

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Such shouts of glee exemplify the connotations of childhood Sal’s narration

strives for in this excursion beyond the parental borders of the nation. What
they find on the other side seems to confirm their hopes for a playground:
“Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had pre-
viously known about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the
magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the
magic” (276). The international road thus furthers their pursuit of spaces
of enchantment.
In moving through these spaces, what’s important to Sal and Dean is
the perspectival shifts it allows. Dean explains by suggesting the trip will
help them “understand the world as, really and genuinely speaking, other
Americans haven’t done before us” (276). On the one hand, this shift involves
the ability to revel in further freedoms: in Mexico, their dollars go further,
the police are far less interested in watching or arresting them, brothels and
marijuana are freely accessible, and Dean “had found people like himself” in
that the Mexicans they encounter seem less “hung-up” than the Americans
he had left behind (279). But on the other hand, Mexico’s roads free their
imagination from certain American perspectives. For Sal, as he muses at
the wheel, this involves a trip into time:
The boys were sleeping, and I was alone in my eternity at the wheel, and
the road ran straight as an arrow. Not like driving across Carolina, or
Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into
the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellahin
Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wail-
ing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the
world. . . . These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all
like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore—they had
high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools,
they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the
source of mankind and the fathers of it. . . . And they knew this when
we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in
their land. . . . (280)

Here, the gravitas he sees in the Fellahin (a term for the indigenous, which
Kerouac borrows from Oswald Spengler’s pessimistic vision of western civ-
ilization’s decline) provides a counter to Sal’s own American stereotypes. In
his “eternity at the wheel,” the road seems to be taking Sal out of the present,
to the “essential strain” of all humanity. Perhaps it is partly because Dean
is at last silent and sleeping that Sal is able to open himself to this timeless
perspective (one finds that Sal is at his most introspective when he’s not

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playing Boswell to Dean’s infamous Johnson). Still, it is in large part from

inhabiting a space that reduces him to childlike wonder that brings him to
imagine humanity beyond the borders of nation and lifetime, to envision
where he fits in this wider perspective.
Even Dean becomes open to the relativizing outlook of the international
road. Whereas in America, speed and outlawry are his intoxicants of choice,
Dean drives through Mexico at slow speeds, taking in the roadside in a
manner he had never done in the United States. In contrast to American
norms, Mexican differences in manners and expectations leave Dean in awe:
“‘How different they must be in their private concerns and evaluations and
wishes!’ Dean drove on with his mouth hanging in awe, ten miles an hour,
desirous to see every possible human being on the road” (297). For him, this
relativity confirms the desires he has had all along: that American norms
are not at the center of humanity. It seems to justify his past differences
with his nation’s set of proprieties and responsibilities and permits him to
explore them in the future.
By no means do Sal’s erratic sprints across the United States and beyond
give him an intimate and informed knowledge of geography, architecture,
history, and cultures. But he does “know space” in the sense of being able
to live at new spatial scales—of inhabiting vast geographical distances,
not as a touristic spree but as a yearly event (usually initiated by spring’s
onset), which can consume months at a time. The road has enabled him to
connect himself with spaces of North America that are rarely experienced
by white America, such as racially segregated neighborhoods, urban jazz
joints, and Mexico’s Indian villages. Traveling has tempered some of his
romantic notions of region (the west, for example, turns out to have the
same sadness as the east), but this temperance allows him to feel at home
in un-homely places. Even at the “end of the road” (299), which he locates
in Mexico, he has decentered his connection with modern civilization to
the point of feeling a kind of kinship with the indigenous Fellahin outside
national borders. At the end of the novel, Sal’s closing statement reveals a
comfort in this knowledge of space. As he explains that from his habitual
sunset haunt of a Manhattan pier, he need only face west in order to “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 dreaming in the immensity
of it” (307). Such a vivid projection from his rooted eastern home gives at
least a psychic ownership of the extended region he has inhabited through
the network of highways.
The literary style Kerouac adapted for On the Road also furthered his
effort to identify the road as an alternative space of freedom. He had long

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been seeking the right form for his novel and had abandoned two previous
attempts (one written in third-person, and one written from the first-person
point of view of a black child). For the version that became On the Road,
Kerouac famously typed with the stimulants of long-distance drivers: cof-
fee and furious speed. The connection of this writing method to the road
was not incidental; as he wrote in a letter to Cassady soon after finishing
this first draft, “I’ve telled all the road now. Went fast because road is fast
. . . wrote whole thing on strip of paper 120 foot long (tracing paper that
belonged to Cannastra.)—just rolled it through typewriter and in fact no
paragraphs . . . rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road” (May 21, 1951,
in Selected Letters 315–16). As he drew a connection between the physicality
of the writing with that of the road, many of the sentences themselves also
aim for the connection. While the majority of the novel is written in what
could be called a traditional narrative style, many sections veer into an
impressionistic frenzy. These occur in moments of Sal’s ecstasy: jazz clubs,
parties, conversations, and above all, fast motion. In descriptions of driving,
Kerouac uses complex and breathless sentences, unconnected observations
of passing scenes, pile-ups of adjectives, exclamations, and an emphasis on
verbs (rather than nouns)—all to complement his novel’s effort to portray
an American road of energy and freedom.12

9g^kZcWn8dciV^cbZci
What I have tried to show is the various ways that Dean and Sal project
road space as permitting a fuller expression of desire. Kerouac favors the
economic, expressive, sexual, racial, and creative freedoms the highway al-
lows its white male travelers. Yet while this emphasis on freedom is what is
most often remembered about On the Road, the novel greatly complicates
the issue. Kerouac has laced the road scenes with so much melancholy, fear,
guilt—culminating in a kind of road-abandonment in the novel’s end—that
it is a misreading to interpret the novel as solely offering a positive vision
of the American road. Instead, Kerouac balances this by asserting the con-
founding limitations of a deterritorialized life lived on the highway.
Early in planning his book, Kerouac may not have had in mind the desire
to portray the road as a space of possibility. One letter from October 19, 1948,
speaks of his early plan for the novel, describing it as:
an American-scene picaresque, “On the Road,” dealing simply with hitch-
hiking and the sorrows, hardships, adventures, sweats and labours of (two
boys going to California, one for his girl, the other one for Golden Holly-
wood or some such illusion, and having to work in carnivals, lunchcarts,

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factories, farms, all the way over, arriving in California finally where there
is nothing . . . and returning again.) (Selected Letters 170)

With the exception of “adventures,” all of Kerouac’s above descriptions

color the road experiences negatively (“hardships,” “sweats,” “labours,”
“illusion,” “nothing”), figuring the journey to be all work, disappointment,
and sorrow. In this blueprint for the novel, returning home and getting off
the road seems to function as the projected solution. Certainly, the resulting
novel has more upbeat moments than this original plan, but the intended
retreat does occur. Where the textual plot covers what Sal calls “the part of
my life you could call my life on the road” (1), the conclusion reveals this
to be a temporary phase that he ultimately terminates. What leads to this
decision are the many ways Sal realizes that the road cannot fulfill all of
his desires.
Among the many moments of disillusionment the novel stages for Sal (for
example, about the west, Dean, whiteness, life), a key theme is the highway’s
“impurity.” From Dean and Sal, we frequently hear the optimistic assertion
of the “purity of the road” (135). This phrase translates as the hope of being
able to wipe clean the slate of the past, to leave mistakes and responsibilities
behind through highway speed and distance. Such a move is even cast as a
singular form of nobility, as Sal reports when leaving New York at the start
of one trip: “We were all delighted, we realized we were leaving confusion
and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the
time, move” (134). What becomes quickly apparent, though, is how much
“confusion and nonsense” follow them en route. Hunger, absurd poverty,
interpersonal friction and fights, the pleas from wives left behind, the pull
of home—all these follow and confound the characters’ verbal attempts to
recruit the road as an American Dream space for starting anew. Sal also car-
ries frequent regrets about his own libertine conduct, as during his first trip
to Denver: “I rued the way I had broken up the purity of my entire trip, not
saving every dime, and dawdling and not really making time, fooling around
with this sullen girl and spending all my money. It made me sick” (34). Such
moments of self-disgust signal a call for the “purity” of restraint, decorum,
thrift, and efficiency—all things in other moments Sal seeks to escape.
Kerouac also shows the road to be impure in the sense that it is con-
stantly mediated by travelers’ preconceptions. Sal is deliberately traveling
without guidebooks in an attempt to maintain the spontaneity of seeing
with “innocent road-eyes” (107). Yet Sal himself connects nearly every city,
town, region, and landscape passed on the road with some novel, film,
author, folklore, or phrase he has experienced in advance. This anticipa-

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tion adds to the excitement Sal feels in his travels, for the road is helping
to connect the narratives in his head, but it keeps the road from living up
to the expectations of unmediated purity. Once the American roads have
lost their excitement for Sal and Dean, the road to Mexico City seems to
promise the purity they seek, as they cannot picture the landscapes. Yet in
spite of Sal’s frequent assertions (“We had no idea what Mexico would re-
ally be like”), upon their crossing of the border, the country lives up to the
expectations they in fact held: “To our amazement, it looked exactly like
Mexico” (273–74).13 Such contrasts in the novel show that anticipations and
preconceptions are unavoidable, in spite of Sal’s desire for blank purity. The
contingencies, creators, and histories that anchor the roadsides, as well as
the personal histories, myths, and problems travelers carry with them, make
the claim to “the purity of the road” an impossibility.
Also troubling to Sal is the keen sense of guilt he feels from the violence
of motion. As we have seen, Sal is often rapturous over the ecstasies of move-
ment, and desirous of casting it as a “noble function.” Yet always there is a
foundation of melancholy the descriptions are built on, often coming in the
form of guilt at departure when a trip begins. Sal lingers over these moments
when how driving away causes what appears to be a physical shrinking of
people left behind. When leaving friends in New Orleans, Sal wonders,
“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede
on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?—it’s the too-huge world
vaulting us, and it’s good-by” (156). Here, the independent motion of the
car reduces friends to “specks,” a visual illusion that Sal frames as a guilty
reality. Leaving for Mexico, Sal lingers sentimentally on the scene of the
young Stan Shepherd (their road protégé) leaving home as his grandfather
pleads desperately for him not to go (265–66). Sal himself carries a degree
of guilt over leaving his aunt so frequently to join Dean on the road. And
as Dean leaves wives and children behind through the impulsive facility of
the road, Sal gradually realizes how easily the highway pulls apart families.
Road kinships may serve as replacement families, but Sal ultimately finds
them to be fickle and temporary, compared to the potentially deeper loyalties
of traditional family units. Such culpability extends not only to people but
to places themselves, which Sal’s descriptions frame as being destroyed by
their motion. He repeatedly states at various moments that “everything was
collapsing”—a spatial metaphor that hints at the chaos and structural loose-
ness of a life lived on the road. The Mexico trip begins with Sal’s apocalyptic
description that “Denver receded back of us like the city of salt, her smokes
breaking up in the air and dissolving to our sight” (267). Such examples in
Sal’s aesthetics of disappearance might seem to work in the service of the

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hoped-for obliteration of the past, but in Kerouac’s careful descriptions, the

haze of guilt hovers over all. For all the forward-excitement, Sal spends a
lot of time gazing at the rearview mirror.
At one point, the violence of motion becomes too much for Sal to bear.
Dean’s record-time drive from Denver to Chicago—full of crashes, near-
crashes, and nausea at such speeds—feels out of control to Sal. Where he
had often felt glee at road freedom, Sal here yearns for security: “I couldn’t
take it any more . . . All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the
cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in
the nightmare day” (235). The feeling of being out of control is Sal’s experi-
ence of the apocalyptic extremes of the American road’s freedom. Not even
his retreat to lie on the back seat can relieve his dread: “[N]ow I could feel
the road some twenty inches beneath me, unfurling and flying and hissing
at incredible speeds across the groaning continent with that mad Ahab at
the wheel” (235). The menacing verbs and Melvillean comparison assert the
doom Sal sees inherent in such extremes of freedom. The police presence
that he had dismissed as pesky for much of the trip now seems desirable for
controlling such a mad captain.
Although Sal resigns himself to fate, and Dean manages to get them to
Chicago in one piece, it is their next trip, where they reach what they call
the “end of the road” in Mexico (299), that Sal appears to conclude the on-
the-road part of his life. Originally, Sal was taking the trip by bus to Mexico
alone, but by the time he stops in Denver to visit friends, he hears Dean
is following him. Sal describes Dean in even more apocalyptic terms than
before, connecting him with images of destruction and death (the “Shrouded
Traveler” he frequently talks of), rather than the life-giving associations he
had used earlier in their relationship:

Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel,

palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with
enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain,
bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad,
bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy
chariot with thousands of sparkling flames shooting out from it; I saw
the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went
over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came
like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again. There was no
chance to send money to either wife if he took all his savings out of the
bank and bought a car. Everything was up, the jig and all. Behind him
charred ruins smoked. (259)

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In a manner not unlike the road to Chicago, this vision of demonic destruc-
tion in Dean’s use of the road suggests Sal’s turning against such extremes.
Although Sal goes along with the plan, his sympathy lies with Dean’s wives,
as he mentions the depleted savings and the abandonment that this spon-
taneous road-trip entails. The passage reflects how the novel increasingly
focuses on the destruction the roads permit Dean and foreshadows that
this violence affects not only Dean’s families, but Sal as well. For although
the trip is as eye-opening and ecstatic as previous drives, their relationship
reaches an icy turning-point with Dean’s abandonment of him in Mexico
City. While dysentery leaves Sal nearly unconscious, Dean insists on re-
turning to his new girlfriend in New York now that he has secured divorce
papers from Mexico. As the road can spontaneously bring together these
men for the male bonding they prize so highly, the Mexico trip emphasizes
that it can just as easily split them apart, leaving Sal feeling as abandoned as
one of Dean’s wives. At this point, Sal admits realizing “what a rat he was,”
though he strives to “say nothing” and keep up his habitual nonjudgment
toward Dean (302).
Nevertheless, something has changed in Sal that turns him away from his
partner and the road he symbolizes. Sal rehearses the flux of Dean’s marital
situation with implicit disapproval: “So now he was three times married,
twice divorced, and living with his second wife” (303). What follows this
statement is Sal’s dreamlike moment of decision upon crossing the border
from Mexico back to America:
I heard the sound of footsteps from the darkness beyond, and lo, a tall
old man with flowing white hair came clomping by with a pack on his
back, and when he saw me as he passed, he said, “Go moan for man,” and
clomped on back to his dark. Did this mean that I should at last go on my
pilgrimage on foot on the dark roads around America? (303)

The question is answered only by Sal’s next action, which is to return home
to New York to discover and settle down with his new lover, whom he calls
“the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched
for and for so long” (304). The ghostly image of the backpacker, a vision
Kerouac sets on the border of the nation, seems to beckon Sal to continue
the wandering road life. The Biblical “lo” sets the old man as a spiritual
figure of destiny. But at that liminal moment, by casting the roads as “dark”
and the pilgrimage as an act of moaning, Sal illustrates his retreat to home
and settlement as the brighter choice. In rejecting the pilgrimage and the
white-haired traveler, Sal is rejecting Dean, the road, and perhaps even
the fate of an old hobo, the “Ghost of the Susquehanna,” on whom Sal had

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earlier taken pity for his being utterly lost and lonely in the “wilderness of
America” after a lifetime of the kind of tramping the novel so often venerates
(105). Once back in New York, Sal’s new lover, Laura, seems to come from
out of nowhere, but the meeting does suggest that he can find what he has
“always searched for and for so long” back in the centered world of home,
rather than in the deterritorialized spaces of the road. The flux of traveling
life may still beckon, at borders or from dreamy Manhattan piers, but Sal
has chosen against it, feeling the stronger pull of a more controlled life for
himself and the family structures to which he returns.
In the book’s penultimate scene, Sal stages this rejection of Dean by
choosing to accompany his more conservative friend Remi. As Sal describes
Remi at this point, he lacks spontaneity, preferring to do things according to
a set of standards worthy of Emily Post: “Remi was fat and sad now but still
the eager and formal gentleman, and he wanted to do things the right way,
as he emphasized” (306). Kerouac features them driving to a Duke Ellington
concert at the Metropolitan Opera House, to serve as a retreat from Dean’s
wild bop-jazz toward an older, more socially accepted musical style and
setting. When Remi predictably insists they cannot alter their evening plan
by giving Dean a ride to the train station, Sal goes along with the decision
to leave him out in the cold night. Earlier, Sal had rejected Dean’s offer to
take him and Laura to his new home in San Francisco, so this second assent
to do things the “right way” signals a conscious divorce from Dean. As we
find in the final scene at the pier, the rejection is firm but bittersweet, as Sal
is left thinking of Dean and the road-traced land between them.
Throughout the novel, Sal has struggled to refrain from condemning
Dean, but in the end he cannot help it. Sal has clung to the faith that under-
standing Dean means taking into account the “impossible complexity of his
life,” which means not dismissing him according to traditional structures
of morality and behavior (302). Sal believes this understanding will enable
them to try out a kind of secret of life together. When this hope proves elusive
in trip after trip, and Dean becomes increasingly less saintly to Sal’s mind,
he casts his lot with the friends and family who have turned against Dean.
At this point he leaves the unconventional road-based marriage that had
provided an alternative to the traumatic one he had left at the novel’s begin-
ning, returning to a traditional, home-based relation. The once-powerful,
garrulous Dean is left a shivering, friendless, inarticulate wanderer, who
closely resembles the pitied Ghost of the Susquehanna. Kerouac suggests
that by rejecting Dean’s wandering life, Sal avoids a similar fate.
From this conclusion, we find that Sal has rejected the road-fostered
narcissism that had given a childlike appeal to Dean, for he finds the chaos

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outweighs the ecstasies. Thinking ahead to the future is partly what moti-
vates this; at one point Sal thinks how their kids will see them in the ordered
space of photos, “never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual
lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road” (253–54).
In this notion that photos crop out the “senseless nightmare road,” Sal is
relying on his own text to make sure the terror stays in the picture—which
explains why Kerouac devotes as much of his novel to the grim side of the
American road as he does to its ecstasies.
Ann Charters interprets Sal Paradise’s name as referring to the “sad
paradise” of the American Dream (xxii), but I would offer that the connota-
tion could also be applied to the American road: it is this landscape that the
novel regards as a paradise of childlike permissiveness and openness, but
the overwhelming sadness from its chaos and guilt motivates an ultimate
rejection for a more stable space. The road does heighten emotional extremes
for the men, connects them with nontraditional spaces, and offers provoca-
tive new kinships in place of the family unit. The road’s value for Kerouac
is in its “ecstasy,” in the sense of the word’s Greek origin as ek-stasis, a get-
ting-out-of-place. This is the “deterritorialization” Deleuze and Guattari
identify as important for escaping coercive and stifling social structures,
which Kerouac links with the road inside—and even outside—America. But
as the epigraph that begins this article notes, the move is compounded by a
consequent reassertion of “fascisizing, moralizing, Puritan, and familialist
territorialities.”14 The ending of On the Road achieves this in its reassertion
of traditional normative relationships and stable social structures.
Ultimately, one vision does not necessarily trump the other. In consid-
ering highway space of the 1940s and 1950s, what makes On the Road (and
many other road texts of the era15) characteristic is its need to hold on to
both competing visions. Sal’s settlement and rejection of Dean does not
overshadow the book’s vivid portrayal of road-based social independence.
Many earlier road texts had figured the American highway as wholly eman-
cipatory, and a number of texts in future decades would focus entirely on
the highway’s restrictions. But such works as On the Road hold on to a tense
balance in a multiplicity of desires for liberation and containment, offering
a kind of libidinal economy for a divided nation.

9Zh^gZA^cZhidi]Z;gZZlVn6jide^V
What Kerouac’s literary figuration anticipates is the coming of a national
text far more massive and influential: the interstate freeway. Architects use
the term “desire lines” to describe the pathways pedestrians independently
make across existing landscapes. Trails of trod grass or snow made by people

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taking shortcuts across a plaza are examples of desire lines, and planners
analyze these user-made trajectories to determine where to install a new
walkway. In a sense, the competing wishes found in On the Road form visible
“desire lines” that point us toward the nation’s next generation of interstate
roads. In design, the freeway’s structural roots extended to Germany’s 1930s
autobahn, to Robert Moses’s parkways, and to Norman Bel Geddes’s road
visions for the 1939 World’s Fair. But as a text, the interstate was an expres-
sion of the cultural tension in postwar America. At a time when the existing
two-lane highways were overburdened and outdated, how might one create
a national space that fulfills simultaneous desires for childlike freedoms
and responsible regulation? Where might anonymity be sought without
shading too far into alienation? The plan for the Interstate Highways, which
Dwight Eisenhower pushed through Congress in 1956, called for a forty-
one-thousand-mile circulatory system of limited-access, divided, isotropic
road engineered for seventy-mile-per-hour travel. This meant that the kind
of connectivity, speed, and mental space that Sal and Dean desire could
be socially sanctioned. As a new American space, the Interstate Highway
System could thus offer citizens a place for nervous motion, spatial freedom,
and encounters with the heterogeneous.
At the same time, freeways would also serve the nation’s guilt-ridden
conscience through their careful regulation. As they are built to limit and
guide (decisions, access, movement), freeways circumscribe in the name
of safety and accountability. They limit decision-making by reducing dis-
tractions and exits; they regulate difference by minimizing activities (the
only activity permitted is the driving of certain vehicles at a certain level
of speed). Regional irregularity could be eschewed through standardized
designs and signage, with federal legislature holding the power to trump
that of states. Commercial infrastructure catering to drivers could be made
uniform through franchises clustered around the interstate’s infrequent
exits. Part of what enabled the plan to pass quickly through Congress was
its promotion as the “National Defense Highway System,” for in an age of
the intercontinental ballistic missile, it was pitched as a means of urban
evacuation. Thus, amid the playground-freedom of the freeway were ele-
ments that satisfied a competing desire for homogenizing stability and
security. A country that could not decide between the two impulses would
soon build a spatial structure that reflects that ambivalence. Costing $25
billion, it was the most expensive public works project ever proposed—but
Congress embraced the plan eagerly.
It is especially telling that Walt Disney’s one-of-a-kind amusement
park would feature a mini-freeway as one of its rides in Tomorrowland.

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Disneyland (the place Charles Moore called the most influential piece of
postwar American urbanism) opened in 1955, just a year before the passing
of Eisenhower’s plan. The “Autopia” attraction featured a mile-long loop-
ing concrete channel to simulate the superhighway and guide its miniature
cars along the route. That the interstate system, at the time of its planning,
could be featured as an amusement ride suggests its value was not simply
pragmatic, but touched on certain American ideas of childlike fun—for the
kind of inward, pleasure-seeking that Sal and Dean desire on their roads.
At the same time, the guided nature of the ride (the steering wheel was
purely decorative) was an extension of the interstate’s provision of safety and
regulation. Eisenhower’s new road structure and Disney’s miniaturization
of the plan both set in concrete such ambivalent “autopian” desires. But as
the actual American freeway system would take almost forty years to build,
the full effect of inhabiting this new space of polymorphous desire would
not be registered until the coming decades.

CdiZh
1. While the main project of Anti-Oedipus is to offer an alternative (“schizo-
analysis”) to the Freudian model of psychoanalysis and what Deleuze and
Guattari see as its reductive and even fascistic tendencies, my own use of their
spatialized terminology in reconsidering On the Road is for its recognition of the
diverse and sometimes paradoxical channels in which human desire flows.
2. Between 1945 and 1950, the number of registered vehicles increased 70
percent (Rose 31). By the mid-1950s only four thousand miles of highways had
four or more lanes and the safety feature of being divided.
3. Among the most famous reports were William Cook’s murderous hitch-
hiking in 1950 and Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate’s Midwest killing
spree in 1958 (inspired, perhaps, by the 1934 cross-country bank robbers Bonnie
Parker and Clyde Barrow). Not surprisingly, many of these reports became the
source of films and novels.
4. Seventy percent of American families owned a car by 1955.
5. The Best Western motel chain started in 1946, Holiday Inn in 1952 (prom-
ising “no surprises” accommodations), Ramada Inn in 1954, and Ray Kroc’s
McDonald’s franchise in 1955.
6. In the era of the McCarthy trials to uncover the alleged communist in-
filtration of the government, Hollywood’s hunt to root out subversives from
among the nation’s image-makers, cold war fear of information leaks, and a
general disinclination to desegregate “with deliberate speed” those areas of the
nation that were spatially separated (especially by race), the promiscuous motion
encouraged by the road could be seen as a serious breach of national security.
7. In Deleuze’s essay “Nomad Thought,” this refers to a person mentally free
to drift or “deterritorialize” beyond law, contract, or institution. In this defini-

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tion, physical motion is not necessary, but Dean’s motion is clearly of a piece
with his conceptual drifting.
8. In Robert Corber’s reading of the novel, the plot involves a reaction against
a 1950s masculinity that was becoming more feminized and domesticated. The
“organization man” studies of the period showed that success in the white-collar
sphere depended on “feminine” characteristics of respect for authority, loyalty,
and getting along with others; the economy was being transformed to reorient
men as consumers rather than producers. For Corber, Kerouac’s novel was one
of many that yearned for a reassertion of a masculinity associated with the
cowboy or pioneer, with ideals involving more self-assertion, independence,
and mobility in the face of suburban settlement and sensitivity. In particular,
Sal’s fetishization of the phallic power of Dean is the book’s desire for that kind
of masculinity (50–54).
9. Alternative versions of the novel made Dean’s homosexuality more
explicit, but he reduced the scenes to mere hints in the version that would be
published as On the Road.
10. This in spite of the Kinsey Report, which appeared in 1947 and argued for
the presence of a fluidity in sexual identity. Kerouac is using the road narrative
as a similar kind of report, albeit one more anxious over its results.
11. The one African American family found driving in the novel ends up
disappointing Sal for reporting to the police that Dean rear-ended their car:
“This was one of the few instances Dean and I knew of a Negro’s acting like a
suspicious old fool” (236). It is perhaps the only moment Kerouac has Sal struggle
with his essentialist vision of African Americans as innocent and childlike.
12. Thomas Wolfe, whose influence on Kerouac was immense, earlier at-
tempted to make prose approximate frantic road use. One of Wolfe’s last efforts
before he died in 1938 was to take a five-thousand-mile drive around the national
parks of the west—all in the space of thirteen days. From such an unorthodox
mode of sightseeing, he intended to turn his jotted notes into a book called A
Western Journal, and it was to be a “tremendous kaleidoscope that I hope may
succeed in recording a whole hemisphere of life and of America” (v–vi). The
notes, which were published in 1951, are nothing less than a literature-of-mo-
tion: sharply sensory details, few complete sentences, strings of impressionistic
glimpses connected only by dashes or “and.” It features dreamlike narration
with unusual metaphors (“—and some cattle now and always up and up and
through fried blasted slopes and the enormous lemon-magic of the desert plains,
fiend mountain slopes pure lemon heat mist as from magic seas arising” [16–17]).
Kerouac may not have seen Wolfe’s text, but his unusual narration of his own
frantic uses of the road bears much in common, revealing an ongoing effort to
capture the nation from this modern perspective of the road.
13. Rachel Adams takes this even further, noting that Kerouac’s description
of Mexico is more fantasy than observation: “Not surprisingly, Mexico looks
very much like an idealized version of the Beats’ own subculture” (7).

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14. In another passage, Deleuze and Guattari characterize Kerouac, among

other Anglo-American writers (including Hardy, Lawrence, Lowry, Miller, and
Ginsberg), as “men who know how to leave, to scramble the codes, to cause
flows to circulate, to traverse the desert of the body without organs. They over-
come a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier. And of course they fail
to complete the process, they never cease failing to do so” (132–33). Although I
find it difficult to imagine how one might make the desired “complete” opening
of circulation, the constant failure suggests how hard it is to imagine a space of
resistance that is entirely consistent with itself.
15. I would briefly cite Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita and Alfred Hitch-
cock’s film Psycho as similar examples, in that they stage the road as a desired
sanctuary for such sympathetic outlaws as Humbert Humbert and Marion
Crane, yet also generate a longing for law and regulation as Humbert’s ultimate
regret and Crane’s motel murder inspire.

Ldg`h8^iZY
Adams, Rachel. “Hipsters and Jipitecas: Literary Countercultures on Both Sides
of the Border.” American Literary History 16.1 (Spring 2004): 58–84.
Charters, Ann. “Introduction.” On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1991. vii–xxx.
Corber, Robert J. Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis
of Masculinity. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophre-
nia. Trans. Robert Hurley, et al. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Nomad Thought.” The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of
Interpretation. Ed. David Allison. Cambridge: MIT P, 1985. 142–49.
Harris, Oliver. “Queer Shoulder, Queer Wheel: Homosexuality and Beat Textual
Politics.” Beat Culture: 1950s and Beyond. Ed. Cornelis Van Minnen, et al.
Amsterdam: VU UP, 1999. 221–40.
Holton, Robert. “Kerouac among the Fellahin: On the Road to the Postmodern.”
Modern Fiction Studies 41.2 (Summer 1995): 265–83.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 2005.
———. Selected Letters: 1940–1956. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking, 1995.
———. “The Vanishing American Hobo.” Holiday 27.3 (March 1960): 60 ff.
Lhamon, W. T., Jr. Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the
American 1950s. Washington: Smithsonian, 1990.
Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and
the Atomic Age. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
Pierson, George W. The Moving American. New York: Knopf, 1973.
Rose, Mark H. Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1939–1989. Rev. ed. Knoxville:
U of Tennessee P, 1990.
Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York: Rout-
ledge, 1989.

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Whitman, Walt. “Song of the Open Road.” 1856, 1881. Poetry and Prose. New
York: Library of America, 1996. 297–307.
Wolfe, Thomas. A Western Journal: A Daily Log of the Great Parks Trip, June
20-July 2, 1938. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1951.

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 3

I=:I:C:B:CI86HIA:/@:GDJ68ÉHAJBE:C"7D=:B>6
Robert Holton

ÆI]^h^hVbVc!VcYi]ViÉh]^hXVhiaZ#Ç=Zed^ciZYjeVii]ZiZcZbZci#
Å9ZVcBdg^Vgin^cDci]ZGdVY

The Beat Generation seemed to erupt into postwar American consciousness

almost out of nowhere with the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956)
and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). While these texts articulated the
impulses of a sensibility new to the culture of postwar America, the posi-
tions occupied by Kerouac and the Beats can be located in terms of debates
that arose more than a century earlier, when Parisian bohemians emerged
from the tumult of the French Revolution brimming with artistic imagina-
tion, radical ideas, and oppositional attitudes. Generally impoverished and
uninterested in conventional careers, they clustered among that era’s urban
poor and dissolute in the only neighborhoods they could afford, and the
social formations that ensued, then as in postwar America, were variously
celebrated and deplored. A crucial aspect of this phenomenon is the social
category known as the lumpenproletariat, a heterogeneous group related to
bohemians from the early days of Parisian bohemia to the Beat Generation
and beyond. This lumpen-bohemian heterogeneity is a defining character-
istic of the Beats, and, in On the Road and elsewhere, it provided a sense of
marginal possibility in an American modernity that seemed increasingly
homogeneous. Kerouac was, he admitted in Desolation Angels, unfit “for
this modern America of crew cuts and sullen faces in Pontiacs” (257): “I
really look like an escaped mental patient with enough physical strength
and innate dog-sense to manage outside an institution to feed myself and
go from place to place in a world growing gradually narrower in its views
about eccentricity every day” (255).

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At a time when political resistance was felt to be both dangerous and

futile–in postrevolution Paris as well as in postwar America—bohemianism
rose to prominence by offering the subcultural possibility that, if modern
capitalism’s cultural homogeneity could not be overturned or reversed, it
might at least be evaded. This peculiar space, the anarchic meeting ground
of “mental patients” and artists, students and criminals, the decadent and
the devout, substance abusers and sexual adventurers, scum and refuse,
provided the site for a centrifugal cultural space in the midst of a centrip-
etal cultural moment. While the Beat Generation appeared to be a very
new phenomenon, some of its underlying impulses—such as the imagina-
tive capacity to transform the squalor of a tenement into the privilege of a
castle—go back much further.
In the volatile year of 1848, Karl Marx announced in The Communist
Manifesto that “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism”
(481). By a curious coincidence, another spectre was announced that same
year—the spectre of bohemianism. Henri Murger’s tales of Parisian bohe-
mian life, published as Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, were based loosely on
his own experiences, and they enshrined the free-spirited bohemians in
modern cultural iconography.1 Like the spectre of communism, the spectre
of bohemianism continued to haunt Europe and America for many decades.
Despite their obvious differences, both of these texts (and the social move-
ments associated with them) respond to a peculiarly modern condition,
both are intensely concerned with money and the constraints that money
imposes on the search for a good life in a capitalist economy, and both ar-
ticulate positions of radical dissent from the cultural mainstream. While
communism maintained a belief in the possibility that collective political
action, following a dialectical historical process, could lead to a resolution to
the contradictions of capitalist modernity, bohemianism moved in another
direction, cultivating almost as an end in itself a degree of heterogeneity and
eccentricity that conflicted with the interests of communism and capitalism
alike. In doing so, the bohemians became allied with the lumpenproletariat,
one of the social groups least trusted by Marxists.
Although he was their first major chronicler, Murger did not invent bohe-
mians. Their presence in Paris in the years following the French Revolution
was already well established, and the movement flourished in the ensuing
decades of political upheaval. Marx was well aware of their existence, and,
at one point in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, he uses the
term almost as a synonym for the lumpenproletariat, an unwieldy rubric
designating a very particular category of people—one that seems largely to
escape categorization and thus poses a challenge to analysts such as Marx

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who attempt to construct orderly social and historical categories. While the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie refer to clearly defined economic groups, and
the aristocracy refers to a group clearly defined by birth and social status,
the lumpens resist any such simple taxonomy. By contrast, they comprise a
group of people who have, willingly or otherwise, more or less slipped out
of the ordered class system. Usually poor, they nonetheless exist outside the
economic structures of labor that constitute the industrial working classes.
In a famous passage, Marx attempts to list the members of this group:
Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubi-
ous origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie,
were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley
slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni [disreputable street people],
pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers,
porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beg-
gars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither
and thither, which the French call la bohème. (149)

In Marx’s work, notions of class typically possess a certain conceptual

stability, but the lumpenproletariat, by contrast, seems to resist definition.
An “indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither” is a difficult
entity to get hold of. Indeed, the lumpens are, in a sense, defined less by
their claim to any standard class identity than by their very distance from it:
they are instead, Marx writes, the “scum, offal, refuse of all classes” (149). In
remaining outside the normative structures of social ontology, the lumpens,
as Jeffrey Mehlman has pointed out, stand as the sign of an unassimilable
heterogeneity (13). In the context of the more and more systematized social
structures of modernity—the world growing narrower every day, as Ker-
ouac puts it—the heterogeneity articulated in this passage, according to
Mehlman, registers an “exhilaration,” an “almost Rabelaisian verve, ” and
a “certain proliferating energy” that suggests an ambivalence even in Marx.
The category of the lumpen-bohemian is “the site where that heterogeneity,
in its unassimilability to every dialectical totalization, is affirmed” despite
the fact that such affirmation runs counter to Marx’s own doctrine.
Perhaps in response to this ambivalence, as the quotation from Marx
demonstrates, there seems to arise a compulsion to make lists as an attempt
to contain the anarchic energy and heterogeneity that threatens taxonomic
order. This containment strategy itself signals that the sublime diversity of
individuals represented here can neither be finally subsumed under the
unity of an abstract category nor controlled by the homogenizing forces of
modernity. Like Marx, Murger attempts to list those considered bohemian,

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including, as well as a variety of artists, pickpockets, murderers, “bear-lead-

ers, sword-eaters, vendors of key-rings, inventors of ‘infallible systems,’
stockbrokers of doubtful antecedents and the followers of the thousand
and one vague and mysterious callings in which the principle occupation
is to have none whatever and to be ready at any time to do anything save
that which is right” (xvii). A few pages later, he asserts again that “it may be
worthwhile to enumerate and classify” the bohemians for those who “can-
not have too many dots on the i’s of definition (xxiv), but the task inevitably
remains incomplete.
Pierre Bourdieu’s assessment over a century later echoes earlier state-
ments: “An ambiguous reality, bohemia inspires ambivalent feelings, even
among its most passionate defenders,” he writes, and a central reason for this
is that “it defies classification” (56). Bourdieu’s catalogue is not uncharacter-
istic; he mentions sexual transgressives and destitute but cultured individu-
als who tend toward “audacities of dress, culinary fantasies, mercenary loves
and refined leisure,” as well as “proletariod intellectuals, . . . delinquent or
downgraded bourgeois . . . poor relations . . . aristocrats ruined or in decline,
foreigners and members of stigmatized minorities. . . . penniless bourgeois”
(57). These two categories, lumpen and bohemian, seem inextricably linked,
and if they have long shared a conceptual space, they have often coexisted
in the same urban spaces as well. While the bohemians, Bourdieu notes,
“share[d] their misery” with the poor (56), they cultivated an art of living
distinctly their own. With their sublimely unclassifiable diversity and their
apparent resistance both to definition and to honest labor, the eccentric
lumpen-bohemians were a source of great frustration for Marx, who saw
their political potential, to the degree that they had any, mobilized in the
service of reactionary causes.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire, which contains much discussion of the
lumpens, Marx also refers to Hegel’s claim that history repeats itself every
hundred years, adding that it occurs first as tragedy, then as farce (103). In
1948, exactly a century after The Communist Manifesto and Scènes de la
Vie de Bohème, Jack Kerouac coined the term “Beat Generation” to refer to
his lumpen-bohemian subculture and wrote the first draft of the narrative
that would become On the Road. The frenetic trip to California he took
with Neal Cassady that same year was eventually incorporated as a central
part of the novel, which became an overnight sensation ten years later. The
evocative term “beat” was one he picked up from Herbert Huncke, a petty
criminal, drug addict, and hustler who had been raised in a middle-class
family but veered sharply from that path. Huncke’s autobiography, Guilty of
Everything, relates the descent from his bourgeois beginnings to his arrival

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in New York’s most disreputable crime-infested neighborhood. “It was the

first place I’d found where I felt secure,” he recalls without apparent irony. “I
felt as though I blended in, in some way” (41). Kerouac met Huncke through
William Burroughs, himself the product of a well-to-do family who had at-
tended Harvard before adopting the dissolute life of the lumpen homosexual
drug addict in a homophobic culture.2 In short, along with figures such as
Cassady, who was raised by an alcoholic father on Denver’s skid row, these
were perfect personifications of the lumpen-bohemian “scum” and “refuse”
that, as Marx observed, emerge from every social level and mingle in that
peculiar and unsavory social space with little regard for conventional class
distinction. Figures of downward mobility such as Huncke and Burroughs
resist both capitalist and Marxist social logics, and their prominence in the
Beat pantheon–as well as the widespread and intense attention the Beats
attracted–is indicative of the resonance that this centrifugal and heteroge-
neous note created in the postwar cultural imagination.
Of course Kerouac too has a few things to say about scum and refuse and
its relation to “la bohème.” At one point in On the Road, Sal Paradise dozes
through a B-movie double bill in a slummy Detroit theater. The audience
with him was, he writes, “the end,” a hipster expression articulating a sense
of ultimacy, of a terminal state distant from the superficial comforts and
distractions of the mainstream. Like Marx and Murger before him, Kerouac
too provides a lumpen list: they were
Beat Negroes who’d come up from Alabama to work in car factories on
a rumor; old white bums; young longhaired hipsters who’d reached the
end of the road and were drinking wine; whores, ordinary couples and
housewives with nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody to believe in. If you
sifted all Detroit in a wire basket the beater solid core of dregs couldn’t
be better gathered. (245)

Dregs, scum, refuse, the end: this merging of the literal garbage with the
heterogeneous social dregs leads to a surreal lumpen fantasy as the theater’s
cleaners move through the aisles “with their night’s total of swept-up rub-
bish and created a huge dusty pile that reached my nose as I snored head
down—till they almost swept me away too” (246). From there, things only
get worse:
All the cigarette butts, the bottles, the matchbooks, the come and the
gone were swept up in this pile. Had they taken me with it, Dean would
never have seen me again. He would have had to roam the entire United
States and look in every garbage pail from coast to coast before he found
me embryonically convoluted among the rubbishes of my life, his life, and

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the life of everybody concerned and not concerned. What would I have
said to him from my rubbish womb? “Don’t bother me, man, I’m happy
where I am. . . . What right have you to come and disturb my reverie in
this pukish can?” (246)

This vision of “the end” is followed immediately with another anecdote of

abjection about passing out in the restroom of a filthy bar, wrapped around
the toilet bowl, and waking up hours later “unrecognizably caked” in actual
scum, which he tactfully refers to as the “debouchments” of those who used
that toilet during the night (246).
As in Marx, the language of filth and garbage overlaps from the literal
to the social here and elsewhere in descriptions of those who keep to no
specific class but gather together on the lumpen social margins. Marx’s de-
scription of an “indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither,”
and Kerouac’s fantasy of being thrown out with the garbage evoke a literal
sense of abjection—that is, the condition of being cast off or thrown away.
Unlike Marx, however, Kerouac finds elements of explicit regeneration in
this realm of abjection. The sense of self as garbage articulated in this pas-
sage constitutes an abandonment of conventional forms of symbolic capital,
a social pathology paradoxically offset by the images of birth, womb, and
embryo woven into this curious combination of fundamental hope and utter
despair. As Julia Kristeva has observed, it is not only “the lack of cleanliness
or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order.
What does not respect border, positions, rules” (4). In scenes such as these,
with Sal swept up in the garbage or passed out by the toilet, On the Road
foregrounds a pattern of images of precisely such disturbances and viola-
tions of fundamental cultural borders and rules, a pattern that reinforces the
tendency of the heterogeneous lumpen-bohemians to disturb and violate the
regularities and norms of social order. Questions might be raised, however,
concerning the impulse to resort to such extreme images, the conditions
that would allow such a narrative to attain a remarkable level of acceptance
and popularity, and the nature of the regeneration that might arise from
this peculiar lumpen-bohemian disturbance.
For many postwar Americans, conformism had emerged as a major
social issue, and the problem was identified with a sense of modernity as a
set of fundamentally confining and homogenizing structures leading to a
sense of dehumanization. Literary works such as On the Road, which opens
with a sense of being “miserably weary” and a feeling “that everything was
dead” (1) explored this condition in detail, but the anxieties it generated
were widely registered in other public discourses as well. This issue was
urgently debated in studies such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd;

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C. Wright Mills’s White Collar; Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd; and

Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, to mention only a few. While the
cold war defense of “freedom” that was a mainstay of the period’s public
rhetoric principally referred outward in opposition to communism, it also
resonated inward for those concerned with America’s conformist condi-
tion and the structures of history that, by mid-twentieth century, seemed
capable of eroding the sublime diversity of individuals and imposing a
level of homogeneity that threatened traditional notions of humanity. In
1951, for example, the eminent American historian Henry Steele Commager
argued that the recent defeat of Germany and Japan could be attributed
to these regimes’ “insistence upon acquiescence and conformity,” and he
warned against the rise of similar attitudes in America. The remedy was
clear: “only if we put a premium on non-conformity, can we hope to solve
the enormously complex problems that confront us.” Much was hanging in
the balance, it seemed: “Our responsibility here is immense. Upon it rests,
to a large degree, the future of Western civilization” (19–22).
Such dire warnings were frequently heard. In 1954, in between his two
bids for the American presidency, Adlai Stevenson delivered a speech at
Columbia University in which he concurred, declaring that “we are not in
danger of becoming slaves anymore, but of becoming robots” (Fromm, Es-
cape 102). And in 1957, theologian Paul Tillich pleaded with students to “pre-
serve the power to say ‘no’ when the patterns prescribed by society will try
to conquer them. We hope for nonconformists among you,” he urged, “for
your sake, for the sake of the nation, for the sake of humanity” (O’Neill 94).
One unanticipated consequence of these urgent calls for nonconformism was
the emergence of widespread public fascination with heterogeneous groups
such as the Beats.3 Such lumpen-bohemians neither played a productive role
in capitalism nor contributed any revolutionary potential to socialism, but
they also appeared unswayed by the homogenizing tendencies of modern
America. Some postwar North Americans, alienated from cold war politics,
resistant to the emerging structures of modernity whether right or left, and
attracted by the energy and heterogeneity that Mehlman identifies even in
Marx’s description, became interested in the possibilities of precisely this
disengaged lumpen-bohemian zone of refuse and refusal.
If, as Herbert Marcuse maintained in One-Dimensional Man, the very
possibility of critique was being compromised by the homogeneity of mod-
ern culture, then the existence of bohemian (Murger), lumpen (Marx), or
beat (Kerouac) spaces appeared to provide rare dimensions in which alter-
native thoughts and behaviors could persist.4 Marcuse argues that while
“the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted

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of other races and other colours, the unemployed and the unemployable”
(256) is at best politically unstable, this lumpen refuse nonetheless “exist[s]
outside” and “violates the rules.” The distance between the leftist agenda
for the lumpens and the bohemian position becomes clear in Marcuse’s ob-
servation that “their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness
is not” (256). The possibility that lumpen alienation might eventually turn
to revolutionary consciousness was an important concern for some radical
groups in the 1960s, 5 but for the Beats, who entertained no revolutionary
ambitions, the fact of lumpen consciousness, however romanticized at times,
was itself sufficiently inviting.
The term lumpen itself is a German word meaning rag, and the lumpens
are often pictured as raggedy, as ragpickers; and rags themselves are a kind
of garbage. References to rags and raggedy people abound in On the Road as
Sal Paradise pursues his quest for the “ragged promised land” (83). The ragged
condition of Dean Moriarty, a second-generation lumpen of skid-row origins,
educated at a Denver reform school, is integral to his exemplary position
in the novel, and it is precisely his uncontainable energy that gives On the
Road its focus. He is described as wearing “greasy wino pants with a frayed
fur-lined jacket and beat shoes that flap. . . . dirty workclothes [that] clung
to him so gracefully, as though you couldn’t buy a better fit from a custom
tailor but only earn it from the Natural Tailor of Natural Joy” (7). Later, with
a ragged bandage hanging from his broken thumb (and his personal life in
tatters), Dean is transformed into the “HOLY GOOF” (194), a lumpen can-
onization that confirms his stature in Kerouac’s Beat mythology. Standing
in uncharacteristic silence, “ragged and broken and idiotic . . . his bony face
covered with sweat and throbbing veins,” it appears “as though tremendous
revelations were pouring into him all the time now. . . . He was BEAT—the
root and soul of Beatific.” In this elevated state of lumpen consciousness, he
confronts “the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being” (195).
There is no evidence that Kerouac was familiar with the etymology of the
term lumpen, but his repetition of the term ragged, here and throughout the
novel, is nonetheless remarkable. Released from the constraints of middle-
class behavior, Dean exhibits an astonishing energy, a character trait that
recalls the sense of “proliferating energy” that, according to Mehlman (13),
even the disapproving Marx tacitly acknowledges as a defining quality of
the lumpens:

He had become absolutely mad in his movements; he seemed to be doing

everything at the same time. It was a shaking of the head, up and down,
sideways; jerky, vigorous hands; quick walking, sitting, crossing the

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legs, uncrossing, getting up, rubbing the hands, rubbing his fly, hitching
his pants, looking up and saying “Am,” and sudden slitting of the eyes
to see everywhere; and all the time he was grabbing me by the ribs and
talking, talking. (114)
The clear suggestion here is that while elevated experience is unavailable
within the homogeneous spaces of a bland and superficial mainstream
culture, it remained available to the lumpens, who had managed to evade
the stultification of American modernity. The novel registers this initially
in the way Dean’s wild lumpen energy allows Sal to escape the feeling of
death that opens the narrative. As Michel de Certeau has argued, “There has
to be something somewhere that does not deceive,” and the “positioning of
the subject under the sign of refuse is the point where ‘true’ discourse is im-
printed” (39–40). The lumpens, as the point of intersection for the “refuse of
all classes” (Marx), took on the aspect of truth in the eyes of those alienated
from mainstream culture, and, in this context, the appearance of truth was
charged with an energy that resonated widely. It was not so much that they
had a blueprint for any positive social action, as that by their very existence
they seemed to expose what Paul Goodman disparaged as the fraudulent
and contemptible nature of an ignoble conformist system (ix, 14). And with
that set of delusions dismantled, that obstruction to truth removed, it was
thought, a new vision and a new energy might yet arise. When Sal imagines
his arrival in Denver, for example, he imagines his lumpen (ragged) state
as a necessary condition for the delivery of truth in a fallen world: “I would
be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land
to bring the dark Word” (35).6
The relation this suggests, between the lumpen condition and religious
experience, constitutes one of the novel’s basic refrains. Observing that
“no society has ever been so standardized as this one, and that the stream
of human, social, and historical temporality has never flowed quite so ho-
mogeneously,” Fredric Jameson queries where the nonhomogeneous might
continue to exist in the modern world. One traditional location involves
the transformative power of spirituality: “Historically,” he points out, “the
adventures of homogeneous and heterogeneous space have most often
been told in terms of the quotient of the sacred and of the folds in which
it is unevenly invested” (22). Mississippi Gene presents another clear—if
romanticized—instance of an unassimilable lumpen existence tinged with
the aura of the sacred. A “thirty-year old hobo but with a youthful look,”
Gene sat “crosslegged, looking out over the fields without saying anything
for hundreds of miles” (23). Not long before, during the Great Depression, his
wanderings might have been ascribed to the quest for work that kept so many

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Americans riding the highways and the rails. After the war, however, when
the economy was back to high gear and jobs were available, this indigence
could not be so excused. An exemplary case of social refuse, Mississippi
Gene refuses the logic of both capitalism and socialism: he simply does not
want to work, and with neither fixed address nor family ties, he exists in
the nonproductive and heterogeneous lumpen space.
Kerouac characterizes this as a space not of tragic homelessness, as we
might today, but of transcendental freedom. Gene wears “hobo rags . . . old
clothes that had been turned black by the soot of the railroads and the dirt of
the boxcars and sleeping on the ground” (23) —hardly a positive description
from the point of view either of socialist reformism or enterprising capital-
ism. But here, it is precisely in evading the contending modern systems of
commodity production and consumption that freedom—albeit a peculiar
form of freedom—seems to lie. “Although Gene was white, there was some-
thing of the wise and tired old Negro in him, and something very much like
Elmer Hassel, the New York dope addict, in him . . . crossing and recrossing
the country . . . because there was nowhere to go but everywhere” (26). While
it is clearly paradoxical at one level that transcendence is characterized here
in terms of poverty, racial segregation, and drug addiction, it is the manifest
heterogeneity of all these that, for Kerouac, constituted the possibility of
an exit from the homogeneous and mundane order of conformist postwar
America. The image of ragged Gene, already inhabiting a “ragged promised
land” (83) of his own, looking out over the land, cross-legged and deep in a
“Buddhistic trance” (28), contrasts sharply with the obnoxious businessmen
dressed up in ostentatious western-style clothes that Sal next encounters in
disappointingly modern, bourgeois Cheyenne.
The American story, at least in one influential version, was supposed to be
a story of upward, not downward, mobility, of rags to riches, not the other
way around. Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus,” the 1883 poem mounted
on the Statue of Liberty itself, etched the idealized social trajectory deeply
in the American imagination:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
(233)

America here represents a space of deliverance for the huddled and home-
less who, through hard work, were to transform themselves from “wretched
refuse” into prosperous citizens enjoying the bounty and freedom offered

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by the new world. According to postwar analysts such as David Riesman

and C. Wright Mills, the outcome was rather different. America’s mid-cen-
tury masses were no longer huddled—unless around their TVs or in their
Chevrolets—yet this gain was offset by the fact that they were apparently no
longer yearning to breathe free, either. Whole new industries had sprung
up based around the emergent conformist masses, finding productive
and efficient ways to move them around in mass transit, to entertain and
inform them through mass media, to supply them with needs and desires
through mass marketing, and to fulfill those needs and desires through
mass production.
With the calling into question of that way of life, with the rising concern
that its bounty could be reduced to bland mass consumerism and its free-
dom reduced to mass conformism, Beat discourse contemplated a reversed
trajectory of liberation leading from (relative) riches back to lumpen rags.
The experience of life might be fuller and the desire to breathe free might
be better explored, it seemed to some disenchanted Americans, through a
downward mobility, and this led back to a curiosity about the inassimilable
lumpen state of homeless refuse. “We wandered around,” Kerouac writes,
“carrying our bundles of rags in the narrow romantic streets” (170). The
rags proclaimed (even etymologically) a lumpen identity; the wandering
established a sense of freedom from the ordered efficiency demanded by
modernity; and the narrow streets remained available to those romantics
willing to abandon the standardized freeways and suburban subdivisions
of the postwar world. Modernity seemed not only to homogenize the social
diversity of individuals, it seemed to reduce the range of experience available
to those individuals. The heterogeneity of the lumpen-bohemians, whether
the vagabond vision attributed to Mississippi Gene or the bohemian de-
lirium of Sal himself, famished and “frozen with ecstasy” on the streets of
San Francisco (172), appeared to counteract this tendency.
The exploration of the spaces of skid row, of addiction and perversion,
criminality, lunacy and vagrancy, became sources of a desperate sense of
possibility in a white middle-class modernity that had begun to seem syn-
onymous with dead-end mass culture, a space of potential individuality and
freedom in the land of what C. Wright Mills called the “cheerful robots”
(233). If, as many social critics charged, the cheerful robots of postwar
America functioned as efficient cogs in the wheels of modern production,
the antithesis would lie in a calculated inefficiency. The original French
bohemians arose in the context of a postrevolutionary disillusionment
with political solutions; their postwar American counterparts, in the wake
of two world wars and a global economic depression, in the grip of the cold

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war’s threat of nuclear holocaust, developed a similar estrangement. In the

absence of any sense that progressive social change is an option, then, use-
lessness itself can become a kind of virtue, and dysfunctionality a badge of
countercultural courage. Nonproductivity is a hallmark of the lumpens and
bohemians, whose activities may include poetry, petty crime, or wandering
ragged through narrow romantic streets, but whose proclivities do not ex-
tend to productive labor in the industrial or bureaucratic model. As Jameson
puts it, “To be unique or grotesque, a cartoon figure, an obsessive, is also
. . . not to be usable in efficient or instrumental ways” (101). The adoption
of strategies of un-usability potentially opens the door to a freer space, to
“a Utopia of misfits and oddballs, in which the constraints for uniformiza-
tion and conformity have been removed, and human beings grow wild like
plants in a state of nature” (99). Coincidentally, Sal comments at one point
that Dean’s “madness . . . had bloomed into a weird flower” (112).
Social scum and refuse appeared to threaten the coherence of both Marx-
ist and capitalist taxonomic order, both of which depend on the efficient
control of productive labor. The nonproductive nature of the lumpen-bo-
hemians is one of their defining traits, and Georges Bataille associates this
directly with unassimilable heterogeneity:
the heterogeneous world includes everything resulting from unproduc-
tive expenditure (sacred things themselves form part of this whole). This
consists of everything rejected by homogeneous society as waste. . . . the
waste products of the human body and certain analogous matter . . . the
numerous elements or social forms that homogeneous society is powerless
to assimilate . . . those who refuse the rule. (142)

When Sal Paradise, whose names both allude directly to a sense of the
sacred, states that “we were making our appalling studies of the night”
(132), he affirms that a descent into the heterogeneous dimensions of the
lumpen abject is at some level desirable, even necessary, and that there ex-
ists a narrative framework, perhaps as yet obscure, in terms of which this
state of being is not only acceptable, but leads to new possibility. The scene
in the all-night Detroit theater leading from the rubbish heap to images of
womb and embryo anticipates the sense of promise that seemed to lie on
abjection’s other side. In the same way, what Sal characterizes as “the rag-
gedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it,
the senseless nightmare road” (254) appears also to be the route—albeit a
circuitous one—to “the ragged promised land, the fantastic end of America”
(83). These images of finality and closure are never actually realized in the
novel, however, as the narrative (with its own ragged contours) refuses both

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the overall cohesive movement of a structured plot and the satisfactions of

orderly closure.
The repeated echoes of the sacred that arise in the text and in related dis-
cussions of lumpen heterogeneity and the abject suggest a movement not only
away from modern culture, but away from history itself. As he speeds along
the wintry highways, Dean resembles “a monk peering into the manuscripts
of the snow” (112), and the revelation he seeks is not in history, it seems, but
in the transcendent moment. Both Marxism and capitalism are animated by
a narrative of history as progress, yet Dean’s lumpen intensity has a place in
neither. Just as their heterogeneity played havoc with the orderly taxonomies
of Marxism, the lumpen-bohemians also threaten these historical narratives.
Indeed, as Peter Stallybrass concludes, the category itself seems “to emerge
as the very negation of historicity” (84) and thereby threatens to “undo the
imagined progress of history and the historical dialectics that [Marx] him-
self had proposed as the privileged means of understanding history” (79).
The lumpen-bohemians appeared to live as far from the currents of modern
history as from the channels of efficient productivity. If modern history
appeared to have led to the dead-end of cold war militarism, suburban con-
sumerism, and cultural homogeneity, the lumpen alternative seemed to offer
an almost ahistorical social space at once heterogeneous, unassimilable, and
generally removed from such concerns.
It follows, then, that the sense of futurity registered in the novel does not
follow any progressive historical dialectic but instead emerges as apocalyp-
tic. Sal’s vision of being “embryonically convoluted” in a “rubbish womb”
(246) suggests an ultimate rebirth whose precise details are never provided.
His account of the encounter with the Indians of Mexico includes an allusion
to the possibility of nuclear war, an eventuality that would bring modernity
to an end and usher in a return to the condition of the “fellahin,” a term
Kerouac borrowed from Spengler and which may provide an indication of
the rebirth Kerouac had in mind. The “fellahin,” according to Spengler, oc-
cupy a marginal social space not unlike the lumpenproletariat. Their lives
are experienced as “a planless happening without goal or cadenced march
in time” and as a result, like the lives of the lumpens, are “devoid of [histori-
cal] significance” (II 170–71). In yet another manifestation of the tendency
to characterize this group in terms of garbage, a tendency evident in Marx
and Kerouac both, Spengler refers to these rootless denizens of the late
stages of civilization as “inefficients” and “waste-products,” and the result
is a “historyless mass” (II 185). The end result, for Kerouac, is the abolition
of history itself, “when destruction comes to the world of ‘history’ and the
Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before,

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people will still stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well
as from the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled
and taught to know” (280). The search for “the ragged promised land” (83)
is, in a sense, ultimately a search for a space on history’s other side.
This position on the outside, in poverty and rags and running on pure
energy, inevitably takes its toll, and despite his sentimental attachment,
Murger saw stark endings for those who remained too long in lumpen-
bohemian territory. This tenuous way of life could not easily be prolonged,
he observed, but led in many cases to “the Hospital or the Morgue” (xxiv).
Despite its heterogeneous lumpen energy, On the Road is not lacking in
expressions of sadness and abjection. “The one by whom the abject exists,”
Kristeva argues, is “a stray. He is on a journey, during the night, the end
of which keeps receding” (8), and when we last see Dean, lumpen- bohe-
mian extraordinaire, famous for his energy, wit, and loquacity, he seems
exhausted. He “couldn’t talk anymore and said nothing,” remarks Sal. On
a freezing New York street, “ragged in a motheaten coat,” he pleads with
Sal and Remi for a ride but is refused, leaving him to walk away alone on “a
cold winter night” (306). Some readers find that Sal’s actions here constitute
a symbolic and final rejection of Dean and the lumpen condition he stands
for, but here too it is precisely the radical heterogeneity of the lumpen-
bohemian category that allows Sal to be in a limousine driven by a bookie
and heading to a Duke Ellington concert at the Metropolitan Opera on one
page and sitting on a “broken-down river pier” the next (307). The logic of
all this defies normal class boundaries, and it is precisely this illogic that
so frustrated both Marx and his followers, who depended on the predict-
ability of stable class behaviors for the success of revolutionary politics. The
novel’s last image of Sal leaves him neither gloating from the plush seat of
a limousine nor celebrating the joys of domestic life with his most recent
partner, Laura. Instead, like Dean, who walks off into the night alone, he is
staring into the night, contemplating the only certainty in a lumpen world,
“the forlorn rags of growing old” (307).

CdiZh
1. This novel appeared first in installments in the journal Corsaire, and
Murger also published it as a play, which was produced successfully in 1849.
The book has been translated into English under various titles, including The
Bohemians of the Latin Quarter (1898), Bohemian Life (1899), The Latin Quarter
(1908), La Boheme (1920), Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (1924), Love in the Latin
Quarter (1948). This continuing interest in the book can be attributed in large
part to the fact that it provides the basis for Puccini’s La Bohème, one the most
popular operas ever.

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2. Huncke is referred to in On the Road as Elmer Hassel. William Burroughs

appears as Bull Lee.
3. In other circumstances, the Beats might have remained an obscure subcul-
ture. Given the apparent need for a group to occupy the space of nonconform-
ist rebellion, they were vaulted to unlikely celebrity. The peculiarity of this is
suggested in the title of a Life magazine article that helped make them a media
sensation: “The Only Rebellion Around.”
4. Similarly, in The Lonely Crowd, Riesman saw a high degree of other-di-
rected conformity as the fate of most Americans, though he does allow some
exceptions to this network of increasing social homogeneity, one of which is
a nebulous category he refers to as the anomics. This group includes all the
misfits, the maladjusted, those who can’t fit in and those who won’t fit in, that
assortment of individuals existing beyond—or perhaps beneath—the reach of
conformity: drug addicts, homosexuals, criminals, lunatics, and so on. Noting
the “ruleless, ungoverned” nature of these people and their overlap with “those
whom Marx called the ‘Lumpenproletariat,’” Riesman concludes that “Taken all
together, the anomics—ranging from overt outlaws to catatonic types who lack
even the spark for living, let alone for rebellion—constitute a sizable number
in America” (287–90). While Riesman largely dismisses the significance of the
anomics, the Beats responded quite differently, finding that the space of social
waste, the wretched refuse of all classes, could paradoxically be transformed
into an outside space of freedom and strange hope, a site of irredeemable het-
erogeneity in a repressively homogeneous cultural landscape.
5. The Black Panthers, for example, seeking to expand their base of support
among marginalized African Americans, conducted an extensive debate con-
cerning the political potential of the lumpens.
6. The disturbance brought about by the abject condition, Kristeva notes,
can also contain within itself a kind of possibility: “The time of abjection is
double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment
when revelation bursts forth” (9). The repeated linking in Beat writing of the
ragged lumpen condition with religious discourse is in keeping with Fredric
Jameson’s observation that the sacred and the heterogeneous are inextricably
tied (22). Bataille continues: “Violence, excess, delirium, madness characterize
heterogeneous elements to varying degrees: active, as persons or mobs, they
result from breaking the laws of social homogeneity” (142). And this: “the lowest
strata of society can equally be described as heterogeneous, those who generally
provoke repulsion and can in no case be assimilated” (144).

Ldg`h8^iZY
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939. Ed. and trans.
Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field.
Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996.

,)
 I]ZIZcZbZci8VhiaZ

Certeau, Michel de. Heterologies, Discourse on the Other. Trans. Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.
Commager, Henry Steele. “The Pragmatic Necessity for Freedom.” Civil Lib-
erties Under Attack. Ed. Claire Wilcox. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P,
1951. 1–22.
Draper, Hal. “The Concept of the ‘Lumpenproletariat’ in Marx and Engels.”
Économies et Sociétés 6.12 (Dec. 1972): 2285–312.
Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1941.
———. The Sane Society. New York: Rinehart, 1955.
Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems 1947–1980. New York: Harper and Row, 1984.
Goodman, Paul. Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized So-
ciety. New York: Vintage, 1960.
Huncke, Herbert. Guilty of Everything: The Autobiography of Herbert Huncke.
St. Paul, Minn: Paragon, 1990.
Jameson, Fredric. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
Kerouac, Jack. Desolation Angels. New York: Riverhead, 1995.
———. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 2005.
———. Selected Letters: 1940–1956. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Penguin, 1995.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia
UP, 1982.
Lazarus, Emma. Selected Poems and Other Writings. Ed. Gregory Eiselein.
Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Literary Texts, 2002.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon, 1964.
Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx, Frederick
Engels: Collected Works. Volume 11. New York: International Publishers,
1963. 99–197.
Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Karl Marx, Fred-
erick Engels: Collected Works. Volume 6. New York: International Publishers,
1976. 476–519.
Mehlman, Jeffrey. Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac. Berkeley: U
of California P, 1977.
Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Ox-
ford UP, 1956.
Murger, Henri. The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter. Philadelphia: U of Penn-
sylvania P, 2004.
O’Neill, Paul. “Arise Ye Silent Class of 57.” Life June 17, 1957: 94.
Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Char-
acter. New Haven: Yale UP, 1950.
Schumacher, Michael. Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg.
New York: St. Martin’s, 1992.
Sontag, Susan. “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for Us) to Love the Cuban
Revolution.” The Uptight Society: A Book of Readings. Ed. Howard Gadlin and
Bertram E. Garskof. Belmont, Calif.: Brooks/Cole Publishing, 1970. 186–94.

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 GdWZgi=daidc

Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. 2 vols. Trans. Charles Francis At-
kinson. New York: Knopf, 1926.
Stallybrass, Peter. “Marx and Heterogeneity: Thinking the Lumpenproletariat.”
Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 69–95.
Thoburn, Nicholas. “Difference in Marx: The Lumpenproletariat and the Pro-
letarian Unnamable.” Economy and Society 31.3 (August 2002): 434–60.
Wilson, Elizabeth. Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts. New Brunswick:
Rutgers UP, 2000.

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 4

Æ69K:CIJG:H>C6JID":GDI>8>HBÇ/:8DCDB>:H
D;IG6K:A>C<B6H8JA>C>IN>CDCI=:GD696C9
I=:;>GHII=>G9
Mary Paniccia Carden

Describing his youthful “adventures in auto-eroticism,” or his ability to

take and control cars and girls, Beat icon Neal Cassady puns on the word
“auto,” making it mean both “car” and “self.” He merges the two into a
vehicle for performance of an alternative masculine identity, a site where
male sexual virility, male freedom, and male power converge. Cassady’s
play on words may be humorous, but it also reflects and expresses the larger
mythos of the Beat generation within the United States. Beats who stand out
most vividly in American popular culture are men, and the freedom they
enjoyed—a geographical independence combined with creative and sexual
autonomy—has been understood as a particularly male kind of freedom.
In their autobiographical writing, Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac both
foster and undermine this view of travel as synonymous with a resistant
and iconoclastic male freedom.1 The two men intimately link freedom of
movement to masculine independence and integrity, which they imagine
in simultaneously revolutionary and conservative terms.
Kerouac’s autobiographical novel On the Road and Cassady’s collection
of autobiographical narratives, entitled The First Third and Other Writings,
imagine a traveling American masculinity that transcends the patriarchy
associated with bourgeois society but retains its claim to power and author-
ity. They attempt to replace the model of manhood dominant in capitalist
America with a model of manhood rooted in foundational American ideals
of conquest and self-discovery. Although Kerouac and Cassady disavow
masculinities shaped and enacted through capitalist competition and

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consumption, I will argue that their alternatives remain deeply invested in

marketplace models of identity.2 On the Road and The First Third construct
economies of masculinity in which male travelers negotiate and trade the
markers of manhood encoded in Cassady’s “auto-erotic” ideal. These forms
of exchange, however, ultimately serve to destabilize connections that Ker-
ouac and Cassady want and need to make between mobility, masculinity,
and power in post–World War II America.
Eric Leed has observed that travel “has long been a means of changing
selves, a method of altering social status, of acquiring fame, fortune, and
honor” (263). He suggests that the “social transformations of travel are
closely connected to the origins of identity, the ways in which a person’s
selves are defined and made visible” (263). Travel, he further observes, has
also “long been the medium of peculiarly male fantasies of transformation
and self-realization” (275). The agency to invite and survive change, the
self-sufficiency to disengage from familiar contexts, and the hardiness to
endure deprivation and dislocation—components closely associated with
successful travel—have historically been represented as male properties.
Georges Van den Abbeele notes that “while there is nothing inherently or
essentially masculine about travel . . . Western ideas about travel and the
concomitant corpus of voyage literature have generally . . . transmitted,
inculcated, and reinforced patriarchal values and ideology from one male
generation to the next,” often through “journeying conceived as the rite of
passage to manhood” (xxv–xxvi). While women obviously do travel, popular
Anglo-European notions of journeying tend to come structured in male-
oriented tropes of exploration, conquest, and sexual adventure. From Grand
Tours and exotic safaris to scientific and surveying expeditions, travel has
been conceptualized as an extended and heightened experience of (white)
male mastery and privilege.3
In America, a nation constructed by movement into and beyond flexible
frontiers, the journey into the unknown has served to define national his-
tory and identity. Casey Blanton notes that “both American fiction and the
American travel narratives that influenced it share a response to the idea of
travel as a symbolic act, heavy with promises of new life, progress, and the
thrill of escape” (18). From Pilgrims to frontier explorers, from John Smith
and Lewis and Clark to Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett, American he-
roes have been travelers. In American origin stories, freedom of movement
models a corresponding freedom of identity, illustrated in the “deeply ro-
mantic” promise that “in this new land, untrammeled by history and social
accident, a person will be able to achieve complete self-definition,” that here
“individuals come before society, that they exist in some meaningful sense

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prior to, and apart from, societies in which they happen to find themselves”
(Baym 71). This promise of authentic and unimpeded self-determination
remains a deeply resonant and highly influential foundational trope, which
provokes both nostalgia and anxiety in American men living (what appear
to be) more bounded lives.4 Cassady and Kerouac tap into the mythology
that conflates the male-identified dynamics of travel—the “imperial eye” of
the self-contained adventurer, the bracing challenge of the unknown, the
empowering erotics of discovery and conquest—with the male-identified
dynamics of American origin stories—exploration, self-determination, and,
of course, conquest.5
While many commentators have celebrated Cassady’s and Kerouac’s con-
nection to “an earlier American spirit (the American Adam, the American
innocent)” (Stephenson 158), they do not, for the most part, explore the
ways in which such nostalgia glorifies performances of masculinity based
in an uncomplicated opposition to and exploitation of feminized spaces,
resources, and subjects. In On the Road and The First Third, Kerouac and
Cassady take pains to separate themselves from men who have settled into
the ordered and secure patterns of life in postwar America, men whose lives
are circumscribed by their path from home to office, by their participation
in “capitalist modes of circulation that unsettle all modes of collective, stable
identity except those based on the nuclear family and specialized skills in
the corporate workplace” (Leverenz 27). While Kerouac and Cassady see
travel as rejection of gender-role expectations based in social conformity,
they reserve such resistance to men; they gender travel and its desirable
outcomes male by invoking the old association of women and society.6
Reassigning disempowering elements of patriarchy to female keeping, they
attempt to substitute male brotherhood for nuclear family and to replace
the ladder of success with the freedom of the road as primary measures of
male identity.7
Kerouac and Cassady construct economies of manhood in which they
devalue one aspect of American patriarchy (the need and desire for capital-
ist success) by investing in another (the need and desire for independent
self-determination). Van den Abbeele argues that “the exchange of objects
that defines commercial activity implies by its back-and-forth movement
some kind of travel. . . . If there is a great investment in travel, it is perhaps
because travel models the structure of investment itself, the transfer of
assets that institutes an economy, be it political or libidinal, ‘restricted’ or
‘general’” (xvi–xvii). An economy reflects and enforces balances of power,
determining direction and control of capital as well as of social value and
status. For Kerouac and Cassady, the value or property at stake in travel is

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their claim to an unconventional yet authoritative masculinity, to an “auto-

erotic” freedom and dominance. In their work, trading on models of male
identity offers returns of increased power, pleasure, and fulfillment but
also puts these outcomes at risk and produces unstable identities prone to
unpredictable fluctuations.
In The First Third, Neal Cassady separates himself from cultural struc-
tures that he associates with women and transfers power from stationary
men to traveling men. True masculinity, for Cassady, resides outside the
social hierarchies and familial restrictions represented by the bourgeois
woman. His refusal of a male identity rooted in class status and enforced
by women, however, depends on and reinforces conventional relations of
gender, power, and capitalist modes of consumption. While he insists that
real American men must be resistant men, he posits that resistance in the
terms of value current in class-driven ideologies of American manhood.
The First Third and Other Writings contains The First Third: A Partial
Autobiography, composed of a prologue and three chapters. Narrated in
the third person, the prologue traces Cassady’s father’s life as a traveling
man and his marriage to Cassady’s mother, until the point he and his young
son strike out on their own. The First Third then moves into first person
to narrate Neal Cassady Jr.’s adventures with his father (characterized by
movement, freedom, and sexuality) and trials with his mother (misunder-
standing, regimentation, and oppression), ending with the punishment he
suffered at age eight, having been labeled “a runaway” and caught fulfilling
his “carnal desire” with the daughter of his mother’s friend (Cassady 137).
The “partial autobiography” is followed by two sections: “Letters,” addressed
to Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey, and “Fragments,” brief autobiographical
essays, reflections, and stories. These final sections represent Cassady’s
life in terms of his movement—by car and train—and his appetite for sex.
They include much of the material that helped establish him as a “mythic
macho intellectual outlaw” (Amburn 107) and “muse of the Beat Genera-
tion” (Plummer 7).
The prologue to The First Third establishes a tradition of wandering for
men out of place in traditional family structures and positions Cassady as
his traveling father’s heir. As a teenager, Neal Sr. “flee[s] the house of . . .
hardened and uncommonly bitter men” to his sister Eva, his “only refuge”
(Cassady 5). But Eva has been effectively absorbed into her husband’s family
and is unable to support him. He ends up at the boarding house of “Mother
Anne” Stubbins, which “as houses go, was as big as its owner, as women go.
The female had two hundred and fifty-some pounds; the house had twenty
and more rooms” (7). To Anne, “the house and herself were inseparable”

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(8). Neal Sr. leaves this mother to take on the role of son-substitute to a man
named Roolfe Schwartz, who keeps him innocent and naïve “with the selfish
wisdom of a domineering, patient mother” (11). He escapes Schwartz and
lives for a time at the house of a rich widow. In her house, the gaze of upper-
class people “again made him feel the long-dormant emotions of inferiority
and helpless rage he had first known in his youth” (18). In Cassady’s prologue,
mother figures remove their support, like Eva, or are neurotically bound to
houses, like Anne. They are selfish and devouring, like Roolfe, or facilitate
emasculating class hierarchies, like the widow. Cassady’s account of his
father’s wandering serves to establish a complex of restrictive associations
linking women, mothers, families, and society.
As Neal Sr. settles into a stationary job as a barber, this “normal way of
life,” Cassady explains, “naturally turned him toward a yearning for femi-
nine companionship” (26). Neal Sr. meets and courts Maude, a respectable
middle-class widow. But her marriage to Neal Sr. interferes with her class
status and security within a normative family; he cannot support his wife
and son, and the “‘home’ [he] provided was really a depression dilly” (45).
Her husband’s “drink-caused poverty made Maude turn more and more to
her sons for financial help” (43). Cassady’s half-brothers act as men because
they act as “breadwinners” (95). Although they are bootleggers, they nev-
ertheless perform the crucial masculine role of provider. Their hypocritical
respectability reaffirms Cassady’s view of society as a crumbling facade set
over degrading violence, presided over by would-be bourgeois women.
When Cassady moves with his father “into the lowest slums of Denver,” he
becomes, he says, “the unnatural son of a few score beaten men” (46–47). In
this alternate family he “gains[s] certain unorthodox freedoms not ordinar-
ily to be had by American boys” (49), most especially his unsupervised wan-
derings through the city. These freedoms help to compensate for Neal Sr.’s
inability to protect him from a society that denigrates him for his poverty and
lack of status. But this unique existence with his father is interrupted when his
half-brothers, acting as agents of their mother, intrude into the community of
bums and attack Neal Sr. in “pretend[ed] horrified self-righteousness” at the
lifestyle he provides for Neal Jr. (96). They deliver Neal Jr. to his mother, who
“was simply too much harassed . . . to show [him] her affection adequately”
(106). Much of The First Third is structured by Cassady’s oscillation between
the humiliation inflicted on him in the domain of mother/society and the
abjectness of his father’s outsider position. Suspended between his brothers
and his father, Neal Jr.’s options for masculine identity seem equally unten-
able: both his brothers’ violence and his father’s drunken gentleness shame
him by forcing him into powerless positions.

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Neal Sr.’s travel is the result of his lack of power, his failures to perform
the dominant male role, his abject position within American culture. Neal
Jr., on the other hand, reframes the relationship of travel to masculinity
and makes travel commensurate with male freedom and conquest. Feeling
the “constant challenge to conquer a new tree or building” (132), he devotes
himself to his travels around the city. His explorations of the city that has
become his “playground” (83) evolve into scavenging expeditions, and he
quickly becomes a more skilled hunter than any of the adults. Later, he
takes this skill on the road and provides for his father and his fellow trav-
elers in hobo jungles and railroad yards throughout the west. At “every
chance,” he remembers, “bums asked [his] father for [his] presence on
hunting trips” (85). In this sense, Cassady’s source of power is identical to
his brothers’ and to the bourgeois businessman’s: his status coincides with
his role as breadwinner.
But Cassady’s most salient claim to male power appears in the long seg-
ments of The First Third and Other Writings that address his sexual prowess.
He recounts his “first involvement with sex,” which occurs on a trip with his
father, where he “thrill[s] chiefly to tiny girls and limitless play” (95). Upon
his return to his mother’s home he is “beaten often by [his] legal guardian,
brother Jack, because, great though [his] fear of him was, in the excitement
of games, [he] would completely forget the dictated time to be home” (95).
For Cassady, sex and travel converge as a site for play outside the laws of
a brutalizing society. Identifying himself in opposition to these laws, he
creates himself as a traveling sex machine and measures his masculinity in
terms of cars stolen and women “had.”
Cassady describes “auto-eroticism” as “the virgin emotion one builds
when first stealing an auto”—the risky excitement of feeling for control of
an unfamiliar car, coupled with the thrill of joyriding—in combination with
the risky excitement of “exploring the anatomy of the school girl picked up
in it” (70–1). Stealing cars, he transfers power to himself by disrupting the
breadwinners’ hold on status-conveying material property—cars—and on
status-conveying sexual property—women. Cassady’s car-stealing habit did,
however, produce some less desirable outcomes. William Plummer reports
that “by his late teens Cassady had been arrested by the police ten times,
convicted six times, and had served a year and some months in jail” (21).
In The First Third and Other Writings, Cassady makes reference to his time
in prison but does not discuss or explore its potentially disempowering ef-
fects. Instead, he uses his ability to appropriate, use, and discard cars and
women—other men’s property—to undermine the authority society vests in
bourgeois men. His “adventures in auto-eroticism” (170) draw together an

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illicit freedom of movement with the unsanctioned eroticism of a sexuality

projected outside the structures of normative family and beyond the control
of the dominant social order.
Cassady’s association of eroticism with travel is, of course, not limited
to cars. In a letter to Jack Kerouac, which Kerouac dubbed “the Great Sex
Letter” (Nicosia 183), he describes two bus seductions. The first, involving a
girl named Patricia, leads her to swear “eternal love, complete subjectivity
to me & immediate satisfaction” (Cassady 190). But her “dominating sister”
(191) removes her from the bus terminal before she fulfills this promise.
Cassady is left angry and alone, but soon meets a “young . . . completely
passive (my meat) virgin” (191, emphasis Cassady’s). She accompanies him
to a park where he “screwed as never before; all my pent up emotion find-
ing release in this young virgin . . . who is, by the by, a school teacher!” (191,
emphasis Cassady’s). He loses Patricia to her “terror and slave-feeling” (190)
for her sister, representative of family obligation; he succeeds, however, in
overcoming the elements of society and conformity embodied in the un-
named school teacher.
In these exchanges and others like them, Cassady both rejects and exem-
plifies what David Gartman has identified as the anxiety of consumerism.
“American desires for autonomy and community,” Gartman argues, “have
been channeled into privatized, reified commodity consumption. And be-
cause such substitutes were inherently unsatisfying, they were compulsively
repeated in a frenzy of futile and limitless consumption” (139). Rather than
working to establish male power through buying power, Cassady glories
in his unlimited and unsanctioned consumption of the ultimate icons of a
capitalist economy based in male dominance—cars and women. For him,
the free exercise of masculinity means consumption without cost. If women
stand in for society as representatives of the bourgeois household—the
center of capitalist consumption—then in conquering women Cassady
overcomes the society that has humiliated and punished him. If women
love and want him, want “it” from him, love “it” from him (152), then in
a way society wants him, too, and indirectly validates the masculinity he
understands as resistant.
Cassady repeatedly insists that male power lies in unconstrained sexual-
ity. In what remains of his famous “Joan Anderson letter,” he breaks off his
narrative of sexual adventure to remark, in a facetious aside:
(let this be a lesson to you, men, never become separated from your
clothes, at least keep your trousers handy, when doing this sort of thing
in a strange house—oops, my goodness, I forgot for a second that some

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of you are out of circulation and certainly not in any need of “Lord
Chesterfield’s” counseling—don’t show this to your wives, or tell them
that I only offer this advice to pass on to your sons, or, if that’s too harsh,
to your dilettante friends, whew!, got out of that) (154)
As “Lord Chesterfield,” Cassady acts as a locus of sexual knowing and
adventurous masculinity unfettered by the conventional heterosexual
arrangements that proscribe the free exercise of virility. He opposes his
circulating virility with the performance of masculinity possible within
the structure of the traditional couple and deems himself more free and
more masculine than men who have submitted to societal containment. 8
In his long descriptions of his prodigious sexual activity with the underage
daughter of rich parents, he flaunts his rejection of social mores but also lays
claim to the social space of Denver, which they “cover” with “pecker-tracks”
(153); his traveling virility enables him to simultaneously escape and make
his mark on dominant culture.
Traveling men not only resist the deadly grip of a feminized society but
bond through manipulating women—going to meet women, introducing
each other to women, exchanging women. Cassady’s letters to Jack Kerouac
center on his efforts to “make” (189) women, offer advice on making women,
and request that Kerouac make women for him: “if you love me, you’ll do all
in your power to find a girl” (197). All this frenetic motion and frantic sex
seem as driven and anxiety-ridden as more conventional forms of consump-
tion, and like other, capitalist, forms, provide returns in elevated status. In
a sense, Cassady’s “auto-erotic” consumption functions as an attempt to
recoup his father’s losses of personal power and cultural authority.
Cassady’s unspoken desire for recognition by the society he disdains
emerges in “Joe Hanns,” one of the more polished pieces in The First Third
and Other Writings. This short story describes a race car driver who has
become a new American mythic figure, “America’s number one idol, hero,
perfected one” (177). Through his “faculty for instantly acting on thought”
(179), he coincides with himself.9 This heroic traveler’s name, Cassady writes,
has entered “all current colloquial dictionaries: anything perfect was per-
formed ‘Hanns down’” (178–79). Feted by powerful men and greeted by ador-
ing crowds wherever he goes, he is desired by “envious, worshipping” youths
and encounters “sly maid[s]’ seductive” eyes (177). Here, travel becomes a
tradeable commodity that promises sexual fulfillment and cultural status.
The wish-fulfillment evident in Cassady’s story about a driving superman
encodes his desire for social validation, suggesting the difficulty and perhaps
the undesirability of detaching a resistant, traveling form of manhood from
signifiers of a more conventional masculinity.

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s editor’s note, which serves as the introduction

to The First Third, seems to respond to this desire by providing readers
with explicit instructions for approaching the text through a specifically
masculine heroic tradition. Using the images and vocabulary of American
narratives of origin, Ferlinghetti validates Cassady’s resistant masculinity
and likens his autobiography to “letters from pioneers in wagon-trains
trekking Westward two hundred years ago” (n.p.). Cassady’s “wander-
ing existence,” he writes, is like “source material for that old myth of the
Wild West, as if Cassady were of the last generation of folk heroes” (n.p.).
Comparing Cassady to Paul Bunyan and to Paul Newman’s character in
The Hustler, Ferlinghetti describes “his hustling voice,” the voice of the con
man operating on the margins of American culture, as the voice of the true
American man (n.p.). He compares Cassady with “an early prototype of
the urban cowboy who a hundred years before might have been an outlaw
on the range” and asserts that “as such Kerouac saw him in On the Road”
(n.p.). But, as we will see, Jack Kerouac’s development of Cassady’s theme of
traveling virility and unencumbered male potency takes some unexpected
turns and moves in directions that call the consociation of movement and
manhood into question.
In On The Road, Kerouac’s autobiographical novel, Dean Moriarty, a
thinly disguised Neal Cassady, initiates Sal Paradise (Kerouac) into the
traveling life. The novel records the events of a number of Kerouac’s jour-
neys, collapsed together “for the sake of focus” (Tytell 158). Earlier versions
made no attempt to conceal markers of time and location, not to mention
the identities of friends and acquaintances. Names of places and people
were changed at the insistence of Kerouac’s publisher, who feared exposure
to libel suits. Malcolm Cowley, Kerouac’s editor, worried that “the novel
posed horrendous legal issues because it was not a work of fiction, in [his]
estimation, but a documentary journal” (Amburn 221). On the Road began
to emerge in its present incarnation when Kerouac “decided to write the
novel as if he were answering [his wife’s] questions” about his experiences
with Cassady: “What did you and Neal really do?” (Nicosia 343). Cassady,
who Kerouac seems to have seen as “a phallic totem” (Tytell 62), is in many
ways the center and focus of the novel, source of its energy and drive. As
a “phallic totem,” he acts as model and measure of the traveling economy
of male identity.10
The novel begins with a pointed contrast between Cassady/Dean’s joy-
ous freedom and Kerouac/Sal’s stultifying life in New York, his “miserably
weary split-up” with his wife, and his “feeling that everything was dead”
(Kerouac 1).11 Dean appears free from such burdens, a “holy con man” (5),

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whose ‘criminality’ was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a
wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind,
an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming
(he only stole cars for joy rides). Besides, all my New York friends were in
the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their
tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced
in society, eager for bread and love” (7).
Dean is a “sideburned hero of the snowy West” (2), and Sal interprets his
“wild yea-saying overburst of American joy” as a recreation of American
origins; the (re)new(ed) American man overcomes bourgeois-controlled
culture not by negating it, but by racing beyond its grasp. Dean promises
escape from settled spaces and deliverance from a life structured by the
breadwinner imperative, offering brotherhood as an alternative to the mal-
aise of marriage. In Dean, Sal can “hear a new call and see a new horizon”
(8). For him, Dean embodies the freedom of a manhood enacted through
travel, a manhood Sal seeks for himself.
Movement toward the new horizon represented by Dean situates Sal on
the margins of culture, and his new vantage point transforms jaded vision
into fresh vision. With his “innocent road-eyes” Sal recognizes “the absolute
madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions
hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream—grabbing,
taking, giving, sighing, dying” (107). He finds that “the purity of the road”
allows him to leave “confusion and nonsense behind” (134), to free himself
from the frantic grasping for a buck that has become the “mad” American
dream of capitalist competition and consumption.
Travel recreates Sal as “strange and ragged and like the Prophet who
has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I
had was ‘Wow’” (35). A strange prophet, Sal brings the new word, which he
hopes will rewrite “the story of America” (68). Traveling men, Dean assures
him, “know America, we’re at home; I can go anywhere in America and get
what I want because it’s the same in every corner” (121). America is “like
an oyster for [them] to open” (138). Dean posits male-dominant sexuality
as a metaphor not only for travel but for truth, assuring Sal, “‘We’ve passed
through all forms. . . . Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Every-
thing since the Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can’t make it with
geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It’s all this!’ He wrapped
his finger in his fist; the car hugged the line straight and true” (120). Here,
the conjunction of symbolically enacted sex and unswervingly “straight”
travel suggests that Beat men encounter the real in a traveling heterosexual
scene. Their refusal of settled, conventional models of manhood and routes

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to knowledge enables them to arrive at truth: “‘we know what IT is and we

know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE’” (209).
But in On the Road, Dean and Sal reach “IT” not through heterosexual
practice but through the intensely voluble talk of their homosocial bond,12
an interaction that transcends traditional measures of truth and logic and
defies conventional laws of narration, an intercourse that rocks their car as
they “swayed to the rhythm of the IT of our final excited joy in talking and
living to the blank traced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars
that had been lurking in our souls all our lives” (209). The energy of their
eroticized bonding culminates in an ecstatic coming to truth; for them, travel
is not about an external destination, but rather about arriving at an internal
truth. Travel is the expression—between men—of authentic or essential male
selves. Although Sal remarks that he “‘want[s] to marry a girl . . . so I can
rest my soul with her till we both get old’” and insists that “‘this can’t go on
all the time—all this franticness and jumping around’” (117), he interrupts
heterosexual relationships to travel either with or toward Dean.
Kerouac often uses sexualized language to describe bonds between
men, but On the Road represses homosexual practices and dilutes erotically
charged relationships within the Beat traveling community. He feared his
own (and others’) homosexual desires, denied (at least publicly) the sexual
component in his relations with other men, and “somehow managed to
convince himself that he could dip deeply and regularly into homoeroti-
cism and still be a part of society’s heterosexual tyranny” (Amburn 103).13
Eliding the “potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial
and homosexual” (Sedgwick 1), Kerouac preserves traveling virility as a
homosocial property that serves to intensify male access to traditional het-
erosexual signifiers of male power, most visibly manifested in dominance
of women. But “the Beats’ model of heterosexuality,” Catharine R. Stimp-
son has argued, “regulated more than the women whom brotherhood had
marginalized. Exemplifying the sheer reach of cultural legacies, it shaped
their homosexuality as well. Men wanted other men, as well as women, to
submit to them, and assume a feminine role” (380). In Kerouac’s novel, the
ambiguity of traveling power relations produces confusion and contradic-
tion within the traveling economy’s balance of homosocial brotherhood and
heterosexual dominance, leading to losses of male capital that complicate
the freedom and control of “auto-eroticism” and suggest the difficulties of
being mobile and powerful at the same time.
“IT” appears as a homosocial property established through men’s ability
to represent themselves to each other completely and absolutely; On the Road
defines women precisely through their inability to represent themselves. For

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example, Sal describes Rita Bettencourt as “a nice little girl, simple and true”
(57), but focuses on her fear of sex and inability to articulate independent or
authentic desires. When he asks her what she “want[s] out of life,” the ques-
tion he “used to ask . . . all the time of girls,” she replies: “‘I don’t know. . . .
Just wait on tables and try to get along.’ She yawned. I put my hand over her
mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life
and the things we could do together; saying that, and planning to leave . . . in
two days. She turned away wearily” (57–58). Rita’s stasis and unimaginative
view of life serve to rationalize Sal’s failure to show her the truth about sex
and his intention to continue on the homosocial road. Kerouac, like Cas-
sady, imagines women as the social/sexual objects whose fixity provides the
ground that enables men to perceive movement as empowering.
But women occasionally manage to introduce a kind of static into the
traveling economy that interferes with men’s satisfactions in sex and travel.
Sal initially describes Dean’s first wife, Marylou, as a “pretty blonde with
immense ringlets of hair,” “her hands hanging in her lap and her smoky
blue country eyes fixed in a wide stare” (2). He adds, however, that “outside
of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing
horrible things” (2). The textual view of Marylou fluctuates between her
attractiveness as a passive, aestheticized dumb object and her dangerous
capacity for “horrible things” that disrupt male security and brotherhood.
In New York, she leaves Dean and causes him problems with “some false
trumped-up hysterical crazy charge” (3). Later, on a cross-country journey,
she watches him “with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his
head and hide it in her closet.” To Sal, her love for Dean seems infused with
“sinister envy” (163).
While the novel focuses on Marylou’s desire to possess Dean, to hide
and hoard him, it also records her resistance to Dean’s desire to own her
and her refusal of her position within his auto-erotic economy. She evinces
serene love of Dean while making love and promises to Sal. A “whore” and
a “pathological liar” (163), neither her sex nor her voice are true or trust-
worthy to purposes of male empowerment. She creates her own economy
of power in which she defies and leaves Dean and deploys her sexuality to
manipulate other men, including Sal. Dean’s failure to retain control over
their relationship corresponds with his decline. He strikes her, but his
“thumb only deflected off her brow and she didn’t even have a bruise and in
fact laughed, but [his] thumb broke above the wrist” and becomes infected
(183). Finally, the tip of the thumb must be amputated, and that constantly
infected thumb, protruding in the air, soiled bandages flapping, becomes
“the symbol of Dean’s final development” (188). “The devil himself,” Sal ob-

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serves, “had never fallen farther; in idiocy, with infected thumb, surrounded
by the battered suitcases of his motherless feverish life across America and
back numberless times, an undone bird” (189).
Dean’s various wives and ex-wives form a kind of nationwide support
group to exchange information and advice. In San Francisco, women band
together, comprising a “sewing circle” that holds Dean “responsible” for his
use of them (193). Galatea Dunkel, the woman Dean convinced Ed Dunkel
to marry for the money to finance a trip across the country and then dump,
confronts Dean:
You have absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself and your damned
kicks. All you think about is what’s hanging between your legs and how
much money or fun you can get out of people and then you just throw
them aside. Not only that but you’re silly about it. It never occurs to you
that life is serious and there are people trying to make something decent
out of it instead of just goofing all the time. (194)

Translating Galatea’s unflattering interpretation of auto-erotic traveling

virility into the mystic language of traveling men, Sal concludes that Dean’s
un-serious use of women makes him “the HOLY GOOF” (194). He trans-
forms female protest into the envy that reinforces the traveling man’s power,
reducing the “sewing-circle’s” version of the road economy to jealousy of his
“position at [Dean’s] side, defending him and drinking him in as they once
tried to do” (195). Sal does not acknowledge that in his competition with
women for possession of Dean, he assumes the feminized role of worship-
per and supplicant.
In his proposition that Dean accompany him back east and in his of-
fer to support him, Sal finds himself negotiating not only the terms of a
homosocial/sexual bond, but the gendered positions of power encoded in
breadwinning, heterosexual arrangements, as well. In Dean’s appraising
gaze, he reads the complexities of their relationship: “I’d never committed
myself before with regard to his burdensome existence, and that look was
the look of a man weighing his chances at the last minute before the bet.
There were triumph and insolence in his eyes, a devilish look, and he never
took his eyes off mine for a long time. I looked back at him and blushed”
(189). This “commitment” is rife with potential meanings in terms of the
novel’s erotic economy of traveling masculinity. It represents, on one level,
a milestone in the novel’s homosocial plot line, as Sal offers to deliver Dean
from domesticity and open new frontiers for traveling adventure in a re-
turn to male brotherhood. As a “commitment,” however, it also suggests
the promises made in the context of love relations and thus the possibility

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of homosexual partnership. It is unclear, however, who would “submit” to

whom and “assume a feminine role” (Stimpson 380) in this relationship. Sal
proposes, which might give him the male-dominant position, but Dean’s
roguish demeanor seems to shift the power to him.
To further complicate matters, Sal is able to make the offer because he
has money, and, as the partner with money, his position in their relation-
ship could easily come to mimic the heterosexually traditional male-domi-
nant role as “breadwinner.” But as the partner with money, Sal also risks
sliding into a feminized role, becoming a kind of Galatea Dunkel figure,
assured of the traveling man’s love only to be used and discarded. Dean’s
gaze of “triumph and insolence” provokes Sal’s blush, perhaps indicative
of his discomfort with an intimacy infused with a bewildering complex of
homosocial, homosexual, and heterosexual undertones of power, domi-
nance, and vulnerability. After some negotiation, Sal and Dean resolve to
“stick together and be buddies till we died” (191), an agreement resolved in
a homosocial context but also a partnership resonant with the metaphors
of the heterosexual marriage contract. Feeling “perplexed and uncertain,”
they cement their pact while watching a Greek wedding party (190).
Later, Sal’s anxiety about these confused and contested gender-role as-
sociations emerges in his suspicion that Dean may be conning him, placing
him in company with a homosexual man from whom he attempts to con
money. This man, who owns the car in which they are traveling east, invites
them to his hotel room and tells them
he liked young men like us . . . he really didn’t like girls and had recently
concluded an affair with a man in Frisco in which he had taken the male
role and the man the female role. Dean plied him with businesslike
questions and nodded eagerly. The fag said he would like nothing bet-
ter than to know what Dean thought about all this. Warning him first
that he had once been a hustler in his youth, Dean asked him how much
money he had. I was in the bathroom. The fag became extremely sullen
and I think suspicious of Dean’s final motives, turned over no money,
and made vague promises for Denver. He kept counting his money and
checking on his wallet. (210)

According to his biographers, Kerouac waited in the bathroom while

Cassady had sex with this man, but the version that appears in On the
Road conveys only the suggestion of a possible trade of love for money, a
suggestion that never materializes textually. Sal notes only that Dean “had
sufficiently conquered the owner of the Plymouth to take over the wheel
without remonstrance, and now we really traveled” (210). From his position

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of power in the driver’s seat, Dean “ball[s] right across the desert” (211), and
none of the passengers dare to complain.
After this episode, while in another bathroom with Dean, Sal steps away
from the urinal “before [he] was finished and resumed at another urinal, and
said to Dean, ‘Dig this trick.’” Dean observes, “It’s a very good trick but awful
on your kidneys and because you’re getting a little older now every time you
do this eventually years of misery in your old age, awful kidney miseries for
the days when you sit in parks.” Sal responds, “I’m no old fag like that fag,
you don’t have to warn me about my kidneys” (213). His sudden, snappish
defense of his ability to control his body—specifically and especially his
penis, signifier of his status as a man in the traveling community—sug-
gests his fear of being placed in a weakened position, rendered less manly
or less powerful than Dean. It also gestures toward the uncomfortably close
correspondence between Dean and Sal’s economy of exchange and Dean’s
near-contract/contact with “the fag.”
Sal quickly retreats from his attack on his “brother,” “holy con-man”
Dean, attributing his suspicion to his lack of experience with “close rela-
tionships” (214). But his unspoken fear that Dean is using him is realized as
their “marriage” follows the trajectory of all Dean’s marriages: Dean proves
himself a “rat” when he abandons Sal in Mexico City because Sal is too ill
to travel (302). Like Dean’s wives, Sal is left behind when he restricts Dean’s
freedom of movement. Sal, however, does not articulate the connections
between himself and Dean’s wives or discuss their implications for traveling
male identity, resolving “Okay, old Dean, I’ll say nothing” (302). Silenced,
Sal occupies a reduced position, ironically less powerful than the “sewing
circle,” whose members voiced and protested their role in Dean’s economy.
Sal’s decision to say nothing demonstrates reluctance to acknowledge his
reduction, together with continued dependency on Dean as privileged model
of male identity. The contradictions of the homosocial/heterosexual travel-
ing economy converge in Sal’s predicament as an abandoned partner.
Gregory Stephenson observes that Dean’s “treatment of people often
parallels his treatment of cars; using them, breaking them under the strains
of his demands, and then abandoning them” (157). If, as Stephenson and
Galatea Dunkel argue, Dean is an insatiable consumer who wrings the
“kicks” out of others before discarding them, then Sal risks being con-
sumed, emptied of value. Because travel encodes a personal economics of
gendered identity, Sal reckons the effects of travel by “figur[ing] the losses
and . . . the gain that I knew was in there somewhere too” (107). He observes
that he “was beginning to cross and recross towns in America as though I
were a traveling salesman—raggedy travelings, bad stock, rotten beans in

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the bottom of my bag of tricks, nobody buying” (247). Travel both inflates
and endangers Sal’s investment in the model of male identity that he both
shares with and loses to Dean. Likening himself to a salesman with noth-
ing to sell, Sal draws on a metaphor of capitalist depletion to describe this
dilemma of traveling manhood.
Sal’s experience often reflects a loss of forms of power constitutive of
the models of manhood informing both hegemonic and Beat economies of
identity. As a hitchhiker, Sal finds himself at the mercy of people who own
cars; he must travel at their paces and adjust to their temperaments. As a
man who is uncomfortable driving, he is at the mercy of Dean, the master-
driver, whose driving skills are often described in overtly sexual terms. At
one point, frightened by “mad Ahab” Dean’s driving, Sal retreats to the back
to sleep, but “when I closed my eyes all I could see was the road unwinding
into me. . . . There was no escaping it. I resigned myself to all” (235–36). Find-
ing that travel subsumes the traveler rather than allowing him to consume,
own, know the road, Sal gives himself up to Dean, “the Angel of Terror”
(235), and lapses into an eerie state of disconnection from the self.
At a number of moments in the novel, Sal finds that as a traveler he lacks
a firm ground for identity. During his first trip west, he experiences “the
strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away
from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room . . . and
I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for
about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else,
some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost” (15).
Noting that this experience of dislocation occurs “halfway across America,
at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my fu-
ture,” he suggests that “maybe that’s why it happened right there and then,
that strange red afternoon” (15). But sensations of ghostliness and haunt-
ing persist throughout the text. Sal repeatedly describes himself as ghostly
and perceives other travelers as phantomlike. He has a troubling dream of
“the Shrouded Traveler,” a “strange Arabian figure that was pursuing me
across the desert; that I tried to avoid; that finally overtook me just before
I reached the Protective City” (124). Although he interprets the dream as
“the mere simple longing for pure death” (124), it seems more likely that
the “strange Arabian” figure who pursues and overtakes him represents his
fear of unredeemed alien-ness, of an alterity he later ascribes to Dean when
he envisions him “pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain,
bearing down on me”:
I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and
the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with

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thousands of sparking flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it
burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn,
through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to
the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again. . . . Everything was up, the
jig and all. Behind him charred ruins smoked. He rushed westward over
the groaning and awful continent again, and soon he would arrive. We
made hasty preparations for Dean. News was that he was going to drive
me to Mexico. (259)

Sal compares waiting for Dean to anticipating “the imminent arrival of

Gargantua; preparations had to be made to widen the gutters of Denver
and foreshorten certain laws to fit his suffering bulk and bursting ecstasies”
(259). Here, Dean occupies the ultimate outsider position, representing an
otherness that cannot be accommodated by any established structure; as
the Shrouded Traveler, a Gargantua who does not fit in culture, Dean’s ir-
reversible alien-ness borders on the insane, inhuman, monstrous. Sal awaits
him, apparently with no control over where Dean will drive him.
Because Dean embodies traveling manhood and because travel alternate-
ly intensifies and endangers culturally intelligible signifiers of masculinity,
Sal’s perceptions of Dean shift as he accumulates conflicting associations
of power and powerlessness. Finally, Sal works to regain the control he has
ceded to Dean by distancing himself from the confusing possibilities Dean
has come to represent. As the novel concludes, Dean cannot “talk anymore”
(304), and IT ceases to signify. His legendary driving abilities have passed
from skillful to self-destructively reckless, and at the end, he is a rider rather
than a driver. Sal loses sight of him when his social-climbing companions
refuse to give his “idiot friend” Dean a ride. Sal sits “in the back of the Cadil-
lac and wave[s] at him. . . . Dean, ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought
specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone, and the
last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street
ahead, and bent to it again” (307). At the end, Kerouac transfers the frightful
possibilities of resistant masculinity—alien-ness, weakness, insanity—to the
figure of Dean as a meaningless traveler, stripped of his power.
But it is as a symbol of lost possibilities that Dean represents an idealized
American identity:
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 dreaming in the immensity of it
. . . the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims

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on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that
blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the 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, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even
think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean
Moriarty. (307)

The novel’s conclusion expresses nostalgic desire for Dean’s original prom-
ise: the possibility of “something new,” a “long-prophesied” reconnection
with a free and authentic American manhood. Its elegiac tone encodes a
sense of loss that finally materializes in the ending oscillation between
Dean—the lost figure of lost possibilities—and his father—a lost traveler
who could not be found. An abject and absent wanderer, Old Dean Moriarty
signifies the diminished outcomes of resistant manhood and the invisibility
and ineffectualness of destinationless travelers in American culture, a legacy
no son wants to inherit. This ending emphasis on a traveling son’s fatal
relation to a lost and powerless father recasts the trope of travel as a “rite of
passage to manhood” (Van den Abbeele xxvi) by offering an empty line of
male identifications, a missing patrilineal connection that fails to convey
dominance and authority. Romanticizing the lost traveling man from a safe
distance, Sal simultaneously valorizes an impossible male identity and re-
treats from the consequences of its ambivalent and ambiguous associations
of gender, power, and class.
Cassady’s pun on “auto-eroticism” conflates self and travel as sites of an
independent and resistant eroticism. But Kerouac finds the erotics of the free
man at large in America bound up in a complex and sometimes reductive
imbrication of homosocial community and heterosexual dominance, in a
not-so-clearly delineated economy of gained and lost signifiers of masculin-
ity. Cassady and Kerouac challenge models of American manhood based
in post–World War II capitalist comfort and cultural satisfaction but also
run up against the limits of such resistance. Their simultaneous rejection of
and dependence on conventional markers of masculinity suggest that the
concept of unlimited travel is antithetical to the concept of identity. The
freedom and detachment of travel easily slide into weakness and fragmenta-
tion: disconnection from the solidness, control, and dominance tradition-
ally assumed as the unshakable center of male identity. Complete freedom
dismantles the structures that construct and protect identity—a consistent
or at least recognizable “I”—and that allow comfortable or at least tolerable
relations in and to culture. Because the various “social transformations” that
travelers undergo in different cultural spaces and in different forms and
circumstances of travel “are closely connected to the origins of identity”

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(Leed 263), they erode certainty about the solidness of those origins and
throw foundational assumptions about identity into jeopardy. Travelers
cannot necessarily choose what elements of their lives or aspects of their
personalities that traveling will free them from, and we all carry things with
us that we cannot afford to lose.

CdiZh
An earlier version of this essay was published as “‘Adventures in Auto-Eroti-
cism’: Traveling Masculinity in Autobiographical Writing by Jack Kerouac and
Neal Cassady,” Journeys 7.1 (2006): 1–25.
1. For more on the meanings attached to Beatness and on Kerouac and
Cassady’s positions within the Beat Movement, see Ellis Amburn, Ann Char-
ters, Dennis McNally, Barry Miles, Gerald Nicosia, William Plummer, Gregory
Stephenson, and John Tytell.
2. “Model of identity” is Paul John Eakin’s term. In Touching the World:
Reference in Autobiography, he argues that
when it comes to self . . . autobiography is doubly structured, doubly medi-
ated, a textual metaphor for what is already a metaphor for the subjective
reality of consciousness. The peculiar complexity of autobiography as a
record of the role of models of identity in the relation between self and
culture resides in this fact: ontogenetically considered, the self is already
constructed in interaction with the others of its culture before it begins
self-consciously in maturity (and specifically in autobiography—where it
exists) to think in terms of models of identity. This is what I mean when I
say that the self of an autobiographical text is a construct of a construct,
and that culture has exerted a decisive part, through the instrumental-
ity of models of identity, in the process of identity formation, whether
literary or psychological. (102)

3. See Sidonie Smith’s Moving Lives for an overview of women’s travel nar-
ratives and identities as travelers, as well as for discussion of contemporary
women travelers’ processes of “self-locating” (27).
4. For in-depth discussion of the frontier in the American imagination, see
Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard Slotkin.
5. See Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes for an incisive articulation of the
politics of race and gender in travel literature. Also, note that Patricia Nelson
Limerick defines the American west as “a place undergoing conquest and never
fully escaping its consequences” (26).
6. The association of women with society and also with nature is well-rep-
resented in American literature and has been extensively discussed by literary
critics. See, for example, the work of Nina Baym and Annette Kolodny.
7. In her article “The Beat Generation and the Trials of Homosexual Libera-
tion,” Catharine R. Stimpson argues that

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the Beats reconstructed erotic culture more ably for themselves, and oth-
ers like themselves, than for people much unlike themselves. In language
and action, they sought freedom, mobility and a state in which transfor-
mation and transcendence were viable. They were far slower to recognize
that others might deserve and desire all this, too. (391)
8. Not only did Cassady reinforce a model for powerful male identity with
this letter, he also proposed a model for powerful writing, for a “virile” prose
(Plummer 87). Ellis Amburn calls the Joan Anderson letter “the most famous
document in Beat history and the work that shaped all of Kerouac’s future
writing.” Kerouac called “Neal’s prose ‘kickwriting’—first person singular arias
composed in fits of soul-bearing frenzy”—and used it as a model for his own
writing (Amburn 161). According to Barry Miles, the letter, a “confessional,
a heart outpouring with no attempt to hold back or shape the material into
something more acceptable,” “amazed” Kerouac, who later remarked that “I
got the idea for the spontaneous style of On the Road from seeing how good old
Neal Cassady wrote his letters to me, all first person, fast, mad, confessional,
completely serious” (147). Most of the letter is lost now.
9. In her Afterword to The First Third, Caroline Cassady suggests a connec-
tion between Cassady and Joe Hanns. She writes that Cassady “reveled in the
game of continuing a sentence as long as he could before resorting to a period.
(Rather like his favorite feat of driving a car as far as possible before applying
the brakes)” (140).
10. Other commentators agree that Cassady-as-symbol is central to Kerouac’s
writing and worldview. Nicosia, for example, writes that Kerouac saw Cassady
as “some kind of hero” and as “a myth figure” (178, 250). Kerouac’s biographers
also agree that he identified Cassady as “a fantasy substitute” (Miles 131) for his
brother Gerard, who died at the age of nine.
11. Kerouac’s discomfort may also have had to do with his failure to per-
form as a breadwinner for his mother and now ex-wife. His father’s “last
words were, ‘Take care of your mother whatever you do. Promise me’” (Nicosia
163). Kerouac promised, but as William Plummer observes, his father’s ex-
hortation may have been “a largely formal request, since [his mother] always
took care of Jack. She handled his finances and—depending on how one sees
it—either gave him the emotional purchase that enabled his itinerancy, or
encumbered him with an attachment that prevented his ever becoming fully
adult” (59). In the novel, his mother becomes his aunt, a woman who takes “one
look at Dean and decided that he was a madman” (Kerouac 7). Sal consistently
returns to her, to renew and repair himself in domestic spaces, over the course
of the text.
12. Eve Sedgwick discusses male homosocial desire as “a pattern of male friend-
ship, mentorship, entitlement, rivalry, and hetero- and homosexuality . . . in an
intimate and shifting relation to class.” It is, she observes,

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 Æ6YkZcijgZh^c6jid":gdi^X^hbÇ

a kind of oxymoron. “Homosocial” is a word occasionally used in history

and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds between persons
of the same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by an analogy with
“homosexual,” and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from “ho-
mosexual.” . . . To draw the “homosocial” back into the orbit of “desire,”
of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbroken-
ness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual—a continuum
whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted. (1–2)
13. For in-depth discussion of Kerouac’s conflicted love relationships with
men and women, see Amburn, especially.

Ldg`h8^iZY
Amburn, Ellis. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. New
York: St. Martin’s, 1998.
Baym, Nina. “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American
Fiction Exclude Women Authors.” The New Feminist Criticism. Ed. Elaine
Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 63–80.
Blanton, Casey. Travel Writing: The Self and the World. New York: Twayne, 1997.
Cassady, Neal. The First Third and Other Writings. San Francisco: City Lights,
1971.
Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Biography. New York: Warner, 1974.
Eakin, Paul John. Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1992.
Gartman, David. Auto Opium. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Kolodny, Annette. The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American
Frontiers, 1630–1860. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984.
———. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American
Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975.
Leed, Eric. The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism. New
York: Basic Books, 1991.
Leverenz, David. “The Last Real Man in America: From Natty Bumppo to Bat-
man.” Fictions of Masculinity. Ed. Peter F. Murphy. New York: New York
UP, 1994. 21–53.
Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the
American West. New York: Norton, 1987.
McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and
America. New York: Random House, 1979.
Miles, Barry. Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats: A Portrait. New York: Holt,
1998.
Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. Berkeley:
U of California P, 1994.

.,
 BVgnEVc^XX^V8VgYZc

Plummer, William. The Holy Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady. New York:
Paragon, 1981.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New
York: Routledge, 1992.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of
Industrialization, 1800–1890. New York: Atheneum, 1985.
———. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America.
New York: Atheneum, 1992.
Smith, Sidonie. Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing. Min-
neapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001.
Stephenson, Gregory. The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat
Generation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990.
Stimpson, Catharine R. “The Beat Generation and the Trials of Homosexual
Liberation.” Salmagundi 58–59 (1982–3): 373–92.
Tytell, John. Naked Angels: The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation.
New York: McGraw Hill, 1977.
Van den Abbeele, Georges. Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992.

.-
 5

E6G6AA:A9:HI>C>:H>CI=:7:AA?6G6C9
DCI=:GD69
Hilary Holladay

There is no evidence that Jack Kerouac and Sylvia Plath, those two arche-
types of the confessional urge, ever met. But if they had been introduced
in the fall of 1957, when Kerouac had just published On the Road and Plath
was at Smith College (her alma mater) teaching freshman English, they
would have had plenty to talk about. They might have discussed Joyce,
Lawrence, and Dostoyevsky, authors they both greatly admired. They might
have talked about what it was like growing up in Massachusetts, Kerouac
in working-class Lowell and Plath in Wellesley, an idyllic college town. As
the high-achieving offspring of immigrants—Plath’s heritage was German
and Austrian; Kerouac’s, French Canadian—they could have compared the
ways their ethnic origins shaped their identities and ambitions.
Other commonalities would have also beckoned. Plath was so strongly
affected by the death of her father, Otto, when she was eight years old that
she would have been curious about Kerouac’s relationship with his father,
Leo, who died in 1946 when Jack was twenty-four. Since she was at the time
deeply in love with Ted Hughes, the English poet whom she had married
in 1956, she would not have been romantically interested in Kerouac, but
the sensualist in her would have appreciated his blue eyes and brooding
intensity. And if she had heard him read his own work aloud, she would
have surely admired the musical rhythms of his voice as well as his innate
feel for language.
For his part, though he was not in the habit of treating women as
equals, Kerouac would not have been able to look down on Plath, literally
or intellectually. At 5 feet, 9 inches, she was as tall as he was, and she had

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an intensity of her own, which Hughes later uncharitably called her “par-
ticular death-ray quality” (qtd. in Ennis and Kukil 50). Kerouac’s aborted
stint at Columbia College would have paled in comparison to her degrees
from Smith College and Cambridge University, which she had attended
on a Fulbright scholarship after graduating from Smith. And though she
had not yet taken cross-country road trips the way he had, she had lived in
England and traveled in Europe.1 Ten years his junior and in the late 1950s
not yet producing her most celebrated work, Plath was nevertheless more
worldly in many ways than Kerouac was. Alternately bumptious and shy,
he might have seen a flicker of disdain cross Plath’s animated face if they
had met not long after the publication of On the Road.
That such a meeting never took place does not mean, of course, that
these two were oblivious to one another’s existence. Although Kerouac may
have overlooked the author of the definitive confessional poems “Daddy”
and “Lady Lazarus,” since she was just becoming posthumously famous in
the United States during the last, difficult years of his life, 2 Plath could not
escape some knowledge of Kerouac and the Beat Generation. Ted Hughes’s
personal library, now owned by Emory University, contains a copy of On
the Road, a 1961 Pan Books paperback edition printed in London. It has no
marks indicating that Plath read it, and Hughes may have acquired it after
he and Plath separated in 1962, but Plath likely knew of the novel and had
possibly read her husband’s copy of it.3
We can say with much greater certainty that she knew of Kerouac several
years before he published On the Road, because one of her early publications
indicates that was the case. In 1953, the year after John Clellon Holmes had
published his essay “This Is the Beat Generation” in The New York Times
Magazine, Plath was chosen for Mademoiselle magazine’s college board. As
guest managing editor, she wrote in an introduction to the August 1953 issue,
“Focusing our telescope on college news around the globe, we debate and
deliberate. Issues illuminated: academic freedom, the sorority controversy,
our much labeled (and libeled) generation” ( “Mlle’s Last Word” 235). The
last item refers to “The Labeled Generation,” a lighthearted essay by Joel
Raphaelson, identified in his biographical note as a twenty-four-year-old
Harvard graduate. Writing for Mademoiselle’s audience of young women
in their teens and early twenties, Raphaelson tries to determine the most
accurate moniker for their generation. He describes Holmes as “the talented
young author of a book with the spirited title of Go [who] said moodily that
we’re the Beat Generation. Right away I remembered that we had been called
the Silent Generation by Time” (264). The word “beat” inevitably leads him
to Kerouac: “Beat wasn’t even Mr. Clellon Holmes’s own word. A few years

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ago Mr. John Kerouac, still another talented young novelist, had made a
significant remark to Mr. Clellon Holmes. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘this is really
a beat generation.’ So I tried to get in touch with Mr. John Kerouac, but his
publisher said he was out of town” (355).4
The notion of a Beat Generation, though not yet a Beat Movement, had
entered the national consciousness in the early 1950s and was of particular
interest to young writers like Raphaelson and Plath who did not want to be
typecast before they had their own say. But Plath already had a Beat sensibility
that was edging into public view; her villanelle “Mad Girl’s Love Song” ap-
peared in the same issue of Mademoiselle that she helped edit. Like Kerouac
and Allen Ginsberg, she was open to the possibility that madness (with all of
its visionary associations) was a precondition for revelation. With lines like
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead,” the poem could well be titled
“Beat Girl’s Love Song.” In her journals, moreover, she was fully capable of
writing “with a bebop sense of fifties hip we normally associate with Ker-
ouac and company” (McManamy).5 But it is The Bell Jar (1963), Plath’s only
published novel, that is especially compatible with On the Road.
Because Plath did not associate with the Beat writers and did not take
an active interest in them or their writings, she could not know that the
novel she would base on her first psychological breakdown and suicide at-
tempt would prove to be so consistent with the emerging ethos of the Beat
Generation—an ethos that combined profound disaffection with a yearning
for spiritual consolation. Yet both Plath and her autobiographically inspired
narrator, Esther Greenwood, can be seen in Holmes’s 1952 essay:
The origins of the word “beat” are obscure, but the meaning is only too
clear to most Americans. More than mere weariness, it implies the fee-
ing of having been used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of
mind, and, ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock
of consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically pushed up
against the wall of oneself.
...
[F]or today’s young people there is not as yet a single external pivot around
which they can, as a generation, group their observations and their aspi-
rations. There is no single philosophy, no single party, no single attitude.
The failure of most orthodox moral and social concepts to reflect fully
the life they have known is probably the reason for this, but because of it
each person becomes a walking, self-contained unit, compelled to meet,
or at least endure, the problem of being young in a seemingly helpless
world in his own way. (223, 227)

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Although the twenty-year-old Plath, who would try to kill herself not long
after her summer job at Mademoiselle ended, may not have given much
credence to the “Beat Generation” label, the thirty-year-old who published
The Bell Jar in England just a few weeks before ending her life had helped
document its existence. It is not much of a stretch, after all, to include Plath
among the brilliant minds Ginsberg commemorates in “Howl.”6 And Plath,
sorting through ideas for a novel (though not necessarily for The Bell Jar)
in July of 1957, was prescient enough to realize—just as Kerouac had—that
she could draw on her life experience to create a protagonist who would
speak to and for her peers: “Make her enigmatic: who is that blond girl: she
is a bitch: she is the white goddess. Make her a statement of the generation.
Which is you” (Unabridged Journals 289).
Yet it is precisely because The Bell Jar pays no notice to the Beat Genera-
tion or the coterie of male Beat writers that it is able to meet On the Road,
the Beat Generation’s defining prose work, on equal terms. By comparing
the two novels, we can see that Esther Greenwood has much in common
with Kerouac’s Sal Paradise. Both of these protagonists are preoccupied
with death and dying; both yearn for understanding and connection while
remaining at odds with the world in which they live. But while Sal Paradise
feels some fleeting kinship with “a new beat generation that I was slowly
joining” (On the Road 54), Esther portrays herself as an anomaly without any
group to call her own. Though Plath had wanted to create a female character
who would be “a statement of the generation,” Esther is a starkly isolated
figure. That is the distinguishing truth and tragedy of her story.
The Bell Jar begins in New York City in the summer of 1953, with the
nineteen-year-old Esther Greenwood, a student at a prestigious women’s
college, working as a guest editor for a fashion magazine. Ambitious and
status conscious, she is worried because this glamorous summer job is not
making her feel the way she imagines other people think that she should.
Rather than enjoying her puff literary assignments and the parties that
go with the turf, she obsesses over Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Jewish
couple who will soon be electrocuted as communist spies. Much to her own
discomfiture, she finds herself identifying with these doomed outsiders: “I
couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along
your nerves” (1). Her preoccupation with the Rosenbergs not only foreshad-
ows her traumatic experience with electroshock therapy but also allies her
with Kerouac’s Sal Paradise, who likewise identifies with the marginalized
and dispossessed.
Like Paradise, moreover, she is never able to reconcile this identifica-
tion with an innate sense of upwardly mobile entitlement—what Kerouac’s

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narrator calls “white ambitions” (180). A walking embodiment of the cold

war conflict, Esther hears so much about the Rosenbergs that “I couldn’t
get them out of my mind” (1), while simultaneously tormenting herself with
the knowledge that she is “supposed to be the envy of thousands of other
college girls just like me all over America who wanted nothing more than to
be tripping about in those same size-seven patent leather shoes I’d bought
in Bloomingdale’s one lunch hour” (2). Beside herself with frustration, she
continues to spin out the fantasy she imagines other people have for her:
“Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-
of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine,
and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and prize
there and ends up steering New York like her own private car” (2). This is,
of course, her fantasy, a fantasy rooted in the “white ambitions” that caused
her to pursue the New York job in the first place.
Her automotive metaphor calls to mind Dean Moriarty, the recreational
car thief and socially marginalized hero of On the Road who spends all of
his (and his wife’s) money on a 1949 Hudson. For both Dean and Esther,
the car is the ultimate American status symbol, a capitalist means to an
escapist end. Ironically and tellingly, Dean destroys the Hudson with his
rough handling of it and ends up on the last pages of On the Road begging
Sal for a ride to Penn Station. As a true outsider, he has not been able to buy
or steal his way into mainstream society; he must depend on private charity
or public transportation to get from one point to the next on his circular,
never ascending path.
Something similar is true for Esther. As she prepares to leave the mental
institution where she has endured electroshock therapy, insulin treatments,
and unpleasant company, she has this to say: “There ought, I thought, to be a
ritual for being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road”
(244). Still clinging to the car metaphor, she imagines herself as a retread—a
significant comedown from “steering New York like her own private car.”
Though she may look as good as new to the doctors whose approval she
needs in order to reenter society, she knows, just as they do, that she will be
more vulnerable than most to the hazards of the road ahead.
The groundwork for her imperilment is laid early in the novel. While
maintaining the arch tone of someone seeking to amuse the dominant
class, Esther reveals that her depression is rooted in her slightly threadbare,
middle-class home life. When she returns home from New York, her mother
picks her up at a suburban Boston train station. A widow with two college-
aged children, Mrs. Greenwood supports the family by teaching secretarial
classes at a university in Boston. A bit of a martyr figure, she seems intent

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on responding to Esther’s every need. From Esther’s perspective, however,

her mother only makes things worse. The book is filled with examples of
Mrs. Greenwood’s well-meaning but obtuse reactions to her daughter’s woes.
After Esther’s suicide attempt, for instance, Mrs. Greenwood tells Esther
that she “should be grateful” that Philomena Guinea, the romance writer
turned philanthropist providing her college scholarship, will pay for her care
at a private hospital (185). And later, when Esther seems to have recovered
from her suicidal depression, Mrs. Greenwood declares that they can look
back on everything that has happened in recent months as if it were “a bad
dream” (237). Such comments infuriate Esther, who at one point blurts out
to her psychiatrist that she hates her mother (203).
It is not that Mrs. Greenwood says or does anything that is truly terrible.
It is just that mother and daughter do not live in the same reality. Her at-
tempts to shield her daughter from sorrow and suffering—most prominently
a long-ago decision not to take the nine-year-old Esther to her father’s
funeral—have backfired. Now, as a young woman, Esther courts trauma
as a way to make up for her perceived deficit of experience: “If there was a
road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to
look at, I’d stop and look so hard I never forgot it. I certainly learned a lot of
things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they
surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that’s the way I
knew things were all the time” (13). Sheltered and naïve, she treats human
suffering like another college course that requires hard studying. She is
not so much educating herself, however, as she is doing violence to herself.
By pretending that the morbid and the macabre do not faze her, she denies
her own feelings, her core humanity. That she does this to herself is not her
mother’s fault. Instead, it is evidence of Esther’s essentially beat condition.
Opting not to disclose her private suffering, she is, to return to John Clellon
Holmes’s description, “a walking, self-contained unit, compelled to meet,
or at least endure, the problem of being young in a seemingly helpless world
in [her] own way.”
By suppressing her honest reactions to the scenes and situations that
shock her, she imperils the very self she is trying to protect. The more she
relies on masks to hide her feelings, the more unrecognizable she becomes
to herself. We see the impact of this virulent form of self-denial when she
repeatedly likens herself to inanimate objects or alienated minorities.
Describing the early days of her depression in New York, she writes, “I felt
very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving
dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo” (3). She reports
that her faded suntan makes her look “yellow as a Chinaman” (8), and

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whenever she is on a date with a man inconveniently shorter than she is,
she feels “gawky and morbid as somebody in a sideshow” (9; the image of
the sideshow freak also appears in Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”). Standing beside
her self-confident friend and fellow guest editor Doreen at a bar, she melts
“into the shadows like the negative of a person I’d never seen before in my
life” (10). Watching Doreen and the disc jockey Lenny Shepherd dance at
Lenny’s apartment, she feels herself “shrinking to a small black dot against
all those red and white rugs and that pine paneling. I felt like a hole in the
ground” (16). Back at the ironically named Amazon hotel, where she and
all the other guest editors are staying, she boards the elevator and glimpses
“a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face. It was
only me, of course” (18). On her way home from New York, “The face in the
mirror looked like a sick Indian” (112).
Again and again, Esther sees herself as a repellant Other. As the eye of
a tornado, a photographic negative, a black dot, or a hole in the ground,
she registers herself as a dark abstraction, an absence without independent
meaning or value. Her racial shorthand builds on this notion, revealing that
she has become her own state enemy. As a sick Indian (no gender specified),
yellow Chinaman, or smudgy-eyed Chinese woman, she imagines herself
as alien, repellant, weird—a far cry from the smart, successful, and alluring
young white woman that she thinks she is supposed to be. In all of these
instances, which build on her preoccupation with the Rosenbergs, we can
see Edward Said’s concept of a pejoratively defined orientalism at work.
Esther simultaneously identifies with and rejects the very groups that a po-
litically and socially defensive white U.S. society cannot countenance—the
disenfranchised Indians, the communist Chinese, the Jewish communists.
Although she neither satirizes herself for taking this untenable stance nor
satirizes the national climate, we can still glimpse something of Ginsberg’s
“America” (1956) in her. Like Ginsberg’s narrator, who says he “used to be
a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry,” only to declare later, “Asia is
rising against me” (40, 41), Plath’s protagonist seems to personify the major
political clashes of her era.
One might say, after Whitman, that she contains multitudes, but there is
no Whitmanian joy or Ginsbergian laughter for Esther in her own multiplic-
ity of identity. Because the society she lives in does not like or trust women
who stray from the conventional script, she sees no obvious way to reconcile
the competing desires—the competing selves—struggling to cohere within
her. Her tiresome boyfriend Buddy Willard has often quoted his mother’s
fake pearl of wisdom: “What a man is is an arrow into the future and what
a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from” (72). Esther knows in

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her heart that “The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the
place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to
shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of
July rocket” (83).7 Like Sal Paradise, she wants to make a gaudy mark on the
world. Her vividly expressed passion for a life fully lived irresistibly calls
to mind those “mad ones” who captivate Sal—“desirous of everything at
the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but
burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders
across the stars” (6). That is just the sort of person Esther wants to be, and
be with, but she never encounters anyone remotely like Dean or Sal. Unable
to “shoot off in all directions” and ultimately afraid of what might happen
if she did, Esther remains alarmed by the alien entities that seem poised to
take over her very soul. She is the walking embodiment of a very dangerous
cold war that is simultaneously personal and political. 8
Her sense of profound dissociation does not end with her suicide attempt.
She wakes up in a hospital, bruised and battered as a result of a sleeping-pill
overdose in a basement crawl space, and discovers that she is not blind, as
she is erroneously informed. Even though she can see, she is nonetheless un-
recognizable to herself. Handed a mirror, she mistakes it for “a picture”:
You couldn’t tell whether the person in the picture was a man or a woman,
because their hair was shaved off and sprouted in bristly, chicken-feather
tufts all over their head. One side of the person’s face was purple, and
bulged out in a shapeless way, shading to green along the edges, and then
to a sallow yellow. The person’s mouth was pale brown, with a rose-colored
sore at either corner. (174)

She has now become the sideshow freak that she felt like earlier in her story.
Upon smiling at the “picture” and seeing her wounded, sexless image smile
back, Esther throws down the mirror, smashing it to bits. For once she does
not try to tamp down her horror. It is both sad and extremely revealing
that the image that finally provokes a spontaneously visceral response from
her is not “a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory
jar” but her own ravaged face. Her transformation into a monstrous Other
is complete—and she is both the cause and the most horrified witness of
the spectacle.
Esther’s dual roles—as victim and perpetrator, object and subject, colored
suspect and white woman of the world—make her a hard character to pin
down. She is simultaneously fragile and thick-skinned, naïve and perceptive,
purposeless and driven. Given all of these contradictions, it should come
as no surprise that her story resists definitive interpretation. So much of

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what happens to her can be taken in more than one way. As Ted Hughes
has observed, “[I]n each episode of the novel [a] deeper pattern contradicts
the ritual on the upper level; everything on the upper level, every step of the
ritual dance that is trying to compel ‘the good things to happen,’ acquires
a tragic shadow” (10). In keeping with this formulation, we can see Esther’s
destruction of the mirror as either the first step in her painstaking recon-
struction of a viable identity for herself or one in a long line of symbolic
acts of self-denial manifested as self-violation.
The unsettling pattern that Hughes discerns is especially noticeable in
the last two chapters of the novel. Although formulaic convention dictates
that Esther should be on the mend, spiritually and physically, she nearly
dies from hemorrhaging upon losing her virginity to an unattractive young
math professor. Shortly thereafter, her lesbian admirer and doppelganger
Joan Gilling, who had taken her to the emergency room the night of her
hemorrhaging, hangs herself in the woods near the mental institution where
they have both been patients. Although Joan’s suicide may seem like a neces-
sary sacrifice so that Esther can emerge as the sole survivor, the episode can
also be read as a ghastly commentary on Esther’s sexual initiation and as
an indication that her own prognosis is far from optimistic. Buddy Willard
underscores both possibilities when he implies, at the end of the novel, that
Esther may never marry. Although the recuperating Buddy still resides at
a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients, he does not seem worried about his
own prospects. No, it is Esther, who has endured a punishing one-night
stand (unbeknownst to Buddy) and logged time at a mental institution,
who risks the perception of damaged goods. As she prepares to return to
the seeming normalcy of college and society at large, she is reminded that
her inner resources are her only real defense against a world full of passive-
aggressive “Buddys.”

Though his story follows a different arc from Esther’s, Sal Paradise is caught
in a bind similar to hers. In his mid-twenties, at loose ends, and with a failed
marriage behind him, he, too, is looking for ways to shake off a depression.
The arrival in New York of the “young jailkid” Dean Moriarty presents
him with a much-needed diversion (On the Road 1). When he decides to
take a trip west, it is out of a desire not only to catch up with Dean, who
has returned to his hometown of Denver, but also to see the country Dean
has seen. Knowing that Dean is out there somewhere, excitedly observing
everything around him and making the most of his ragtag life, inspires Sal
no end. With Dean as both catalyst and destination, Sal is able to imagine
and then embark on a new phase in his own life.

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But first he has to get out of his aunt’s house. Her maternal presence sug-
gests that Sal still needs looking after. Like Esther’s mother, she is endlessly
accommodating, even as her opinion subtly infantilizes the would-be adult:
“My aunt was all in accord with my trip to the West; she said it would do
me good, I’d been working so hard all winter and staying in too much; she
even didn’t complain when I told her I’d have to hitchhike some. All she
wanted was for me to come back in one piece” (9). One gets the feeling that
she worries about Sal, just as Mrs. Greenwood worries about Esther. And
there is reason to worry, since Sal confesses to a “feeling that everything
was dead” in the book’s opening paragraph (1). As the novel progresses, we
see that he never entirely escapes this melancholy feeling.
Like Esther, Sal is an ambiguous character on an ambiguous journey. We
can’t say precisely how, or even if, he has changed by the end of his story,
though we know that he has gotten the material he needed for the book we
are reading. He has in this respect accomplished an important goal, just
as Esther has. But in other respects—such as knowing himself and being
comfortable inside his own skin—Sal is very much a work in progress.
Like Esther, he relies on comparisons to limn his identity or lack thereof.
Sometimes he imagines himself as a ghost; other times, he wishes he were a
black man or a Mexican. His comparisons are not inherently self-degrading,
however, the way Esther’s are. They express, instead, feelings of yearning and
penitence that grow out of a preoccupation with death. In these instances,
we see that Sal is far from having conquered the sorrows troubling him
before his narrative begins.
From the outset, he wrestles with an identity crisis. After stopping at an
inexpensive hotel in Des Moines, Iowa, on his first trip west, he awakens in
the afternoon after a long sleep: “I woke up as the sun was reddening; and
that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I
didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with
travel. . . . I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my
whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost” (15). If he were merely at a
symbolic crossroads, “halfway across America, at the dividing line between
the East of my youth and the West of my future” (15), as he seems to hope,
then he could expect to evolve into a happier, more mature version of his old
self. But the ghost metaphor is a tenacious one, and Sal repeatedly imagines
himself as a shade of the living.
Being alone in a strange location always heightens his anxieties. Arriving
in San Francisco for the first time, he writes, “I was rudely jolted in the bus
station at Market and Fourth into the memory of the fact that I was three
thousand two hundred miles from my aunt’s house in Paterson, New Jersey.

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I wandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was, Frisco—long, bleak
streets with trolley wires all shrouded in fog and whiteness” (60). Later, when
he fears that his new girlfriend, Terry, is setting him up for a robbery, he
repeats his earlier description of himself: “I was like a haggard ghost, sus-
picioning every move she made, thinking she was stalling for time” (83). A
ghost has known both life and death and carries the burden of that duality
when revisiting the world of the living. The trouble for the “haggard ghost”
is not that the sorrows and suspicions of the world are foreign to him; it is
that they are all too familiar. As much as Sal had wanted a fresh start once
he hit the road, his initial “feeling that everything was dead” has consigned
him to a post mortem perspective on his every move.
Sal is not the only ghost in the book. He dwells at some length on “the
Ghost of the Susquehanna,” a “poor little madman” he meets along the river
near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (104, 105). After he escapes the company of
the directionally challenged hobo, he muses, “I thought all the wilderness
of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me
different” (105). Despite all of his years roaming the country, the Ghost of
the Susquehanna has no idea which road leads where. It is therefore not just
the wilderness of the east that he shows to Sal; it is the willful confusion of
a perpetually lost old man. Given his own problems getting from place to
place, Sal can’t help but take the old man’s plight personally. After leaving
the Ghost of the Susquehanna behind, he sinks into another apparitional
depression: “Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in
everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans,
when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and
naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering
through nightmare life. I stumbled haggardly out of the station; I had no
more control” (106). Comparing himself to a “gruesome grieving ghost,”
Sal is much worse off than the Ghost of the Susquehanna. He is lost not in
the Pennsylvania woods but in the forest of his “nightmare life.”
Ironically, it is this self-damning logic that keeps Sal among the living.
He is caught in an endlessly repeating death cycle much like Plath’s Lady
Lazarus, for whom “Dying / Is an art” (Collected Poems 245). Instead of one
climactic scene in which Paradise tries to annihilate himself and thus end
his own suffering, there will be several unbidden death scenes (starting
with his identity crisis in Des Moines). We see him metaphorically dying
when he is alone in San Francisco, broke, and nearly starving after Dean
has abandoned him and Marylou has lost interest in him. In the midst of a
vision triggered by the sight of a restaurant proprietress he imagines to be his
“mother of about two hundred years ago in England” (172), he experiences

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a moment of ecstasy in which he feels “the sensation of death kicking at my

heels to move on” (173). Reflecting Kerouac’s emergent interest in Buddhism
and reincarnation in the early 1950s, Sal continues, “I realized that I had
died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especially
because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy,
a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a mil-
lion times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it” (173). In this state
of “sweet, swinging bliss” (173), he fully expects that he will die any minute,
but he says that he does not. Returning to the earthly moment at hand, he
scrounges cigarette butts from the street and returns to Marylou’s room to
fill his pipe with discarded tobacco. Because this is just the sort of thing a
skid row bum would do, it seems possible that Sal has been reborn—as a
bum—and simply hasn’t realized it yet. After all, he himself admits, “I was
too young to know what had happened” (173).
Another metaphorical death scene occurs once Sal has settled down in
Denver. Alone, and lonely for Dean and Marylou, he wanders the city at
night “wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had of-
fered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness,
music, not enough night. . . . I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a
poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a ‘white man’ dis-
illusioned. All my life I’d had white ambitions; that was why I’d abandoned
a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley” (179–80). Unlike Esther
Greenwood, who shrinks away in horror from the reflections of herself that
conjure ethnic minorities, Sal yearns to walk in the shoes of an Other. To
be reborn into the life of an ethnic minority would enable him, he thinks,
to escape the sorrows and difficulties of his white man’s existence.
Significantly, he puts “white man” in quotes, as if he were a man passing
as white rather than an actual white man, and this raises questions about
his true racial identification. As an ostensibly Italian American character
standing in for an author of French Canadian ancestry, Sal Paradise is
not a member of the ruling class of WASP Americans. His “white ambi-
tions” can be read as his desire to be white rather than as a set of racially
inscribed choices he has already made. His haphazard adventures suggest
that these ambitions are no more or less likely to be fulfilled than his naïve
and patronizing desire to “exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted,
ecstatic Negroes of America” (180). Interpreted this way, Sal seems racially
confused rather than merely racist. The case for this is strengthened by his
earlier description of himself as “[s]ighing like an old Negro cotton-picker”
after a day at work in the California cotton fields and his conviction that
the “Okies” in his migrant camp think he is a Mexican, “and in a way I am”

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(97, 98). Like a chameleon, he assumes one ethnicity after another, never
identifying for long with any one of them. Put another way, whiteness is
not the base station to which he inevitably returns but rather one of several
platforms (each with its own advantages and disadvantages) that he consid-
ers mounting.
Without any fixed ethnicity to call his own, and momentarily mistaken
for someone else by a dark-skinned woman who calls him “Joe,” Sal con-
tinues on his ghostly walk in Denver. In his description of “strange young
heroes of all kinds, white, colored, Mexican, pure Indian” playing softball
(180), the athletes of different ethnicities are all at an equal remove from him
in his state of panicky yearning. Once again, the grieving, haggard ghost of
Sal Paradise speaks to us from the void: “It was the Denver Night; all I did
was die” (180). “How I died! I walked away from there” (181).
Sal’s mortal sorrows shadow him all across the country, even during
episodes that bring him pleasure. At the beginning of his brief but relatively
idyllic love affair with the young Mexican woman named Terry, for instance,
he feels miserable as he contemplates the slums of Los Angeles: “I never felt
sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities”
(86). After Galatea Dunkel quite rightly tells off Dean in San Francisco, Sal
observes, “It was the saddest night. I felt as if I was with strange brothers
and sisters in a pitiful dream” (195). His tumultuous trip back to New York
with Dean provides excitement and distraction but does not assuage his
pain in any lasting way. Preparing to say goodbye to Dean in New York,
he looks at photos their mutual friend Ed Dunkel took of Dean’s young
family: “I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would
look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth,
well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning
to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy mad-
ness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless
nightmare road” (253–54).
These bleak meditations, which are just as real as Sal’s exclamations of
joy, contribute to the novel’s complex emotional texture. As Ben Giamo
has pointed out,
[T]he road of life entails certain sadness paired with exuberant joy. . . .
The oscillation between ecstasy and suffering—elation and dejection—ap-
pears to be the maxim of the novel. It simply goes with the territory, as if
a physical law of motion—“our one and noble function of the time.” This
oscillation, in which characters and events both expand and contract,
results in an uncanny state of equilibrium whereby the states of creation
and annihilation balance out. (20)

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It is hard to say, however, whether sadness and joy truly balance out in On
the Road as Giamo suggests. The verdict seems to depend, to an unusual de-
gree, on one’s individual willingness to acknowledge and accept the novel’s
duality of vision—a duality that is also present in The Bell Jar. Paradise’s
interludes of happiness have come to define the novel for many readers who
prefer not to dwell on the suffering strewn all along his road. For them, Sal’s
story seems to have become part of the self-affirming myth of their own
youth and boundless potential. On a visit to Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell,
for instance, the Italian journalist Massimo Pacifico summed up the novel’s
primary appeal: “Kerouac represents the sense of freedom all the young
men have. It is the myth of travel without a target, without a goal. It has a
big sense of liberation that still attracts young people to this. Every young
man wants this” (Perry 14). It is a testament to the novel’s almost insidious
charm—as well as its lack of resolution—that it continues to accommodate
such a blithely subjective response.
Sal is admittedly very appealing when he is caught up in the moment,
without time or inclination to dwell on either the past or the future. In
these rare instances, he is able to connect with the people around him and
the landscape he inhabits. We see him in this flattering light when he joins
a motley fraternity of hobos and teenaged boys riding west on a flatbed
truck. To his great satisfaction, he is finally making good time as he speeds
toward Denver and Dean Moriarty: “How that truck disposed of the Ne-
braska nub—the nub that sticks out over Colorado! . . . I yelled for joy. We
passed the bottle. The great blazing stars came out, the far-receding sand
hills got dim. I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way” (25). With
his whole life ahead of him, Sal is the “arrow” Esther Greenwood longs to
be. The young writer traveling west in pursuit of adventure is not just a free
spirit; he is a freed one, and his explosive release in this scene helps account
for the novel’s transformative impact on readers. Who wouldn’t want to be
in Sal Paradise’s huaraches—which he cheerfully calls “the silliest shoes in
America” (27)—as he launches himself into the starry western night?
On this occasion Sal seems to know “IT” (127)—as Dean calls the experi-
ence of completely surrendering to the joy of life—all by himself. But even
this early scene hints at the shaded depths, the beatness, of Paradise’s soul.
Kerouac himself believed that “self-realization or highest perfect wisdom
. . . can only be achieved in solitude, poverty, and contemplation—and in
a gathering of homeless brothers” (Selected Letters 447). Seen from this
perspective, Sal’s transcendent joy alongside his fellow hitchhikers—his
“homeless brothers”—is all of a piece with his solitary death visions in San
Francisco and Denver. As they pass around that bottle of cheap booze,

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the home they have made out of homelessness is what illuminates the sky
above them.
Whereas Sal experiences occasional moments of supreme self-awareness
that stem from his beat condition, Dean is his consciously crafted vision of
the truly beaten down yet spiritually transcendent—what we might call Beat
with a capital B. As such, he is Sal’s one enduring love interest, his “HOLY
GOOF” (194). Approaching but never quite becoming a gay romance, their
intense relationship occupies a gray area somewhere between platonic
friendship and explicit homosexual desire. After Sal has returned to New
York and fallen in love with “the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes
that I had always searched for and for so long” (304), he writes to Dean
in San Francisco. He has decided that he and his new love interest should
live near Dean. Despite Dean’s callous desertion of him in Mexico City,
Sal clings to the relationship. It is only when Dean shows up unexpectedly
in New York, before Sal and Laura are ready to move out west, that Sal is
finally able to let him go. When Remi Boncoeur declines to give Dean a ride
to the train station, Sal does not try to overrule the decision. He yields to
convention and rides off with Laura and Remi even though his heart aches
for Moriarty.
In our last sighting of him, Dean is a lonely, seemingly helpless figure. In
the book’s final pages, he has made only one truly lucid pronouncement: “I
wanted to see your sweet girl and you—glad of you—love you as ever” (305).
Sal does not reveal his response to this declaration of love, the first of its
kind between them. But he knows that Moriarty will never be free of “his
wives and woes” (302), and they cannot easily run off together this time.
A novel that begins in longing for an attractive but elusive new friend thus
ends in essentially the same place, with Sal declaiming, “I think of Dean
Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found,
I think of Dean Moriarty” (307). Significantly, the first part of the Irish
name Moriarty is very close to the Latin “morior”—“to die.”9 Paradise’s last
words, then, are not only a sort of elegiac prayer for his beloved friend and
his friend’s father but also a punning acknowledgement of his continuing
preoccupation with death.10 Seen through the religious lens that Kerouac’s
narrators always insist on, the two main characters—let’s call them Death
and Paradise—are truly codependent, the meaning of the one inseparable
from the meaning of the other.
Both Sal Paradise and Esther Greenwood go through a great deal but
ultimately change very little. They are solipsistic dreamers whose forays into
relationships only lead them back to themselves. Though he has the benefit
of many friends, most notably Dean Moriarty, and an amicable relationship

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with his aunt, Sal is no less a loner than Esther. His tortured spirituality
grows out of an unquenched, and perhaps unquenchable, desire to know
himself, that ghostly specter that is equally “mad to live” and mad to die
(5). As for Esther, her story ends with her on the brink of a future that is
virtually indistinguishable from her recent past:
Pausing, for a brief breath, on the threshold, I saw the silver-haired doctor
who had told me about the rivers and the Pilgrims on my first day, and the
pocked, cadaverous face of Miss Huey, and eyes I thought I recognized
over white masks.
The eyes and the faces all turned themselves toward me, and guiding
myself by them, as by a magical thread, I stepped into the room. (244)

Like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the novel Esther had planned to analyze in
her college thesis, The Bell Jar has an elliptical quality to it. The uncertain
ending leads us back to the uncertain beginning, when Esther confesses to
her preoccupation with the Rosenbergs. Since Esther herself has asked, “How
did I know that someday—at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere—the
bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?” (241), we are
not fully convinced that our more mature narrator, who briefly alludes to her
baby in the novel’s opening pages (3), is truly cured. Esther’s internal cold
war seems far from over, and of course it is hard to ignore the extratextual
evidence of Sylvia Plath’s own suicide.
It is safe to say that neither Plath nor her fictional protagonist would have
been saved by a Beat Generation, had either one cared to acknowledge that
such a thing existed. But in turning a blind eye in her life and her art to a
cultural phenomenon that actually spoke to her condition, Plath helps us see
that the Beat Generation, as Holmes and Kerouac conceived of it, really did
exist. For Plath in her last, terrible days can surely be seen as one of Kerouac’s
“solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization”
(“Aftermath” 47). Both she and Esther Greenwood personify Holmes’s no-
tion of “a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness” and
the concomitant feeling that one has been “pushed up against the wall of
oneself.” Such exigencies do not afflict groups or generations but only iso-
lated individuals. That is what Plath was—and what her Esther Greenwood
chooses to be. The irony is that both Plath and Kerouac, Esther and Sal, have
spoken to the experiences of so many. Nearly everyone has an inner Bartleby
or an inner Beat, it seems. Though maybe the Beat Generation “was really
just an idea in our minds,” as Kerouac candidly admitted (“Aftermath” 47),
it is an idea that gives viable definition to Esther Greenwood’s plight and
helps us see Sylvia Plath in a revealing new context. Though their paths on

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earth apparently never crossed, Plath and Kerouac were both arrows into a
future world that they seemed to know in their hearts would look back on
them with astonishment and gratitude.

CdiZh
1. In the summer of 1959, Plath and Hughes made a cross-country trip to visit
Plath’s aunt and uncle in Pasadena, California. Their drive took them through
parts of Canada as well as across the United States.
2. Harper and Row published the American edition of Plath’s Ariel in June
1966; Faber and Faber published a new edition of The Bell Jar, listing Plath as
author (instead of her pseudonym Victoria Lucas), in England in September
1966. The first American edition of The Bell Jar appeared in April 1971, nearly
two years after Kerouac’s death in October of 1969 (Middlebrook 227, 239).
3. According to David Faulds, Rare Book Librarian at Emory University’s
Robert W. Woodruff Library, On the Road is the only book by Kerouac catalogued
to date in the Hughes library. Faulds noted, however, that the cataloguing of the
Hughes library is not yet complete (Faulds email to author, Oct. 11, 2006).
4. Kerouac was on the move for much of 1953. He began the year at his
mother’s home in Richmond Hill, New York.; in February visited with his
sister and her family in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.; in the spring moved to
California to work for the Southern Pacific railroad; and then in the summer
got a job aboard the S. S. William Carruth. He ended the year back home with
his mother in Richmond Hill (Selected Letters 395–404).
5. As an example of her Beat sensibility, McManamy cites Plath’s description
of a student party in Cambridge, England. It was at this memorable party that
Plath first met Ted Hughes, whom she would marry less than four months later.
Dated February 26, 1956, the entry reads, in part,
Falcon’s Yard, and the syncopated strut of a piano upstairs, and oh it was
very Bohemian, with boys in turtle-neck sweaters and girls being blue-
eye-lidded or elegant in black. Derrek was there, with guitar, and Bert
was looking shining and proud as if he had just delivered five babies, said
something obvious about having drunk a lot, and began talking about
how Luke was satanic after we had run through the poetry in St. Botolph’s
and yelled about it. . . . By this time I had spilled one drink, partly into
my mouth, partly over my hands and the floor, and the jazz was begin-
ning to get under my skin, and I started dancing with Luke and knew I
was very bad, having crossed the river and banged into the trees, yelling
about the poems, and he only smiling with that far-off look of a cretin
satan. (Unabridged Journals 210–11)
6. Note the way that Plath’s Esther Greenwood describes her visit to her
father’s grave: “I laid my face to the smooth face of the marble and howled my
loss into the cold salt rain” (167).

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7. Plath returned to the image of the arrow in “Ariel,” in which she writes,
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies

Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

(Collected Poems 239–40)
8. In regard to the cold war context in which Plath was writing, Robin Peel
observes,
The change in title, from the original ‘Diary of a Suicide’ to The Bell Jar
is indicative of a shift in perception and focus. The first title suggests that
the subject is the self: the second the influence of something beyond the
individual on that self. A bell jar is a vessel used in a physics and chemistry
lab for experiments in which the enclosed material is denied oxygen and
condemned to extinction. That definition provides echoes of the effect
on the atmosphere of surface nuclear tests, which scientists and govern-
ments made possible. (66–67)
9. I am grateful to Christian Singer, a student in my course in literature of
the Beat Movement at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, during the fall
of 2006, for pointing out the Latin root embedded in the name Moriarty.
10. As another of Kerouac’s autobiographically based narrators declares,
“Death is the only decent subject, since it marks the end of illusion and delu-
sion” (Visions of Gerard 103).

Ldg`h8^iZY
Faulds, David. Email to author, Oct. 11, 2006.
Giamo, Ben. Kerouac, The Word and the Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000.
Ginsberg, Allen. “America.” Howl and Other Poems. 1956. San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 2000. 39–43.
Holmes, John Clellon. “This Is the Beat Generation.” 1952. Beat Down to Your
Soul: What Was the Beat Generation? Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Penguin,
2001. 222–28.
Hughes, Ted. “On Sylvia Plath.” Raritan 14.2 (Fall 1994): 1–10.
Kerouac, Jack. “Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation.” 1958. Good
Blonde and Others. Ed. Donald Allen. San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1993.
47–50.

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 EVgVaaZa9Zhi^c^Zh

———. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 2005.

———. Selected Letters: 1940–1956. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking, 1995.
———. Visions of Gerard. New York: Penguin, 1963.
McManamy, John. “Sylvia Plath—In Her Own Words.” McMan’s Depression
and Bipolar Web. <www.mcmanweb.com/article-77.htm.> Accessed Oct.
1, 2006.
Middlebrook, Diane. Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath—A Marriage.
New York: Penguin, 2003.
Peel, Robin. Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics. Madison, N.J.:
Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2002.
Perry, David. “Italians Keep the Beat Strong: Journalists Tour Kerouac Sites
during Lowell Visit.” Lowell Sun Oct. 8, 2006: 1, 14.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. 1963. New York: Harper-Collins Perennial Classics,
1999.
———. “Ariel.” The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Perennial,
1980. 239–40.
———. “Lady Lazarus.” The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Pe-
rennial, 1980. 244–47.
———. Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–63. 1975. Ed. Aurelia Schober Plath.
New York: Bantam, 1977.
———. “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” Mademoiselle 37.4 (Aug. 1953): 358.
———. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962. Ed. Karen V. Kukil.
New York: Anchor, 2000.
Raphaelson, Joel. “The Labeled Generation.” Mademoiselle. 37.4 (Aug. 1953):
264+.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

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 6

Æ9:9>86I:9ID6B:G>86!L=6I:K:GI=6I>HÇ/
@:GDJ68ÉHK:GH>DCHD;DCI=:GD69
R. J. Ellis

The marking of the fiftieth anniversary of On the Road in 2007 raised some
complex questions, revolving around which anniversary, of exactly which
On the Road, should be celebrated? Of course, different On the Roads will
exist in different readers’ cultural imaginaries. But these differences are
complicated in the case of On the Road by different degrees of knowledge
about the novel. Does the reader know much, if anything, about the Beats,
or the Beat Generation, or the novel’s complex prepublication, compositional
history? For example, does the reader know about the famous composition
of an early draft of On the Road in a three-week period in 1951 (on a 140-foot
long scroll of eight pieces of paper, taped together), and if so, has the reader
studied the scroll version, published only in 2007? Does the reader know
that Kerouac a few weeks later retyped the scroll on regular paper or that,
after constantly reworking, revising, and adding to his manuscript, Kerouac,
toward the end of the process, returned to the 1951 scroll and a 1952 retyping
of the scroll on bond, set aside most of the intervening rewriting, and only
then produced the 1957 version? If not, some fairly foolish conclusions can
be jumped to, as when the editor of the London Observer bemoaned the
fact that the “new” edition of On the Road, as he understood it, changed the
names of Sal and Dean to Jack and Neal—failing to understand just how
much difference existed between the scroll version of On the Road and the
version that was finally published. How many readers, like the Observer’s
editor, might see such name “changes” being akin to a new edition of Moby
Dick with the opening words, “Call me Bob.”1
All these questions inevitably complicate any response to Road—not
least because Kerouac was working for such a long period on the novel that

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he himself became aware, self-reflexively, of the ways in which markedly

different Roads were coming into being—not only because of his constant
rewriting, but also because of what others in his circle and beyond learned
of these. Kerouac widely broadcast amongst his acquaintances the fact that
he had composed the novel in a three-week rush of writing. He also later
gave an interview with Alfred Aronowitz published in the New York Post
on March 10, 1959, which quoted him as claiming that it “took me 21 days
to write . . . on one long roll of paper with no periods, no commas, no para-
graphs, all single-spaced.” This interview is frequently cited at face value,
even though the Road scroll is well punctuated. Yet in the extended version
of this interview, published in 1970, eleven years after the Post first ran its
story, what Kerouac said in 1959 is revealed to be significantly different: “I
wrote On the Road on a roll of Cannastra’s drawing paper . . . It was . . .
all one big paragraph. I had to retype it so they could publish it. . . . that’s
the way to tell a story—just tell it!”2 There is no mention here of missing
punctuation, but in 1959 a myth of spontaneous outpouring is born. The
novel was composed in a three-week rush, but not in the way that popular
versions of the process would have it.
Kerouac also widely complained about his publisher’s comment that
a continuous scroll would be difficult to revise—something he did not
want to do (particularly because he believed his first novel, The Town and
the City [1950], had suffered from his publisher’s revision demands). Soon
he was widely discussing how he was, after all, rewriting On the Road. 3
Alongside this confusing self-publicity, the Beats as a loosely affiliated group
were gaining attention, especially by participating in a 1955 reading at San
Francisco’s 6 Gallery. Such publicity contributed to the novel’s growing fame.
By August 1957 San Francisco Chronicle journalist William Hogan was not-
ing the enormous amount of prepublication attention Road was receiving
(28). Yet also, between 1951 and 1957 (especially at first), the writing Kerouac
was producing for Road was often markedly more experimental than that
found in either the scroll or final version of the novel. John Clellon Holmes
recalls how Kerouac at the time was “writing long, intricate . . . astonishing
sentences obsessed with simultaneously describing the crumb on the plate,
the plate on the table, the table in the house, the house in the world” (78) in
the process of trying to capture a line of thought:
[Cody was] estimating how he himself got there, not only the world but
the bench, not only the bench but the part of the bench he filled out. Not
only that but how he got there to be aware of the saliva and the part of the
bench his ass filled out, and so on in the way the mind has; at all of which
now because it wasn’t his best idea of what to do in a poolhall . . . even in the

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roaring noise and even though among all these Saturday feet he couldn’t
quite see the exact spot he had studied, though he knew there were new
cigarette butts and spit on the spot now. . . . (Kerouac, Visions 39–40)

This huge sentence unrolls for another seven lines. Kerouac wrote so much
material in this sort of experimental mode that he was finally compelled
to separate much of it off, incorporating it into another book, Visions of
Cody—largely completed in 1952 but published only in excerpted form
in 1959 and not in full until 1972. Visions, made up of other writing about
Kerouac and Cassady, was composed in parallel with work upon Road and
even includes a few out-takes from Road—specifically the 1950 depiction
of a fictionalized Cassady turning up in a Denver poolhall, quoted in part
above (Visions 29ff.; [Excerpts from] Visions 57ff.).4
How much does Road’s reader know about this paratext? If, for example,
Visions’s long tape-transcript sections, recorded by Kerouac with Neal Cas-
sady in (drug-fuelled) conversation and transcribed more-or-less faithfully,
are set to one side (along with the ”Imitations of the Tape” section), on the
basis that these sections are the least intimately connected with the ever-
shifting versions of Road, then a much shorter Visions of Cody remains
(245 pages, not 398). This rump now conspicuously ends with a revamped,
compressed, helter-skelter version of many of the travels of Kerouac and
Cassady (Visions 338–98) also making up the core of Road.5 As Kerouac
(narrating as Jack Duluoz) explains in Visions: “The thing to do is . . . The
telling of the voyages again . . . told each in one breath” (337). Furthermore,
if these helter-skelter road pages of Visions are also set aside (along with
the tape transcripts and the imitation of the tape) then the surviving 192
pages are almost the self-same ones found (with a few omissions) in the
much-shortened 120 page version of [Excerpts from] Visions of Cody edited
by Jack Kerouac and James Laughlin during 1959.6
Laughlin is described as “helping” make the 1959 “selection” in Kerouac’s
untitled preface to the 1959 [Excerpts from] Visions (6). What this assistance
amounted to is less clear,7 yet this 1959 version is generally dismissed as
very much a second-best, bowdlerized text, not worth much attention. 8
Kerouac, however, carefully signed every single issue of the 1959 print run
of 750 copies. This surely suggests some degree of investment on the part of
the author, and the text deserves much more notice than it usually receives.
Attending to this 1959 Visions—printed soon after Road appeared and com-
posed mostly during the three or four years bracketing the composition
of Road’s 1951 scroll version—leads to a very different kind of anniversary
celebration. It becomes an anniversary attending to both what was excised
from On the Road and what was written around about it during Kerouac’s

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constant recompositions—in part rescued in 1959—and then rereading the

1957 On the Road in the light of these. Indeed, the 1959 Visions even claims
that it itself offers the “complete Cody” (11). The background to Cody/Dean
Moriarty is extensively explored (almost as extensively as in the full 398 page
version published in 1972). Furthermore, the 1959 Excerpts displays Kerouac
writing at his best. The most interesting segments of the tape transcripts,
in which Duluoz and Cody discuss the loss of spontaneity that inevitably
occurs in the process of transcribing/writing, for example, still feature in
the Excerpts (95–108), alongside much of the “Visions of Neal” notebooks
Kerouac wrote in 1951–52.9
Yet another way of redefining On the Road results from next attending
to the full 398-page 1972 version of Visions—again, like the 1959 version,
largely completed in the three or four years surrounding the composition
of the Road scroll. In the 1972 Visions, the homosocial dimension to Sal
Paradise’s attraction to Dean—or, in this instance, Duluoz’s attraction to
Cody—becomes much more apparent, famously in the “fag Plymouth” scene
(On the Road 209) shared by both books (though not, instructively, by the
1959 Excerpts). In the 1957 On the Road, the Plymouth driver is portrayed,
in highly negative stereotyping, as a timid, skinny homosexual. Cassady
unsuccessfully seeks to manipulate this homosexual to his pecuniary advan-
tage but without offering anything other than an ambiguous commitment
readily reneged upon if the homosexual’s money is not forthcoming. The
1972 Visions takes things much further, depicting Cody as subjecting the
homosexual to vigorous anal intercourse, and by doing this takes us back
to the 1951 typescript:
The fag began by saying he was very glad we had come along because he
liked young men like us, and would we believe it, but he really didn’t like
girls and had recently concluded an affair with a man in Frisco in which
he had take the male role and the man the female role. . . . The fag said
he would like nothing better but to know what Neal thought about all
this. Warning him first that he had once been a hustler in his youth, Neal
proceeded to handle the fag like a woman, tipping him over legs in the
air and all and gave him a monstrous huge banging. I was so non-plussed
all I could do was sit and stare in my corner. And after all that the fag
turned over no money to us, tho he made vague promises for Denver,
and on top of that he became extremely sullen and I think suspicious of
Neal’s final motives. He kept counting his money and checking on his
wallet. Neal threw up his hands and gave up. “You see, man, it’s better
not to bother. Give them what they secretly want and they of course im-
mediately become panic-stricken.” (Scroll 1951 [2007] 307)

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The fag began by saying he was very glad we had come along because
he liked young men like us, and would we believe it, but he really didn’t
like girls and had recently concluded an affair with a man in Frisco in
which he had taken the male role and the man the female role. . . . The
fag said he would like nothing better than to know what Dean thought
about all this. Warning him first that he had once been a hustler in his
youth, Dean asked him how much money he had. I was in the bathroom.
The fag became extremely sullen and I think suspicious of Dean’s final
motives, turned over no money and made vague promises for Denver.
He kept counting his money and checking on his wallet. Dean threw
up his hands and gave up. “You see, man, it’s better not to bother. Offer
them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become
panic-stricken.” (On the Road 209)

That night the gangbelly broke loose between Cody and the skinny skel-
eton, sick: Cody thrashed him on rugs in the dark, monstrous huge fuck,
Olympian perversities, slambanging big sodomies that made me sick,
subsided with him for money; the money never came. He’d treated the
boy like a girl! “You can’t trust these people when you give them (exactly)
what they want.” I sat in the castrated toilet listening and peeking, at one
point Cody has thrown him over legs in the air like a dead hen . . . (Visions
of Cody 358–59)

The shift in what could be acceptably published has plainly played a part
in creating this pronounced difference (the 1965 trial of Naked Lunch, just
to take one dramatic example, had occurred).10 Yet, subsequent readings of
Road—and even of the 1959 Visions—become retrospectively tinted when
the reader becomes aware of such explicitness. For example, take the “Vi-
sion of Cody” on page 109:
Cody . . . loves to mimic women and wishes he was a sweet young cunt
of 16 so he could feel himself squishy and nice and squirm all over when
some man had to look and all he had to do was sit and feel the soft shape
of his or her ass in a silk dress and that squishy all over feeling . . . and
finger himself and wait for hubby who has one sixteen inches long. (Ex-
cerpts 109–10)
It becomes crystal clear just how tightly buttoned-down yet incipiently
homosexual the homosocial attraction between Sal and Dean is in the 1957
Road. Recognizing this queer subtext, made quite clear in the scroll version
(1951) and deliberately foregrounded in Visions, in turn casts in a new light
the almost unrelenting, near-misogynistic sexism saturating the attitude

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to women of Dean and a conscience-stricken Sal in Road. This, in turn,

is made all the clearer by recalling Jack’s assertion in Visions that “As far
as young women are concerned, I can’t look at them unless I tear off their
clothes. . . . This is almost all I can say about almost all girls and any further
refinement is their cunts and will do” (23). A startling sexual politics emerges
from behind the published version.
Such extrapolations from On the Road to the later two Visions are le-
gitimated by the way in which the latter two are so inextricably related to
Road. All three were composed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and all
treat a society still coping with the return of World War II veterans. This
helps account for the books’ unstable sexual politics. Millions of Ameri-
cans had been mobilized. Sixteen million had joined the armed services;
others entered wartime industries.11 On their return from abroad, or after
being laid off from war-time industries, some joined a relatively footloose
community of young adults, “the hoboes of the 1940’s and 1950’s . . . mani-
festations of a movement of wholesale rejection of contemporary values”
(Feied 58), as described in the 1957 version of On the Road (91), but more
often they were drawn to the large metropolitan areas of the East or West
Coast. There, some were eligible for college by way of the GI Bill of Rights
(again as mentioned in Road [109]).12
As both On the Road and Visions of Cody make clear, when these service-
men and women returned from abroad to the United States—ten million
served in the armed forces overseas—they often brought back with them
altered perspectives on what was acceptable (Zinn 398). It would be easy
to overstate this alteration (prewar America had been no reservoir of in-
nocence), but one arena in which perspectives shifted was the terrain of
sexuality. In particular, many of the young men and (to a lesser extent)
young women who joined the armed services during the war experienced
life in largely single-sex, homosocial communities and subcommunities.13
It had been more difficult to establish monogamous heterosexual relation-
ships with regular sexual contact (because of postings and redeployments).
The institution of marriage was positioned differently. Some rushed into
marriage; others delayed. Marriage rates rose, but so did divorce rates and,
more quickly than both, so did birth rates (Wynn 16).
Socio-sexual mores consequently altered. Lesbianism was, contradicto-
rily, both tolerated and persecuted in the armed services; service women
suffered from being caricatured as promiscuous; whilst in civilian life
prosecutions for female vagrancy and prostitution doubled during the war,
and casual, albeit often also intense, liaisons became more common.14 For
males, homosexual coupling became more available, if still risky. Though

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the military’s predominantly homosocial culture was homophobic—ho-

mosexuality was, after all, illegal—nevertheless a more cohesive sense of
community and a higher public profile developed for some gays (Sherry
104). This helped render sublimated homoerotic interactions more accept-
able after the war than before it, as, for example, when buddy relationships
were foregrounded in popular cultural forms (Westerns, war movies, and
some “screwball” comedies). Sal and Dean’s relationship in Road draws
upon such cultural trends and the way these broadened the public’s range
of expectations. Ironically, these altered expectations were also accompa-
nied on the one hand by anxieties about increased female autonomy and
on the other by the development of a medical model of homosexuality as
pathological—laying the grounds for postwar 1950s punitive intolerance
(D’Emilio and Freedman 287–89).
As the war receded, the pressures that generated all these disturbances
slackened: many men and women returned to their hometowns; many
turned to child-raising, creating a postwar “baby boom” (Sherry 294).
Home-buying was rapidly mass-commodified in the suburb developments,
often in large “Levittown” estates (Rosenberg 141–42). But disruptions per-
sisted: a substantial minority did not assume their ascribed gender roles,
home-building stereotypes, or sexual identities. This left them adrift in what
was often a repressive climate, compelled to congregate where “deviant”
behavior survived, especially in larger cities. The field of sexuality in this
postwar period was complex and contradictory, and this is the context in
which to view its representation in the early versions of Visions and Road.
Yet such fluidity was short-lived. As the birthrate rose and as more passed
through college, benefiting from the GI Bill of Rights, what the dominant
culture represented as “traditional” norms broadly reasserted themselves.
This shift towards a greater moral conservatism becomes quite apparent
when comparing Road’s 1951 scroll version and 1957 published version.
Allen was queer in those days, experimenting with himself to the hilt,
and Neal saw that, and a former boyhood hustler himself in the Denver
night . . . the first thing you know he was attacking Allen with a great
amorous soul such as only a conman can have. . . . I heard them across
the darkness and . . . said to myself “Hmm, now something’s started, but
I don’t want anything to do with it.” (Scroll 1951 [2007] 113)15

Their energies met head-on . . . I couldn’t keep up with them . . . Wanting

dearly to learn to write like Carlo, the first thing you know, Dean was at-
tacking him with a great amorous soul such as only a con-man can have.
“Now Carlo, let me speak—here’s what I’m saying . . .” I didn’t see them

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for about two weeks, during which time they cemented their relationship
to fiendish allday-allnight-talk proportions. (On the Road, 1957 8)

Dean’s and Carlo’s homosexual bond, made clear in 1951, is only intimated
subtextually in 1957 as “fiendish allday-allnight-talk.”
For similar reasons, the complex exploration of Dean/Cody found in the
Visions writing bracketing the scroll Road’s composition were only thinly
incorporated into Road’s 1957 version. Dean/Cody, a footloose working-class
young man chaotically indulging in a string of extra- and intra-marital
relationships and prepared to embrace homosexuality whilst ever-keen to
marry, is very much a febrile sign of his particular times. This at least can
explain how Dean/Cody can paradoxically represent himself as “normal”:
I was just normal kid . . . Well, I mean, you know, normal-seeming, I’d
go to work, and go home, go and try to get a girl or somethin, only thing
was, these cars, and naturally all young guys in America they’ll tell you,
they’ll—anybody you want to meet about . . . Saturday night fights or
somethin, or . . . this or that happening, it’s all the same thing, everybody’s
that way . . . you know . . . (Visions of Cody 108)

Cody’s attempt at an explanation—as always in Visions—breaks down. Yet

in this breakdown resides the heart of the explanation. Cody’s “normality” is
not explicable, because such a categorization will not hold in the contradic-
tion-riven period following Word War II. Cody’s deviations are only precari-
ously “normal” for a short period (circa 1945 to 1952), even if this period’s
disruptions were to have long-term cultural consequences (increased promis-
cuity; more visible homosexual communities; more women in the workforce;
a shrinkage in blue-collar work). By 1957, therefore, Cody/Dean has become
more of a symbolic representative of something in the (recent) past.
Recognizing Visions’ more contradictory, milieu-shaped identity, Cody/
Dean helps account for his allure for Duluoz/Sal, and why Duluoz/Sal draws
him into his ambit. He is able to represent a novelty: the “son of a wino . . .
stealing cars, gunning for girls,” Cody/Dean is moving in a fluid postwar
socio-cultural matrix, where he is simultaneously “in there” yet outside,
crossing uneasily between classes and sexual identities (On the Road 38–39,
6). As Carlo Marx in Road comically puts it, “I have finally taught Dean he
can do anything he wants, become Mayor of Denver, marry a millionairess,
or become the greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he keeps rushing out to
see the midget auto races . . . He jumps and yells and is excited . . . Dean is
really hung-up on things like that” (42).
To begin with, when Kerouac rushed into his rapid typing-out of Road
in 1951, he was recording what was very much a contemporary allure—in a

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moment during which other Deans and other Sals negotiated their lifestyles
uncertainly and inchoately. In this sense, Road offered a troubled, unreliable
diagnosis of an important aspect of its times. Yet by the time it was published
in 1957, half a decade later, Road had become something of a historical novel.
This reframing impacted upon how the 1957 novel’s exploration of the topics
of sexuality, class and conformity is couched.
This in turn raises some quite complex compositional issues, revolving
around the novel’s styles. Here (again) there is no simple story of linear
development to be told. It is certainly true that the very rapid composition
of the text in 1951 rendered it experimental. The 1951 scroll possesses a fierce
energy. Though most of the best of it carried across into the 1957 published
version, not all was, and a different kind of On the Road blossoms when
these elisions are noted. It can be argued that it is entirely predictable that
passages such as the following, recording a run-in with the cops precipitated
by a young female, would fall to the cutting-room floor:
Everything was falling apart by degrees . . . that evening I called Edie again
and this time she showed up with a case of beer in back of her car and we
went out to hear jazz . . . She sped through a red light on Hastings Street
and instantly a cruising car overtook us and ordered us to stop. Neal and
I hopped out with our hands up. That’s how wretched we’d become by
now. The cops immediately frisked us. We had nothing on but T shirts.
They patted us and felt everywhere and scowled and were dissatisfied.
“Goddam it” Edie said “I never get in cop trouble when I’m alone. Listen
here you guys do you know who my father is? I won’t have any of this
bull!” “What are you doing with that case of beer in the car?” “It’s none of
yr. good goddam business.” “It so happens you went through a red light
young lady.” “So?” You never saw anyone sassier with the cops. As for Neal
and I we were completely inured to it. We followed the cops to the station
house and gave ourselves over to the desk. Neal even got excited and told
stories to the Sgt. Edie was making important phonecalls and getting all
her relatives lined up behind her. . . . Neal and I were delighted to be in
the police station, it was just like home. . . . The cops were sort of pleased
with us. Another step and we’d be getting the hose in the backroom and
screaming with delight. . . . (Scroll 1951 [2007] 347–48)
But this racy directness then gave way—when it became apparent to Ker-
ouac that the scroll would not readily reach publication—to a long period
of startling literary experimentation. The most radical of these experiments
are (again) largely collated in Visions—in particular in the tape transcripts,
seeking to deliver the true Cody, and the extraordinary “Imitation of the

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Tape” section, in which a series of pastiches/parodies of various writing

styles strive to deliver the “true” or “real” lying beyond the reach of the tran-
scripts. Each imitation falls short and self-reflexively recognizes this failure,
but—and this is crucial—the transcripts themselves fall short as well. They
always recognize that they too become a “mo-dific-ation” (Excerpts 97):
CODY . . . all I did now was re—go back to that memory and bring up a
little rehash of, ah, pertinent things, as far as I can remember, in a little
structure thing of the—what I thought earlier, and that’s what one does
you know when you go back and remember about a thing that you clearly
thought out and went around before, you know what I’m sayin’, the second
or third or fourth time you tell about it or say anything like that why it
comes out different and it becomes more and more modified . . . there’s no
more spontaneous, there’s no . . . first happenings any more. . . . (Excerpts
95–96; see also Visions of Cody 145)

Visions becomes a hall of metafictional mirrors constantly reflecting back

the literary artifice itself rather than reaching “reality.” A kaleidoscopic vor-
tex of words and verbal impressions always—even increasingly—intervenes,
climaxing in the imitations of the tapes and their endless reworkings of dif-
ferent literary styles. One might argue that Visions is deliberately designed
to fail in its futile attempt to deliver anything at all “complete” (Visions 11;
Excerpts 36). In this respect it is significant that the 1959 Visions, apart from
its excision of almost all of the tape “Imitations,” includes nearly every one
of the passages self-reflexively commenting upon Visions’s futile aspirations
to completeness: by becoming more concentrated, the 1959 [Excerpts from]
Visions makes this point even more forcibly.
What I am arguing is well exemplified by the moment in Visions when
what has stood (apparently) as the most unvarnished attempt to deliver a
straightforward biographical account of Cody’s past is self-satirized. Its
clichés become spelt out by way of their lampooning in the distorted mirror
of an imaginary biography of a female in a pin-up photograph, prized for its
capacity to become an iconic stimulus for masturbation. First we encounter
an apparently unvarnished introduction to Cody: “Around the poolhalls of
Denver during World War II a strange looking boy began to be noticeable to
the characters who frequented the places afternoon and night and even to the
casual visitors” (Excerpts 18; Visions 47). This may seem straightforward (hon-
est, direct), but it is not: Duluoz’s attempt simply to describe Cody’s past has
been sucked into a particular generic formula (popular journalism). Within
a few pages this is made blatant, by suggesting that a pin-up’s nipple tells us
more about her than such an autobiography: “the exact nipple will tell us

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more than Ruth’s entire life story, ‘Around the beauty parlors of Brooklyn
during World War II a strange energetic young lady began to be noticeable
to the characters who frequented the place afternoon and night and even
to the casual visitors’” (Excerpts 51; Visions 76). By way of these disturbing
verbal parallels, Cody is by implication reduced to the status of a nipple-
image stimulating Duluoz to masturbate—an image that drives home the
ambivalently valenced sexualities quite apparent in Visions but left relatively
oblique in the 1957 Road: Dean/ Cody is Sal’s/ Jack Duluoz’s Ruth.
Reading Visions alongside Road makes this layering clear. Such a clarifi-
cation is needed, since Road, in marked contrast to its paratexts, is conser-
vatively structured. At its core, the twinning/twining of Sal and Dean draws
substantially upon conventional buddy relationships. They have adventures
together, they talk, they bond, they share girls and fall out over girls, they are
attracted to each other, and they argue with each other. Kerouac’s ironized
generic debts to the picaresque bildungsroman are clear, as is the way he
modulates upon these.
However, this conventional depiction of a developing relationship making
both (or at least one) of the young men more mature is laced in Road with
a contradictory representation of an ever more ominous sense of depleting
decay. Dean is depicted, on the one hand, as ascending to the status of God,
and on the other, as declining into the satanic. The ascending apotheosis is
obvious. Starting out as a “sideburned hero” (On the Road 5), Dean is in turns
venerated by Sal as a mystic (121), then a “saint” (188), then an “Angel” (259),
and finally (when both are high on marijuana) “God” (285). On the other
hand, almost as obviously, Dean antithetically becomes ever more ominous.
Starting out as a “madman,” a “jailkid” and a “conman” (6), he becomes
increasingly “psychopathic”: “the Devil himself had never fallen farther”
(147, 188), and he ends up shrouded and gargantuan, advancing with “mad
bony purpose” whilst behind him “charred ruins smoked” (259). If any sort
of “Angel,” Dean is an “Angel” of “rage and furies” (263), who deserts Sal in
Mexico, like a “rat” (303). Visions compresses such contradictory antitheses
into a series of oxymorons, so laying bare the complex love/hate mare’s nest:
“he’s an angel. . . . / But enough of my greatest enemy—because while I saw
him as an angel, a god, etcetera, I also saw him as a devil, an old witch, even
an old bitch from the start” (Visions 298). In Visions these antithetical vi-
sions are part of a constant series of violently oxymoronic narrative twists
and turns: “Cody isn’t great because he is average. . . . Cody can’t possibly be
average. . . . / He believes in money, goes to work, spends it, and believes in
money still” (330). In Road, however, this depiction is more structured and
progressive, as Dean’s contradictions gradually twine together more closely

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in a double helix, until he “finally” becomes “an Angel [who] . . . had rages
and furies” (263). Visions offers no such finality.
This greater structuredness extends to Road’s overall organization.
The 1957 Road offers an account in five parts of Sal and Dean’s intimate
relationship during four round trips by Sal: three across America, the last
into Mexico. On the first trip, Sal hardly encounters Dean on his series of
adventures whilst traveling from New York to San Francisco and back;
their friendship is only budding. The second and third journeys depict its
increasingly frenetic flowering. On the third trip, the friendship becomes
more strained, and on the final Mexican excursion, signs of disintegration
become clear. For this reason their last trip is divided into two: part 4 de-
scribes Dean deserting Sal in Mexico, part 5 a desolate separation in New
York. This structure illuminates the vortex-movement of Dean’s paradoxical
double-helix (ascent to saintliness/descent to the satanic) as the description
of each trip Sal undertakes becomes progressively more cursory. (Part 1
spans 105 pages; part 2, 70 pages; part 3, 69 pages; part 4, 55 pages; and part
5, barely 6 pages.) Furthermore, Sal’s attempts to find an undefined “IT”
fail, and his trips end in deflated returns to New York, as, depressingly, his
quests exhaust all four compass points. In part 1, the movement is predomi-
nantly westward (the trip east only being summarily mentioned); in part
2 (south-)westward—this iteration itself emphasizing how Sal’s attempts
to escape first take the traditional direction of the United States/American
myth—west. In part 3, the movement is predominantly eastward, in part
4 predominantly southward and, most depressingly, in part 5 (implicitly)
northward—back to New York yet again.
The 1957 Road emerges as carefully—even traditionally—structured. Per-
haps this is what Kerouac had in mind when describing it as a “pot-boiler”
later in life (Montgomery). Compared to the raciness of the 1951 scroll and
the metafictional self-reflexivities of Visions, the 1957 Road’s structure me-
thodically matches the novel’s thematic development of Sal’s and Dean’s
relationship, in what can only be described as a well-made way. Thus, the
trips’ main pivot is clearly Denver, both Dean’s birthplace and a city in
the center of the United States. Denver serves as the novel’s structural and
thematic fulcrum, “like the Promised Land” (On the Road 16).
This careful structure flies somewhat in the face of what might perhaps
be expected from the best known facet of the book’s complex compositional
history: its composition in a “muscular rush” over a three-week period.
Reading the scroll version (which was displayed fully unrolled briefly at the
University of Iowa in March 2005), with its long paragraphs stretching over
many pages and its absence of chapter or section divisions, is very different

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from reading the 1957 Road. The scroll demands a nonstop immersion in
the act of reading matching the immersion in the act of writing by Kerouac,
which he describes as involving “sit[ting] behind a big screen” typing con-
stantly, whilst occasionally “yell[ing] ‘Coffee!’ and [Joan Haverty’s] hand
would come around the corner holding a cup of it.”16 Haverty, Kerouac’s
wife at that time, describes a sweat-soaked Kerouac typing furiously behind
this screen (202).
In arguing in this way, I perhaps risk implying that the 1957 Viking Press
version of On the Road is inferior in some way to its 1951 scroll version and
both versions of Visions of Cody. This risk I think arises because of the high
value still placed upon spontaneity and its (implied) guarantee of greater
authenticity in one Romantic strand of western white aesthetics. The claim
that Kerouac naïvely searched for authenticity needs, I believe, to be treated
sceptically—not least because it runs exactly counter to what Visions asserts
is achievable. In this instance, for example, my contention that the 1957 Road
is carefully structured might be countered by the contention that the book is
autobiographical and that this (the book’s narrative) is what really happened,
portrayed exactly as it happened. Yet Kerouac did not hold to this view, tak-
ing his cue from Proust’s Marcel: “The picture . . . in our own minds which
we believe to be . . . authentic . . . has in reality been refashioned by us many
times over” (1: 675). As Visions repeatedly makes clear, such “authenticity” is
illusory. Instead Visions’s narrative is framed by the inescapable linguistic
and intertextual heteroglossia that contains it.
In this sense, the 1957 version of Road is a logical development of the ex-
perimentation evident in earlier writings representing Neal and Jack (Dean
and Sal/Cody and Jack). This provides a basis for viewing Kerouac’s periodic
returns to the scroll manuscript, to the journals he kept, and to the letters
he received from Cassady. That Kerouac draws verbatim on Cassady’s letters
gives the lie to the idea that he worked solely from the scroll manuscript in
the final retyping[s] of Road and supports the idea that more complex things
were occurring during the novel’s final composition (see Moore).
In part this must be understood as a desire to refresh the narrative follow-
ing the long process of revision that occurred. Reading the 1951 scroll and
key letters by Cassady alongside the 1957 version makes clear just how often
passages are closely similar, often (even) verbatim, despite all the interven-
ing rewriting that had occurred—a similarity made possible by Kerouac’s
returns to the scroll text and Cassady’s letters towards the end of Road’s
long compositional development (Moore 118–26). Yet, evidently, important
changes also occur—in particular in a switch of emphasis in terms of the
role of the narrator. Sal becomes more foregrounded:

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he had to sweat to and curse to make a living and so on. My first impres-
sion of Neal was of a young Gene Autry—-trim, thin-hipped, blue eyes,
with a real Oklahoma accent. In fact he’d just been working on a ranch.
. . . (Scroll 1951 [2007] 110)

he had to sweat and curse to make a living and so on. You saw that in the
way he stood bobbing his head, always looking down, nodding, like a
young boxer to instructions, throwing in a thousand ‘Yeses’ and ‘That’s
rights.’ My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry—trim,
thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent—a side-burned
hero of the snowy West. In fact he’d just been working on a ranch. . . .
(On the Road 6; deviances from scroll in bold)

Sal instructs the reader much more how to “read” Dean in 1957 than in 1951.
Dean in 1957 is presented as a young boxer, slightly excessive in his desire
to please so that he can get on with the fight, and slightly too fired-up. He
is also mythologized by Sal as a “hero of the snowy West,” in line with
what in 1957 emerge as Sal’s romanticizing propensities. The 1957 Dean,
in my argument, is still partly depicted as one particular symptom of the
postwar years and their relationship to the Depression and the World War
that had immediately preceded them, just as Neal in the scroll (and Cody
in Visions) are very directly symptomatic of this transition period. Yet,
also, Dean’s depiction has changed (as the years have passed): where the
1951 Dean had been simply working on a ranch and had also been a car
thief and a reform-school inmate, in the 1957 Road Dean is also insistently
related to U.S. white national mythology, if in a comically “literary” way,
as “a side-burned hero of the snowy West.” Though, to a significant degree,
what the 1957 Road offers is not a revision of the myth of the west but a
satiric rejection of it, there is, nevertheless, a species of engagement with
the myth right from the start, causing later passages to be read with a more
complicit, plangently nostalgic accent than other versions of Kerouac’s and
Cassady’s relationship makes possible:
“Hell’s bells, it’s Wild West Week,” said Slim. Big crowds of . . . fat busi-
nessmen in boots and ten-gallon hats, with their hefty wives in cowgirl
attire bustled and whooped on the wooden sidewalks of old Cheyenne.
. . . Blank guns went off . . . I was amazed, and at the same time I felt it
was ridiculous: in my first shot at the West I was seeing to what absurd
devices it had fallen. . . . (On the Road 33)

In the 1957 Road, Sal partly buys into the “absurd” myth, even as he
recognizes its absurdity. Noteworthily, where, in 1957 Sal observes, “I was

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amazed, and at the same time I felt it was ridiculous,” in 1951, Jack’s denun-
ciation had been more pronounced: “I was amazed, and at the same time
I had never seen anything so really ridiculous” (Scroll 1951 [2007] 135). In
1957, to Sal, Dean is a “western kinsman of the sun” offering “a wild yea-
saying overburst of American joy . . . an ode from the Plains, something
new, long-prophesied” (10), even as the novel quietly satirizes Sal’s roman-
tic attachment; in 1951, by contrast, these passages had not been written;
consequently Neal’s set-up in 1951 is quite different—far less mythologized
than Dean’s in 1957. Taking account of what might be called Road’s para-
texts (both the 1951 scroll and Visions), which offer far less romanticization,
increases the volume of the satire. These paratexts affect, for example, how
the 1957 Road’s descriptions are read. For example, in the light of the Vi-
sions, the words “I was more interested in some old rotted covered wagons
and pool tables sitting in the Nevada desert near a Coca-Cola stand” (1951
[2007]: 282; On the Road 182) become altered. Though in both the 1951 scroll
and the 1957 Road Sal is openly lured back to—“more interested in”—the
anachronistic, “rotted” western “covered wagon” parked beside a “Coca
Cola” logo, Visions again and again makes crystal clear how the postwar
west is always infused by such commodity coding (Baudrillard 57 ff.)—an
insistence further spotlighting how Sal in Road emerges as a deeply unreli-
able narrator, more interested passing Dean off as a western cowboy than in
1951 or in Visions. But, like almost all such narrators, Sal is not consistently
untrustworthy in Road. A dialogue exists between the different voices of Sal.
He can see how the west has “fallen” and has noted the “rotted” condition
of its wagons, even as he celebrates its energy, its phallus-like “unbelievable
huge bulge” (309). At the core of Sal’s response is a deep-seated ambiguity
about the United States, compounded by intimations that he is unreliably
forbearing. Once again this becomes clearer when reference is made to the
1957 novel’s paratexts—for example, to the epigrammatic heading of the
1959 Excerpts announcing it is “DEDICATED TO AMERICA, WHATEVER
THAT IS” (7; my emphasis).
Reading the scroll and the two Visions thus helps highlight Sal’s deep-
rooted unreliability in Road, renders less trustworthy his over-valuation of
“western” spontaneity, and clarifies how his quest for the authenticity he
believes it offers is already commodified. It also helps the reader to recog-
nize how, insofar as the 1957 Road replicates the pervasive, urgent contin-
gency—the lack of sure external referents—found in Visions, this occurs
only to a subdued degree. Despite the published novel’s relative orderliness,
Sal’s unreliability in Road constitutes a refusal of metanarrational mythic
coherence; reading its paratexts makes this refusal inescapably apparent.

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Sal’s untrustworthiness undermines certainty and implicitly critiques post-

war attempts to revivify a sense of national destiny. On the Road’s paratexts
thereby serve as signposts to how, despite its apparently clear structure as
a picaresque bildungsroman, the 1957 novel undergoes a constant loss of
centering about what Sal’s or Dean’s “development” might constitute. The
paratexts also deepen the gathering vortex-descent characterizing Sal’s trav-
eling, so emphasizing how this is indicative of a loss of faith in both the U.S.
national (white) project and its claimed direction. Such an interaction of text
and paratexts helps illuminate just why Sal almost ignominiously retreats
from exposure to the demands of the road in the back of that archetypal
American consumer icon, a Cadillac, hired by his friend, Remi:
“D’you think I can ride to Fortieth Street with you?” [Dean] whispered.
“Want to be with you as much as possible, m’boy, and besides it’s so
durned cold . . .” I whispered to Remi. No, he wouldn’t have it . . .
So Dean couldn’t ride uptown with us and the only thing I could do
was sit in the back of the Cadillac and wave . . . Dean, ragged in a moth-
eaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperature of the
East, walked off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner
of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again. (On
the Road 308–9)

The critical force of this is greatly intensified when set beside passages
from Visions clarifying how postwar America is deeply alienating:
America, the word, the sound is the sound of my unhappiness, the
pronunciation of my beat and stupid grief—my happiness has no such
name as America, it has a more personal smaller more tittering secret
name—America is being wanted by the police, pursued across Kentucky
and Ohio, sleeping with the stockyard rats. . . . ([Excerpts from] Visions
of Cody 64)

One key impact of such passages on reading the 1957 Road is to highlight
how important it is that three of Sal’s four round trips across America in
Road have as their originally intended destination somewhere outside the
United States. The first trip to San Francisco is made to catch an “around-
the-world-liner” across the Pacific ( 11); the third, mainly depicting a re-
turn trip to New York, sees Sal heading for Italy; whilst the last is made to
Mexico. This is all part of the gathering sense of desolate impatience with
the United States’ materialistic directions and its government’s obsession
with “all kinds of war material that looked murderous” (Road 135)—both
on the increase in the postwar period: “Dean slowed down to look at [the

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procession of armaments in Washington]. He kept shaking his head in awe.

‘What are these people up to?’” (135). The irony is that a narrative which sets
out, in 1957 (but not 1951) to celebrate a belief that “somewhere along the line
the pearl would be handed to me ” ( 11), ends up, like the 1951 scroll, repeat-
edly depicting Sal intending to leave the United States, its seamy material-
ism and armament stockpiles. In a double irony, the one trip that sees Sal
crossing the country with no intention of leaving it is one that he intends
to end with a return “back to school” (143) and a college degree, potentially
the entrance ticket to corporate America’s “salariat” (Bernard Bell, qtd. in
Chafe 14). Or, as the Mexican cottonpicker, Terry, pithily puts it, “I thought
you was a nice college boy” (83). His incipient recognition of the growing
processes of corporatization, internationalization, and globalization leaves
Sal simultaneously trapped within and alienated by America, and unstably
intent either on leaving it or joining it as a graduate.
This wavering sense of social disaffiliation in Road, so much stronger in
Visions and even the scroll, is related to the onset of the nuclear era. Old Bull
Lee is the first to voice this: “scientists . . . right now are only interested in
seeing if they can blow up the world” (On the Road 154). Later on in the text,
in Mexico, Sal takes up this point: “[the Mexican] Indians . . . didn’t know a
bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads” (299). Crucially,
Kerouac relates this to America’s global impact: “shawled Indians . . . had
come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their
hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never
dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusions of it” (299).
This emerging American global dominance ironically underlies Dean’s
recognition that “the road must eventually lead to the whole world” (On
the Road 230). Yet Sal, the college graduate manqué, either never leaves the
country or soon hurries back to it and its “senseless, nightmare road” (254).
Sal’s narrative constantly prevaricates, undercutting its own apparent direc-
tions, until the bildungsroman finally dissolves into sentimental nostalgia
that is difficult for the reader to share:
don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be droop-
ing and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before
the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers,
cups the 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, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty, the
father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. (309–10)
It is significant that this sloppy paragraph is an addition to the scroll version
(the final passage of the typescript was eaten by Lucien Carr’s dog) and prob-

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ably draws upon a conversation Kerouac had with Cassady’s children after
the scroll was completed, in February 1954 (Kerouac, Some of the Dharma
17–18); the 1957 Road’s sentimentalism is again undercut by reference to its
more direct and caustic paratexts.
When taken together, these versions of Road and Visions constitute a spe-
cies of late modernist fiction that, having lost faith in progress, anticipates the
impatience of postmodernism with grand narratives whilst retaining modern-
ist ironic literary tropes. Each text—the 1951 Road, the 1957 Road, the 1959
Visions and the 1972 Visions—mutually reinforce and reinflect each other’s
themes and underline the loss of faith in narrative that the 1957 On the Road
ironizes relatively obliquely. What I am claiming is that different readerships,
with different levels of awareness concerning the history of Kerouac’s seminal
text and the legends that frame it, will necessarily carry out the consequent
negotiations that are called for in different ways.
So perhaps the calculation of the anniversary of On the Road should be
based not on the work’s first publication in 1957, nor on the scroll’s creation
in 1951—despite the fact that the final version published in 1957 represents a
substantial return to the 1951 scroll. It would be better, perhaps, to use 1959 to
calculate the anniversary, when the edited excerpts from Visions of Cody were
published, and every copy in the print-run was signed, or even 1972, when,
belatedly and posthumously, the full version of Visions of Cody was published
to stand alongside On the Road and serve as a paratextual commentary upon
Road’s aspirations, highlighting the inevitability of Sal’s failures and failings. Or
maybe a multi-anniversary needs to be somehow celebrated—so recognizing
that On the Road is best thought of as a textual corpus, since in each of the years
mentioned above—1951, 1957, 1959, 1972 (and, even, in the interstices between
them)—a different kind of illumination of On the Road was born, shedding a
different light on postwar America’s socio-cultural processes.

CdiZh
Unless otherwise noted, references to On the Road refer to the 1957 Viking
edition. Complete bibliographical information for this and other versions of this
work and for various versions of other works can be found in the bibliography.
Many thanks to Dave Moore for all the help he provided on this chapter.
1. See the article by Matt Theado, “Revisions of Kerouac: The Long, Strange
Trip of the On the Road Typescripts,” printed in this volume. See also Hunt.
Except where noted, scroll transcriptions are by Moore. The Observer editorial
appeared on Aug. 5, 2007, p. 24. My essay was written prior to the publication of
the scroll version of On the Road by Penguin/Viking, and only limited changes
were possible after it appeared. The now-published Penguin/Viking scroll ver-
sion unfortunately contains errors.

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2. Aronowitz’s Post interview appeared on March 10, 1959; portions were

reprinted in Kerouac’s Safe in Heaven Dead. Alfred Aronowitz, “Would You
Have Run Away to Become a Beatnik If You Knew That the Man Who Wrote
‘On the Road’ Lived with His Mother?” US—The Paperback Magazine, May
1970, pp. 100–121. See also Theado.
3. Perhaps the best account is Nicosia’s. A more recent account is Maher’s.
4. Dave Moore wrote to me in an e-mail June 13, 2006: “the Poolhall section,
written c. October 1950, was initially intended by JK to be part of OTR.”
5. This helter-skelter version of the Road adventures was probably written
as a pared-down version of Road, intended for publication as a mass-market
paperback by Ace, which had just accepted William Burroughs’s Junkie (1953).
Ace in the end rejected it.
6. However, where each page of the 1972 Visions has, on average, approxi-
mately 560 words per page, the 1959 version has only about 480—14.3 percent
fewer words per page.
7. No biography gives details, but the 1959 Visions’s introductory note
makes the debt clear: “thanks to J. Laughlin for helping make this selection of
120 pages” (5).
8. See, for example, French 20.
9. The “Visions of Neal” notebooks are located in the New York Public
Library.
10. Charles Rembar saw this as marking obscenity’s “end” in the United
States. See Rembar.
11. See Sherry 57. “The . . . boom was unevenly distributed. It favored regions
where capital-intensive industries thrived.” Denver also thrived, producing
submarine chasers (72).
12. Chafe assesses the GI Bill of Rights’ significance (112).
13. The term “homosocial” is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s.
14. See Evans. “The intensity of wartime emotion contributed to short-term
affairs” (228); “lesbian bars began to appear in cities all over the country” (229).
See also Hartmann 31ff. Hartmann focuses on persecution of lesbians; Rowbo-
tham (257) notes how “lesbian relationships” were “tolerated” in the forces.
15. Quoted in Charters xxv.
16. This account first appeared in an interview with Jerome Beatty, “Trade
Winds,” Saturday Review, Sept. 28, 1957, and is reprinted in Paul Maher 51.

Ldg`h8^iZY
Aronowitz, Alfred. “Would You Have Run Away to Become a Beatnik If You
Knew That the Man Who Wrote ‘On the Road’ Lived with His Mother?”
US—The Paperback Magazine May 1970: 100–121.
Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings. Trans. Mark Poster. Cambridge: Polity, 1988.
Brinkley, Douglas, ed. Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947–
1954. New York: Viking, 2004.

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Burroughs, William. Junkie. New York: Ace Books, 1953.

Chafe, William. The Unfinished Journey: America since World War II. New
York: Oxford UP, 1986.
Charters, Ann. Introduction to On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1995. vii–xxx.
———, ed. Selected Letters of Jack Kerouac: 1940–1951. London: Viking Penguin,
1995.
D’Emilio, John, and Estelle R. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexual-
ity in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.
Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty: A History of the Women of the United States.
New York: Free Press, 1989.
Feied, Frederick. No Pie in the Sky: The Hobo as American Cultural Hero in
the Works of Jack London, John Dos Passos, and Jack Kerouac. New York:
Citadel, 1964.
French, Warren. Jack Kerouac. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.
Hartmann, Susan M. The Home Front. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
Haverty, Joan. Nobody’s Wife: The Smart Aleck and the King of the Beats. New
York: Creative Arts Books, 2000.
Hogan, William. “A Bookman’s Notebook: San Francisco Scene.” San Francisco
Chronicle August 13, 1957: 28.
Holmes, John Clellon. Nothing More to Declare. London: Andre Deutsch,
1968.
Hunt, Tim. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: The Development of a Fiction. 1981. Rpt.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1996.
Kerouac, Jack. [Excerpts from] Visions of Cody. New York: New Directions,
1959.
———. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1957.
———. Safe in Heaven Dead: Interviews with Jack Kerouac. New York: Hanu-
man Books, 1990.
———. On the Road: The Original Scroll. 1951. Ed. Howard Cunnell. New York:
Viking, 2007.
———. Some of the Dharma. New York: Viking, 1997.
———. The Town and the City. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950.
———. Visions of Cody. New York: McGraw Hill, 1972.
Maher, Paul, Jr. Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac.
New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005.
———. Kerouac: The Definitive Biography. Lanham: Taylor Trade Publishing,
2004.
Montgomery, John. “Jack Kerouac and the San Francisco Renaissance.” Unpub-
lished typescript, in the author’s private library. University of Birmingham,
1974.
Moore, Dave, ed. Neal Cassady: Collected Letters, 1944–1957. London: Penguin,
2004.

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Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York:
Grove Press, 1983.
Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. 1913–1927. 3 vols. Trans. C. K.
Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
Rembar, Charles. The End of Obscenity. London: Andre Deutsch, 1969.
Rosenberg, Rosalind. Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1992.
Rowbotham, Judith. A Century of Women. London: Viking, 1997.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.
Sherry, Michael S. In the Shadow of War: The United States since the 1930s. New
Haven: Yale UP, 1995.
Wynn, Neil. The Afro-American and the Second World War. London: Paul
Elek, 1976.
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Longman,
1980.

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L=:CB:M>8DADD@HA>@:B:M>8D/
I=:=NE:GG:6A>O6I>DCD;G68:6C9
I=:EJGHJ>ID;I=:6JI=:CI>8
Rachel Ligairi

Jack Kerouac’s representations of race in On the Road have been read as

both revolutionary for their day and naïvely romantic, if not downright
neocolonial. Though Sal Paradise affords African Americans, Mexican
Americans, and other racial minorities admiration uncharacteristic of the
historical moment, his stereotypical idealization of people of color elides
the hardship associated with minority life in pre–Civil Rights America and
perhaps even reenacts colonial patterns of paternalism. Such interpretations
have been argued convincingly by scholars like Robert Holton, David Ster-
ritt, and María Josefina Saldaña and require little expansion. However, in
the half century since the publication of On the Road, the novel’s semiotics
of race remains largely uncharted. Such an exploration of race not only
provides understanding into the particularities of Sal’s, and by extension
Kerouac’s, racial attitudes but—more crucially—situates those attitudes
in a cultural moment dominated by the mass-media consumption that
mediated cold war identities.1 This paradigm then allows for an analysis
that neither excuses nor condemns depictions of race in On the Road but
instead theorizes their function in relation to the questions of authenticity
and representation raised by the novel and its milieu.
The tension between the “authentic” and the “represented” dominating
Kerouac’s narrative can be fruitfully explored by putting Jean Baudrillard’s
corresponding conceptions of “the real” and “simulation” into conversation
with On the Road. In his 1985 essay “Simulacra and Simulations,” Baudril-
lard argues that the postmodern is an era of the hyperreal, the more real

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than real. As part of a media-saturated environment, an exchange system

of signs has multiplied to the extent that is has become disconnected from
the objective world. Baudrillard offers four phases that lead up to this point:
first, representation “is the reflection of a basic reality”; second, “it masks
or perverts a basic reality”; third, “it masks the absence of a basic reality”;
and fourth, “it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure
simulacrum” (170). Baudrillard uses Disneyland and Watergate as examples
of third-order simulations that mask the hyperreality of America itself. On
an ideological (second-order) level, Disneyland encompasses, or exagger-
ates, many American values that Sal would be quick to identify, including
conformity, competitiveness, and materialism, while Watergate stands for
the corruption of power-hungry politicians. Baudrillard, however, argues
that Disneyland and Watergate are only presented as exceptional, that is
imaginary or particularly scandalous, in order to mask the fact that Ameri-
can culture as a whole is childish and corrupt, devoid of “reality.”
Initially, it may seem anachronistic to engage Baudrillard’s theories,
deeply rooted in a specific technological and cultural moment as they are,
with a novel written nearly thirty years before their articulation. However,
closer inspection reveals that while simulation had perhaps infiltrated
America on a somewhat smaller scale in the 1950s than in years to come,
the mid-twentieth century truly was the beginning—and a dramatic one
at that—of a hyperreal society. Specifically, the explosion of the atomic
bomb, which is often used to bookend the postmodern era, was an image
that became an object of mass consumption. Dennis McNally notes that
“as Jack [Kerouac] left for Mexico City, the Atomic Energy Commission
demonstrated a nuclear explosion in Yucca Flat, Nevada, thrilling some
35 million Americans who watched it on television at home” (156). The de-
struction the bomb could engender was incredible, yet the potential pain
and loss of its victims were overshadowed for the American public by the
widespread, recurring image of the bomb’s mushroom cloud. With the end
of World War II, the mushroom cloud came to signify on an ideological
level the raison d’etre for the cold war, the threat of mutual destruction.
However, the image of the atomic bomb also became part of a hyperreal
network of largely self-referential images in which the cold war was played
out in the absence of physical violence. In short, if the image consumption
of the 1950s differed in degree from the 1980s in which Baudrillard wrote,
it did not differ in nature.2
Sal recognizes the simulated nature of society, as he is confronted every-
where with faulty representations that betray the country’s capital-domi-
nated conformity. He is disgusted by the constructedness (or, as Holden

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Caulfield would say, “phoniness”) of white middle-class America. Sal’s

resulting quest for IT, his fetishization of the authentic, in turn motivates
his cross-country movement, his friendship with the socially marginal
Dean, and—most notably—his appropriation of nonwhite racial identities
and travels among Mexico’s indigenous peoples. Sal Paradise is looking
for a Baudrillardian real, and he is a savvy cultural critic when it comes to
identifying that which is not “real” in his own cultural context.
However, Sal’s discerning eye falls short when it comes to race. The ideo-
logical ways in which race is represented in jazz and cinema are overlooked
in favor of a conception of race that takes appearances at face value. Though
Sal can distinguish between simulations and originals (even if they are fleet-
ing) in his own cultural context, he becomes increasingly unable to make
that distinction as he encounters racialized Others; upon entering Mexico,
he thinks he has found supreme authenticity, when instead, the Mexico he
accesses functions solely as the hyperreal. The hyperrealization of race in
On the Road means that, semiologically, race has been transformed into
a performative sign, measured on the basis of how well it can get Sal the
authenticity, the reality, he craves.

9ZbVgXVi^dchd[i]ZH^bjaViZY
The extent to which Sal misrecognizes the hyperreality of race for the au-
thentic is all the more striking when analyzed alongside his ability to identify
and dismantle the simulations and constructs that dominate his experience
of middle-class white America. Both the precise nature of this American
moment and Sal’s ability to see through dominant legitimating discourses
of his day are made clear when read in conjunction with Arthur Schlesinger
Jr.’s best-selling centrist intellectual manifesto, The Vital Center (1949). In
this book, cold war anxiety is concisely captured by Schlesinger’s warning
that “one false step may plunge the world into atomic war or deliver it into
totalitarian darkness” (156) and that Americans should therefore retreat
from the twin threats of communism and fascism to the safe (and seemingly
narrow) political center. Those who do otherwise, who, like the Beats, choose
nonconformity, are labeled “intellectual escapists” (7). Schlesinger, himself
attempting to “escape” his leftist intellectual past through this book, thus
articulates a vision of America wherein conformity is packaged as centrism
and unity is privileged over expression.
It is in such a society and against such arguments that Kerouac uses
On the Road to critique concepts as fundamental to liberal democracy as
modern notions of progress, the capitalistic reification of time, traditional
family structures, and the reigning intellectual climate. Rather than enhanc-

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ing life, the novel sees scientific progress as being used to annihilate it, as
demonstrated by the creation of the atomic bomb. Bull Lee shares a common
Beat sentiment by referring to scientists as “the bastards right now [who] are
only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world” (153). In a world that
could end at any moment, time is all the more precious, and Sal laments the
fact that it has become a quantity to be bought and sold. His response to his
temporary job at a fruit market is “In God’s name and under the stars, what
for?” (179). Why sell time for money? Time is also squandered by members
of the middle class as they give empty rehearsals of their growing nuclear
families and material consumption. Sal relates attending a Christmas family
get-together, in which relatives engage in a “weary recapitulation of who
had a baby, who got a new house, and so on” while talking about mundane
subjects like the weather (109). Not even intellectual America is free from
Kerouac’s critique. Chad King, the anthropologist, is portrayed as studying
life at the loss of living it, and Roland Major writes a story in which “the
arty types were all over America, sucking up its blood” (40). Together, these
critiques share a concern about a lack of authentic American experience; as
Simon Rycroft puts it, they constitute an “intellectual revolt” (426) against
conventionality.
Beyond being unconventional, Sal clearly grasps the workings of simula-
tion in his own cultural context. This understanding is perhaps most ap-
parent when Sal is disappointed by the images that have replaced the Old
West. Upon his arrival in Cheyenne, a Wild West Week is in progress. Of
the display he declares, “I was amazed, and at the same time I felt it was
ridiculous: in my first shot at the West I was seeing to what absurd devices
it had fallen to keep its proud tradition” (30). The word devices in Sal’s reac-
tion is important, as it indicates that here he recognizes that simulation may
take on a performative function, a function that he later ascribes to race in a
significantly less reflective manner. In this moment, however, Sal undoubt-
edly sees the West—which he has long fantasized about experiencing—as a
construction. Paradoxically, Sal’s realization shows that the West has not,
to use Baudrillard’s term, been reduced to “pure simulacrum” (173). It does
not exist only in the realm of signifiers, for Sal also has access to pioneer
history (10) to tell him that contemporary representations of the West are
just that: copies of an original, though an original that has passed. Thus,
Sal demonstrates a complex understanding of the relationship between the
real and the represented.
At the same time, Sal seems less critically attuned to simulations as they
were most commonly packaged in the 1950s—in film. Taking place just a
decade after the end of Hollywood’s golden age, Kerouac’s repeated refer-

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ences to directors, actors, and movies in On the Road—including W. C.

Fields, Gary Cooper, Gene Autry, The Mark of Zorro (1940), Sullivan’s Travels
(1941), Of Mice and Men (1939), and several Westerns—seem to suggest that
simulation obscures Sal’s view to some extent. However, the fact that Sal
relates so many moments of his life to cinematic renderings suggests that, as
with the Wild West Week, he can tell the difference between originals and
representations, which resemble originals only to the extent that they differ
from them. Rather than replacing or confusing reality, Sal’s film references
serve as a lingua franca of sorts, a shorthand way of relating experience
to other American youth who are also part of a media-saturated culture.
Every time Sal utters a movie title he is in a way demarcating the division
between what is said and what has only appeared on screen, between reality
and first-order simulations.
Not only does Kerouac, through Sal, distinguish the dividing line be-
tween the simulated and the real in middle-class white American culture, he
also suggests that the film industry is just another construct that masks the
problematic workings of capitalism. The fact that movies largely defined the
mid–twentieth-century American mediascape points to an ambivalent Beat
relationship with Hollywood. In the introduction to his Mad to Be Saved:
The Beats, the ’50s, and Film, David Sterritt argues that while Kerouac and
other Beat writers enjoyed movies and drew upon visual modes of expres-
sion in their writing, they also saw motion pictures, which “generally tried
to function as a guardian of traditional values and the sociopolitical status
quo,” as integral to the mainstream culture they were resisting (6). Evidence
that Kerouac recognizes this fact is found in his portrayal of Sal’s only
literary failure in On the Road. In writing a film script for which his guid-
ing objective is not artistic but monetary, Sal attempts a story that “would
satisfy a Hollywood director” (64). Kerouac therefore equates Hollywood
with the conformity-producing values of capitalism. Though Kerouac’s
analysis perhaps lacks sophistication, he seems to grasp what Baudrillard
argues forcefully in his Watergate example: Watergate pretends to be scandal
in order to conceal the “fundamental immorality” (173) of capital, which
holds true political power and relies on scandal to produce the appearance
that morality is the norm. Indeed, Kerouac (and therefore Sal) often sees
through many U.S. constructs in this way.
Neither political scandal nor newly opened Disneyland distracts Sal from
an analysis of U.S. culture that Baudrillard argues such third-order simula-
tions are meant to mask. Sal already sees white American power structures
as corrupt and American citizens as childish in the sense that they lack the
foresight and vision to fully realize their potential as individuals. Further-

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more, while Sal may feel threatened at times by the police, the presence of
the penitentiary system, including his own brief stint as a security guard,
does not lure him into the illusion that society outside of prison walls is free.
Instead, Sal sees as penal the social conformity and cold war anxiety of the
late 1940s and early-to-mid-1950s. Thus, On the Road’s pilgrimage and quest
for IT can be reread as the search for a measure of authenticity in a world
otherwise constructed by the exchange of money and images.

HZVgX]^c\[dgi]Z6ji]Zci^X
At the beginning of his search for this authenticity, Sal’s first reaction is to get
moving in order to avoid the stasis of the era’s social conformity. Foremost
in Sal’s desire to move across the physical space of the United States is a
yearning to undergo firsthand a wide range of “authentic” experiences. As he
leaves his university life and book-writing behind in New York, he abandons
the vicarious in favor of the literal; no longer is he “vaguely planning and
never taking off” (1). On a practical level, as Sal crisscrosses the continent,
he is also largely free of family commitments and paid labor. In fact, when
his temporary stay in any city results in either of these two restrictions, he
feels the pull of the road and returns to his travels.
However, movement does not ultimately offer Sal the degree of authentic-
ity he seeks. One reason for this, as Linda McDowell convincingly argues, is
that the Beat movement “simultaneously reflects and challenges hegemonic
cultural values” in large part because in principle, leaving home as a form
of rebellion requires a home from which to leave (413). By jumping from
journey to journey, On the Road seduces the casual reader into the percep-
tion that movement was a constant for Kerouac and gang. Yet, no matter
how many hitchhikers Dean picks up or how much food Sal steals, life on
the road is not indefinitely sustainable, and McDowell documents the many
homes that supported members of the Beat community, including Kerouac,
who consistently returned to the home of his mother (reconfigured as Sal’s
aunt) when road-weary. Perhaps Kerouac makes the rhetorical choice to
emphasize movement because doing so heightens the countercultural image
of him and his characters. Indeed, in defining what it means to be “hip,”
Norman Mailer in “The White Negro” states that “movement is always to
be preferred to inaction. In motion a man has a chance, his body is warm,
his instincts are quick” (171). Sal and Dean apparently spend most of their
time zipping across the fifty states, and in so doing avoid things like home
ownership, with its implicit rootedness and associated conservative val-
ues. As William Levitt, father of the suburbs, pronounced, “no man who
owns his own house and lot can be a communist. . . . He has too much to

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do” (Lacayo 150). Movement thus facilitates a categorical rejection of the

American Dream.
Indeed, when Sal does go home, Kerouac tends to obscure reasons for
doing so with statements like “It was time for us to move on” (244), while he
avoids declaring the obvious: home does not feel authentic, but neither does
any other location to which America’s roads lead. Sal’s need for movement
can be read as symptomatic of someone used to consuming the flickering
and ever-changing images projected by mass media. While varied coun-
tryside and cities flash by—the faster the better—Sal is at his most excited
or content. But when he slows down enough to actually see America in
detail, he finds that what had previously excited or contented him was yet
another simulation of sorts, that movement merely blurs the constructed-
ness of the entire country. Perhaps it is for this reason that after a while Sal
starts feeling less like a world-wise “Prophet” (35) and more like a “traveling
salesman” (247). He is in effect wearing thin the country’s land; it runs out
at each coast, forcing him either to become stationary or retrace his steps
in a pattern that becomes increasingly claustrophobic and emblematic of
the worst mainstream culture has to offer—a job that requires one to leave
home and family in pursuit of money rather than enlightenment, or the
inverse of the Beat persona.
If the Beat persona could be captured by one character, that character
would be Dean Moriarty, who serves as a “prophet,” or countercultural
model for Sal. Though Dean too must journey in search of the elusive IT, he
has an advantage over Sal in reaching this metaphysical goal: he is located
on the social margins, which Kerouac figures as a position of power for
someone attempting to escape artificiality. The socially marginal live outside
of white middle-class America and all of the expectations and behavioral
codes that accompany it. Therefore, they aren’t blinded by scripted roles
that produce wealthy, predictable citizens while discouraging individuality
and authenticity.
Dean gains this marginal position in part by virtue of his parentage and
time in prison but also, and more significantly, by taking on stereotypical
cultural traits attributed to African Americans at the time. Indeed, Dean
seems to be “the white Negro” that Mailer addresses in his 1957 essay of
the same title. Dean definitely exhibits what Mailer calls the “existentialist
synapses of the Negro,” for which “one must know one’s desires, one’s rages,
one’s anguish, [and] be aware of the character of one’s frustration and know
what would satisfy it” (171–72). Whether a new wife or a change in direction,
Dean definitely knows what will satisfy his frustrations and desires and acts
on those impulses without hesitation. In fact, Dean follows his impulses so

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slavishly that he becomes increasingly manic as the novel progresses. Such

mental imbalance too fits with Mailer’s definition of the hipster, who is a
“philosophical psychopath” (173). Though Mailer states that the latter is
most commonly associated with “the Negro,” he implies that the former is
a condition of whiteness.
Such pairings point to the fact that Dean does not occupy the same space
as the African American. His whiteness is reinforced by Kerouac’s portrayal
of Dean as a true cowboy, though he lacks the “ten-gallon hat and Texas
boots” (17) of the (white) cowboy of the American West. Instead, Dean is a
cowboy in the sense that he is an outsider who refuses to conform to social
expectations. However, his whiteness also simultaneously allows him to
exist inside dominant social structures, thereby enabling him to go beyond
mere rejection of conventions. For example, though wildly promiscuous
and mobile, he is in the strange position of, if not maintaining, then at least
staying connected to, three separate family units by the end of the novel,
a subversion of traditional family structure rather than a dismissal of it.
Furthermore, Dean subverts industrial time by following a schedule with
minute exactness, but a schedule of his own making. In Denver he tells Sal
“I haven’t had time to work in weeks” (44). Though such subversions may
be powerful in their ability to modify existing constructions, they do not
take Sal far enough in his search for the authentic. Therefore, he also turns
to literal—not just figurative—racial minorities.

GVX^Va>YZci^ÒXVi^dcVcY6eegdeg^Vi^dc
Sal’s attempts to adopt the roles of racialized Others offer him another
path toward social marginality while pointing toward his ultimate deci-
sion to head to Mexico. The most obvious examples are when he is living
with Terry and gets mistaken for a Mexican (commenting “and in a way
I am”) (98), and later in the novel when Sal walks through the “colored
section” of Denver, wishing he were “a Denver Mexican, or even a poor
overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a ‘white man’ disil-
lusioned.” He also laments that he is not one of the “happy, true-hearted,
ecstatic Negroes of America” (179–80). Interpretations of these sentiments
have varied to astounding degrees. Critics read Sal’s desires as being moti-
vated by everything from neocolonial disillusionment with white freedom
“burdened by responsibility of governing” (Saldaña 96) to self-disgust and
an “exhaustion of whiteness” (Adams 62). Eldridge Cleaver even saw in
these scenes an identification allowing for political unification and social
progress (Cleaver in Belgrad 9). The diversity of these reactions indicates
the complicated politics surrounding racial identification. The first reading

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is the least convincing in my mind, since the novel lacks evidence that Sal
is interested in governing anyone, including himself; however, the last two
necessitate further discussion.
The idea that identification with racialized Others offers a way out of
white exhaustion bears up well when the jazz scenes in On the Road are
considered. Sal and Dean’s fascination with jazz is symptomatic of white ap-
propriation of African American music in general (both during this period
and since). Jazz is portrayed as a wellspring of energy and innovation that
can counter white exhaustion in addition to providing a road toward IT.
One horn player is described as blowing “a big foghorn blues out of every
muscle in his soul” (177), and it is this kind of playing that sends Dean into
a “trance” (198) and causes him to venerate the musician Slim, a “God” who
“knows time” (177). Hearken back to the likes of Josephine Baker and her
“jungle dance,” complete with banana skirt, and it becomes clear that jazz
in the white American mind has also long been linked with what Mari-
anna Torgovnick has called the primitive (111). Indeed, Kerouac draws on
the primitive directly in portraying another musician who “hopped and
monkeydanced” (202). Thus, before Sal and Dean ever cross the border into
Mexico—which to them is Other in a distinctly primitive way as well—they
are already searching for and encountering a similar source of “authentic-
ity” in the United States.
That these musicians of color seem to have access to the authentic is
found in the fact that their San Francisco locale was at “the end of the
continent” and “they didn’t give a damn” (178). They don’t mind running
out of land, as it were, because they don’t have to resort to reality-blurring
movement to temporarily conceal the falseness of America. They seem to
embody the principle of originality that Sal and Dean envy. Yet, the jazz
musician is not of the same world as Kerouac’s characters—Slim is neither
anxious to get to New York nor game for the wife-swapping Beat lifestyle.
As he looks at Dean “out of the corner of his eye” Slim forcefully asserts, “I
tole you I was married to her, didn’t I?” after Dean shows a little too much
interest in Slim’s “darling” (200). Though Dean and Sal can temporarily
take part in the experience of jazz, they must go to Mexico in order to be
fully immersed in the seeming authenticity a greater degree of Otherness
can provide. This is true in part because in Mexico, they are better able to
project their own sensibilities onto the Other without those Others talking
back and asserting their own worldviews, at least not in a language Dean
and Sal can understand.
The final reading, that Sal is progressive rather than racist or insensitive
in his desire to assume another ethnicity, seems plausible when Kerouac’s

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visual depiction of the baseball game in Denver’s “colored section” is taken

into account. The game, which would normally be described with an em-
phasis on movement, is described in a very static way: it is “at night, under
lights” during which the “strange young heroes of all kinds, white, colored,
Mexican, pure Indian, were on the field, performing with heart-breaking
seriousness. Just sandlot kids in uniform” (180). More attention is given to
the physical appearance of these players (though characteristically, Kerouac
is still slim on adjectives) than to what they are actually doing. Together
they form a veritable multicultural promotional poster, upon which every
shade of skin in joined in the most American of sports. Another scene
lends itself to a similar analysis. During Sal’s cotton-picking days, he tells
of an “old Negro couple” who “picked cotton with the same God-blessed
patience their grandfathers had practiced in ante-bellum Alabama; they
moved right along their rows, bent and blue, and their bags increased”
(96). Down to the painterly hue Kerouac gives this couple, it would be hard
to find a figurative snapshot of slavery more stock than this. Both images
constitute what Sterritt calls the “verbal tapestry” (9) of On the Road and
demonstrate the extent to which Kerouac, through Sal, participates in the
simulation of race.
These two visually oriented depictions could offer politically progressive
messages: first, that the United States is a place where immigrants from
around the world can enjoy the good life and each other’s company; and
second, nearly a hundred years after emancipation, African Americans un-
fortunately have yet to break free of slavery-era roles. However, Sal’s reliance
on these visual techniques are instead motivated by an attempt to reach IT
himself. He feels despair for himself, not happiness for the neighborhood
baseball players. Similarly, his tryst with backbreaking labor doesn’t elicit
sympathy for those who don’t have the luxury to quit it, as he does. In a text
that largely defends Sal’s encounters with Others, Omar Swartz concedes
that Sal and Dean are engaged in racial poaching to some degree, “bor-
rowing the language, music, drugs, and despair of a repressed people in
order to redescribe their own positions” (88). However, the poacher must
first trespass on the Other’s territory, so to speak, in order to recognize
those cultural traits attractive enough to steal. In other words, poaching,
while undoubtedly a harmful act, implies that the poacher gains a degree
of cultural familiarity (if not understanding) with those from whom he
poaches. Though Sal shares physical space with Mexicans, Indians, and
African Americans, he only skirts around the edges of their cultural worlds.
Therefore what exactly Sal is poaching is more open to debate than Swartz
implies. Arguably, Sal primarily poaches the stereotypical images he projects

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onto these ethnic Others in the first place, images that we might expect from
films like Angels in the Outfield (1951)3 or the hugely popular Gone with the
Wind (1939). Significantly, Sal, who is so quick to correlate cinematic mo-
ments with aspects of his own culture is surprisingly mute on that subject
in these instances of On the Road. With so little cultural knowledge to go
on, Sal mistakes pop-cultural racial images with reality even though he has
rejected similar simulations within his own cultural context.
Thus Sal remains far removed from anything that could be called a real-
ity of minority lives in America. Race and economic class have long been
linked in this country, and most of the Others Sal encounters are distinct
from him not only by virtue of their ethnicity but also their position on a
lower economic plane. As R. J. Ellis notes, for as much as Sal may like to
spend time on the social fringes, he always has recourse to a position of
privilege, as demonstrated by the easy hundred dollars a rich girl offers him
to go to San Francisco (46). Though on the previous page it had seemed that
nothing short of a darker shade of skin would content Sal, upon receiving
the money he declares, “So all my problems were solved” (181). In addition,
when things get complicated with Terry, Sal writes his aunt for some more
cash (98), which subsequently allows him to abandon what had become a
troublesome life. Sal consistently escapes the knowledge (and hardship) that
would come with recognizing that his identification with racialized Others
is only image-deep and that to be a person of color in America may often
mean living in poverty.
Considering the overwhelming role images play in Sal’s dealings with
other races, it is not surprising that he meets Terry en route to Los Ange-
les—a city that is the primary home to the cultural machines that create
virtual America. To take that characterization a step further, Los Angeles
in the mid-twentieth century can be thought of as a simulation of sorts
itself. As discussed earlier, Baudrillard writes of Disneyland as “presented
as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact
all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of
the order of the hyperreal and of simulation” (172). Fittingly, Sal notes that
Main Street LA is “no different from where you get off a bus in Kansas City
or Chicago or Boston” (83). This observation suggests that Sal recognizes
that these streets, and perhaps the cities that house them, are all hyperreal
to some extent—like Disneyland’s Mainstreet USA, copies of an original
that never existed. Accordingly, Kerouac writes of Sal’s surreal experience
of encountering a city full of beautiful people performing ordinary jobs
along with a description of LA as a “desert encampment” (87), indicating
that Sal sees the city in terms of a mirage—a shimmering yet insubstantial

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vision. Finally, Sal notes that the gray dawn of a Hollywood morning is
akin to “the dawn when Joel McCrea met Veronica Lake in a diner in the
picture Sullivan Travels” (83), yet again drawing comparisons, and thereby
distinctions, between reality and simulations.
Yet, significantly, while Sal has been able to identify the artificiality of
several U.S. constructs, including now the simulated nature of LA, he falls
into a scripted role with Terry once inside that city. He can’t recognize the
way in which LA constructs their relationship based on race: “I began get-
ting the foolish paranoiac visions that Teresa, or Terry—her name—was a
common little hustler who worked the buses for a guy’s bucks by making
appointments like ours in LA” (83). Terry as a poor, brown woman makes
more sense in this context as a prostitute than as a “girlsoul” (83). Even
more interesting is Sal’s verbal slip. Though he has conceived of Terry as
another human being up until now, she becomes visibly Mexican to him
in this moment—a Teresa rather than an anglicized Terry. Sal clearly has
a preconceived image of what it means to be Mexican, and he is delighted
to see that image substantiated when he finally crosses the border into
Mexico, where he encounters a place so Other to him that he no longer has
the ability to distinguish the real from the hyperreal, thereby mistaking
the latter for authenticity.

67ZViBZm^Xd
Before analyzing the abstract implications of this journey into Mexico, it is
important to note that Sal and Dean’s plan to cross that border is also pro-
foundly practical. Dean is drawn to Mexico by the promise of easy access to a
divorce from Camille, while both men (in addition to Kerouac, who himself
traveled to Mexico multiple times) feel the pull of cheap, abundant drugs.
Even money ceases to be a worry, as Sal and Dean revel in the “wonderful
Mexican money that went so far” (275). However, the immaterial reasons
for this journey far outweigh the practical, significant as they are.
That Sal experiences Mexico as hyperreal (more real than real) is clear
from his declaration upon crossing the border, when he happily proclaims,
“Just across the street Mexico began. We looked with wonder. To our amaze-
ment, it looked exactly like Mexico” (274). Specifically, the men in “straw
hats and white pants . . . lounging by the dozen against battered pocky store-
fronts” (274) coincide with what Sal thinks Mexicans should look like. But
it is significant that Sal uses the word Mexico, not Mexican, for it indicates
that the entire country conforms to his media-informed preconceptions of
it. Ironically, though, Sal and Dean also find Mexico as the supreme source
of authenticity that, according to Dean, “will finally take us to IT!” (265). At

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this moment in the text, Mexico simultaneously fits into categories of the
stereotypical and the authentic, a seeming contradiction, but one that makes
sense by again turning to Baudrillardian conceptions of simulation.
Sal’s vision of Mexico can be classified as hyperreal in On the Road pre-
cisely because Sal misrecognizes its simulated nature for authenticity. Ac-
cording to Baudrillard, the hyperreal constitutes “the generation of models
of the real without origin or reality” (169). Put another way, the hyperreal
moves beyond “reduplication” and “parody” in “substituting signs of the
real for the real itself” (70). Baudrillard would therefore say that Mexico in
the context of Sal’s mind is a free-floating network of signs whose purpose is
to incite desire. To be fair, Baudrillard is referring specifically to consumer
objects, while I am expanding his analysis to include an entire country. I
feel justified in doing so, however, thanks to the degree to which Mexico
works as an object to be consumed by the experience-craving Sal and Dean.
Mexico not only contains the “girls” and the “visions” that Sal expected to
find on his journey—which he encounters in the brothel and in the jungle,
when he literally sees the white horse that had previously existed only figu-
ratively—but Mexico itself is arguably the “pearl” (8) that motivated Sal’s
travels in the first place.
It is important to note that while Mexico “incite[s] desire” in Sal and
Dean, it is not because a force outside of them (such as an advertising firm)
has constructed a simulation to do so; instead, both men project their own
desires onto Mexico and, not surprisingly, see their dreams reflected in its
landscapes, institutions, and people (“all Mexico was one vast Bohemian
camp”) (301). In this sense, Kerouac uses Mexico as a blank screen upon
which simulated images of Beat desires flicker, masking the complexity of
the world behind. In the end, Sal’s eyes are quick to “read” America, an ac-
tion that implies both an original and a highly abstracted sign (the word),
while he himself participates in the conflation of the original and the sign
as he views Mexico.
By understanding that Sal participates in the construction of Mexico as
hyperreal, it becomes clear why, as Manuel Luis Martínez argues, Sal—who
was so interested in appropriating a new racial identity while in the United
States—becomes distinctly American when in Mexico (49). Whereas Sal
sees himself as Mexican when with Terry, he now notices the “strangeness
of Americans and Mexicans blasting together on the desert and, more than
that, the strangeness of seeing in close proximity the faces and pores of skins
and calluses of fingers and general abashed cheekbones of another world”
(283). This cinematic rendering—a metonymical close-up—differentiates Sal
one cheekbone and finger at a time from the Mexican Other. In the United

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States, Sal sought to identify with the Mexican American in an attempt to

gain marginality. South of the border, he contrasts himself to a people of
the same ethnicity because in order for Mexico to be a place of authenticity,
it must be totally distinct from the constructedness of the United States, of
which he is a part. Put another way, the Mexican Other, in order to fit in
this hyperreal environment, must be wholly separate from Sal—who still
exists in the realm of originals—in order to be authentic.
The moment in On the Road that most succinctly sums up Kerouac’s use
of Mexico is found when the Pan-American Highway takes Sal and Dean
high into the mountains, where they encounter an indigenous population
they deem supremely authentic because they live outside of time, the car-
rier of civilization. Kerouac likens these Indians to the Fellaheen peoples he
had read about in Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1922), who escape
history and therefore are left the sole survivors when civilization inevita-
bly destroys itself. Accordingly, Kerouac situates this encounter between
Sal and Dean and the “Fellahin” as a meeting of the West with the rest of
the undeveloped world, stretching from China to India, Arabia, Morocco,
Polynesia, and Spain (280). He writes of the Indians coming from remote
places to reach civilization (as represented by Sal and Dean), not knowing
the “poor broken delusion of it,” not knowing that “a bomb had come that
could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we
would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same,
same way” (298). But in the same breath that Kerouac shows the Fellaheen
to be absolutely free of all Western constructions, he also describes them in
terms that the Catholic Kerouac himself projects—the Indian girls had the
“eyes of the Virgin Mother. . . . We saw in them the tender and forgiving gaze
of Jesus” (296). A fetishized timelessness has given way to what was always
behind the search for authenticity—spiritual blessedness, or the beatification
from which the label “beat” originally came, according to Kerouac, who not
surprisingly named his fictional counterpart Sal Paradise.
But another way of looking at the meaning of “authentic,” one more ger-
mane to my argument, is also possible: authenticity can denote a system of
representation that can be trusted, where signs correspond one-to-one with
the signified. Sal has clearly lost faith in what the Western world has to offer
in large part because he recognizes that “civilization” is full of simulation
that often “masks or perverts a basic reality” (Baudrillard 170). In fact, Bau-
drillard argues that “All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this
wager of representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that
a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this
exchange—God of course” (170). This concept perhaps illuminates Kerouac’s

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reason for figuring Mexico’s Indians as both Fellahin peoples and Christ
figures; these double subject positions simultaneously render them liminal
and, according to Baudrillard, central to Western schemes of representa-
tion. They offer both a way out of the representational system and a guar-
antee of its signs’ exchange value. However, of all the Others Kerouac has
described thus far in the book, none are more silent or painterly than these
brown-eyed Indians. As readers, we never hear them speak a word; their
sounds are only conveyed as “yammering.” Instead, Kerouac tells us that
“When they talked they suddenly became frantic and almost silly. In their
silence they were themselves” (297). In their silence, the Mexican Others
embody representational integrity in Sal’s mind by appearing as both sign
and signified; Sal and Dean don’t recognize the gap between the simulation
they project onto these people and the people themselves. Voiceless, they
are relegated to the realm of the hyperreal, which Sal and Dean mistake for
the authentic. And this is the novel’s final irony—at the very moment when
IT seems attainable, simulacrum reigns supreme.
If Kerouac had been able to access something beyond the hyperreal
in Mexico, he may have been surprised to find that instead of offering
an “authentic” counterpoint to the United States, Mexico was home to
countercultural allies who shared many Beat sensibilities. Rachel Adams
and Daniel Belgrad have, for instance, documented intellectual connec-
tions between the Beats and La Onda (a Mexican youth movement) and
Magic Realists, respectively. Although a discussion of such connections
fall outside the purview of this essay, I note their existence to show that the
Mexico Kerouac perceived—or at least the one he chose to portray in On
the Road—shares little with this other Mexican “reality” it seems he should
have been drawn to. The hyperrealization of race in the novel consequently
takes on the dimensions of a choice, a choice that suggests a larger Beat
refusal to see racial Others as fellow questers rather than stepping stones
toward the authentic.

CdiZh
Thanks to Kristin Matthews and Trent Hickman for their guidance through-
out several drafts of this essay.
1. As Robert Holton notes, there are really three voices in On the Road: Sal
Paradise the character, whose actions the book chronicles; the older Sal Paradise,
who narrates stories about his past; and Kerouac, who bases most of the book
on his own experiences (20). This distinction is worth keeping in mind because
it highlights the fact that while the book is mainly autobiographical, it has been
crafted and fictionalized to some extent. However, while I will mainly use the
name Sal in this essay, I believe that much of my argument could be applied to

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Kerouac too, for I agree with Tim Hunt, who argues that Kerouac is writing a
“biography of his self-image” (5).
2. Baudrillard’s theories are also rooted in the 1950s in a more practical way
when one considers that Nixon rose to power during that decade—first by pros-
ecuting the Rosenbergs and then as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president.
3. In fact, there was a whole rash of baseball films in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s:
Death on the Diamond (1934), The Babe Ruth Story (1948), The Kid from Cleveland
(1949), The Stratton Story (1949), The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), The Winning
Team (1952), Pride of St. Louis (1952), and Damn Yankees (1958).

Ldg`h8^iZY
Baudrillard, Jean. Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stan-
ford: Stanford UP, 1988.
Belgrad, Daniel. “The Transnational Counterculture: Beat-Mexican Inter-
sections.” Reconstructing the Beats. Ed. Jennie Skerl. New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2004. 27–40.
Ellis, R. J. “‘I’m Only a Jolly Storyteller’: Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and Vi-
sions of Cody.” The Beat Generation. Ed. A. Robert Lee. East Haven, Conn.:
Pluto, 1996. 37–60.
Holton, Robert. On the Road: Kerouac’s Ragged American Journey. New York:
Twayne, 1999.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Lacayo, Richard. “Suburban Legend: William Levitt.” Time Dec. 7, 1998.
Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro.” Dissent 4 (Spring 1987): 168–77.
McDowell, Linda. “Off the Road: Alternative Views of Rebellion, Resistance
and ‘The Beats.’” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 21.2
(1996): 412–19.
McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and
America. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo, 2003.
Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. “‘On the Road’ with Che and Jack: Melancho-
lia and the Legacy of Colonial Racial Geographies in the Americas.” New
Formations 47 (2002): 87–108.
Schlesinger, Arthur M. The Vital Center: Our Purposes and Perils on the Tight-
rope of American Liberalism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949.
Sterritt, David. Mad to Be Saved: The ’50s, and Film. Carbondale: Southern
Illinois UP, 1998.
Swartz, Omar. The View from “On the Road”: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack
Kerouac. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1999.
Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chi-
cago: U of Chicago P, 1990.

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 8

I=:B6@>C<HD;E6G69>H:
Michael Skau

>ÉkZÒcVaanWZXdbZhdY^higVXiZYi]Vi^iÉh\d^c\idWZdcanl^i]i]Z\gZViZhihigj\\aZi]Vi>Éaa
WZVWaZidÒcYdjil]d>Vb^ci]ZXdb^c\bdci]h^ci]Z]ZaaVcY\dcZd[i]ZldgaYVii]Zg^h`
d[adh^c\bnb^cY[dgZkZg#
Å?VX`@ZgdjVX!K^h^dchd[8dYn

When Lewis Carroll’s Alice encounters the hookah-smoking caterpillar,

he asks her, “Who are you?” Alice replies, “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at
present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think
I must have been changed several times since then” (35). Though Alice has
entered into fantastic worlds and even changed size during her adventures,
Jack Kerouac’s narrators could echo her response in their own more limited
fashion. From adolescent athletic achievements and early love fumblings
to merchant marine service and escapes into solitude, jazz, sex, alcohol,
and religion, all experiences return Kerouac’s characters to the problem of
self-discovery. Kerouac sees the confusion as resulting from the global situ-
ation: “I realized either I was crazy or the world was crazy: and I picked on
the world. And of course I was right” (Vanity 89). His attribution of blame
has considerable validity. The Beat Generation emerged in a world whose
values had been turned upside down. It was the first generation to experi-
ence a relentless threat of global nuclear destruction,1 to be spoon-fed on
the jargon and theories of psychology and psychiatry, and to witness such
organized violations of free will as brainwashing, cybernetics, and moti-
vational research. The result was a conviction that the personal identity of
the individual was besieged; therefore, the integrity of that identity must be
preserved at all costs. For Sal Paradise of On the Road, that means a quest
for the idiosyncratic and often ambivalent identification of selfhood and

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nostalgia for the security and irresponsibility of childhood in a world that

seems to promise only the guarantees of aging and mortality.
Biographically, Kerouac shows clear evidence of identity confusion,
and his recently published letters and journals afford valuable resources
for an exploration of this aspect of his character. One of the most obvious
examples involves his use of alternative names, pseudonyms, and adopted
personae. Kerouac’s paternal grandfather, Jean-Baptiste Kirouack, came
from French Canada; Jack’s father, Leo, spelled his surname Kérouack; and
Jack was baptized Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac and as a child was called
Ti Pousse and Ti Jean (which he used as a signature in letters as an adult,
even into middle age), only becoming Jackie or Jack when he later began to
meet people in his community who were not of French background. The
variety of names presages an identity problem that is reflected in Kerouac’s
letters, where he signs himself with a profusion of different names: Jean,
BARON DE BRETAGNE; ZAGG; Flatfoot; Jean-Louis; John Perdu; Jean
Louis Le Fou; Richard Wisp; Fyodor; Jakey Moorhouse; Snuffy Snuff. Much
of this is mere playfulness, but it has roots in a ground of insecurity and
instability. His first published novel, The Town and the City, identified the
author as John Kerouac, and he published an excerpt blending passages
from On the Road and Visions of Cody, as well as a poem from Mexico City
Blues, under the name Jean-Louis.2 Later, “To avoid paying child support,
he [Kerouac] was still receiving mail under aliases and at other addresses”
(Nicosia 427). In a 1952 letter to Stella Sampas, Kerouac asked her to send
mail to him in Mexico addressed to “Sr. Jean Levesque,” “MY SPANISH
NAME” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 389), an amusing multinational request.
Moreover, Kerouac’s ethnic background induced an anomie that affected
his cultural identity: he spoke only joual, a French-Canadian dialect, until
he started school: “I never spoke English before I was six or seven. . . . Isn’t
it true that French-Canadians everywhere tend to hide their real sources . . .
as once I did, say in high school, when I first began ‘Englishizing myself’ to
coin a term” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 228–29). Kerouac also repeatedly
commented on his own identity dilemma. In a 1950 letter to Neal Cassady,
he says, “I’ve been trying to find my voice,” and he goes on to indicate a
variety of voices and dialects that he was planning for narrators of projected
novels (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 233–34). In addition, when Gilbert Mill-
stein, who enthusiastically reviewed On the Road for the New York Times,
hosted a party to celebrate the novel’s publication, Kerouac “told his friend
John Clellon Holmes, who came to see him that night, ‘I don’t know who I
am anymore’“ (Kerouac and Johnson 66–67).

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Kerouac remained obsessed by his identity confusion, the result of what

he suggests is his “protean personality,” for “You can’t pin a wriggling
fish like me” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 62, 188). He traces this quality to
the “complex condition of my mind, split up, as it were, in two parts, one
normal, the other schizoid” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 60). He elaborates
on the dichotomy of his character in a letter to Carolyn Cassady: “Biggest
trouble is hangup on self, on ego-personality. I am not Jack, I am the Bud-
dha now. I am only Jack when I act myself, which is, mean, silly, narrow,
selfish” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 428).
The elements of identity confusion constitute a major motif throughout
Kerouac’s writings. His Beats renounce the goals and aspirations of the
conventional world: they see traditional values as deadening awareness,
brutalizing feeling, and distorting the responses of the individual. Therefore,
they sing their nonconformity (sometimes in chorus) and celebrate a new
moral and ethical position intended to salvage human dignity. Kerouac
extols “the miracle of everyday heartbeat” (Town 473), precisely because that
miracle seems so precarious in the world of the mid-twentieth century. Af-
fected by a new historical imperative, “Everybody in the world has come to
feel like a geek. . . . It’s really an atomic disease, you see. . . . It’s death finally
reclaiming life” (Town 369–70). In an exploding and imploding world, the
individual finds himself diminished. Consequently, Kerouac’s characters,
in self-defense, interpret experience in egocentric terms: Peter Martin, the
protagonist of The Town and the City, “never thought of this [merchant
marine service] in terms of war, but in terms of the great gray sea that was
going to become the stage of his soul” (274).
The individual, in consternation and desperation, exalts his own life
above all else. Dissatisfied with a stultifying existence, he rejects the placid,
boring, and superficial style of life in the society around him: “Can anyone
be anything but a rebel in a conventional world like this?” (Town 450). In
On the Road, Sal embraces the people who lead exciting, unpredictable lives,
hoping to discover meaning for his own existence:
I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me,
because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad
to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn,
burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders
across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and
everybody goes “Awww!” (5–6)

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Passion and intensity become the values that Sal treasures.

However, in most of his works, the Kerouac personae (Peter Martin,
Sal Paradise, Leo Percepied, Ray Smith, Ti Jean, and Jack [and Jackie]
Duluoz) function primarily as followers, observers, reporters on the Beat
and conventional worlds. In a 1949 journal entry, Kerouac, struggling with
the project that became On the Road, says, “I decided I am not one of the
hipsters, therefore I am free and objective thinking about them and writing
their story” (Windblown 223). In The Town and the City, which lays much
of the foundation for On the Road, Leon Levinsky explains Peter Martin’s
outsider stance to him: “there’s a certain dignity to your soul . . . but it’s
not a sadness of understanding, it’s really a neurotic failure to see yourself
clearly” (366). Before Peter can participate wholly in the life of Sal’s “mad
ones,” he must achieve self-knowledge. Peter’s crisis of identity perplexes
and disturbs him:
And what was most horrible to him that first night was the final terrible
realization that he was only Peter Martin, only Peter Martin—and who
was that in the world? Who was he, if not some sort of imposter and
stranger and scoundrel, who somehow managed to fool people and even
his own family into believing that he was Peter Martin. Who was he?
(Town 126)

Early in On the Road, Sal undergoes a similar experience when he awakes

in a cheap hotel in Des Moines and feels that it “was the one distinct time
in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was.”3 Sal
explains this as a rite of passage: “I was halfway across America, at the divid-
ing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future” (15).
In his earliest projections for On the Road, Kerouac saw identity as a
crucial theme: a journal entry from 1948 confides, “I have another novel
in mind—‘On the Road’—which I keep thinking about: about two guys
hitch-hiking to California in search of something they don’t really find,
and losing themselves on the road, and coming all the way back hopeful
of something else” (Windblown 123). The novel published nine years later
develops this theme, especially in the portrayal of Sal, who says, “I like too
many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling
star to another till I drop. . . . I had nothing to offer anybody except my own
confusion” (125–26). When Bull Lee confronts Sal and Dean about their
plans, Sal confesses that “we didn’t know anything about ourselves” (145).
Later, abandoned by Dean and Marylou in San Francisco, Sal’s identity
confusion becomes transhistorical as he sees a woman in a fish and chips
shop: “It suddenly occurred to me this was my mother of about two hundred

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years ago in England, and that I was her footpad son, returning from gaol to
haunt her honest labors in the hashery” (172). Still later, he finds himself
wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered
was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness,
music, not enough night. . . . I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a
poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a “white man”
disillusioned. All my life I’d had white ambitions. . . . I was only myself,
Sal Paradise, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night,
wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic
Negroes of America. (179–80)4

Sal’s confusion results from the fact that too often the process must
lead him to a product, a violation of Kierkegaard’s precept that life is not a
problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. In the mañana world
of Southern California, Sal feels compelled to ask, “Where do we go now,
man?” (92). When Dean Moriarty tells Sal, “Whee. Sal, we gotta go and
never stop going till we get there,” Sal’s response is “Where we going, man?”
(240). When Dean is “so excited it made me cry,” Sal asks, “Where would it
all lead?” (212). “I want to marry a girl,” he confesses, “so I can rest my soul
with her till we both get old. This can’t go on all the time—all this frantic-
ness and jumping around. We’ve got to go someplace, find something” (117).
However, Sal’s ambivalence dominates the novel. He vacillates between his
impulse to pursue the mad life of his friends and his desire to settle down.
He asks Ed Dunkel, “What are you going to do with yourself, Ed?” Dunkel
answers, “I just go along. I dig life,” and Sal comments, “He had no direc-
tion” (123). Nevertheless, just a paragraph later, Sal himself says, “I didn’t
know where all this was leading; I didn’t care” (124). Shortly afterwards, he
reverses himself again, feeling that “This madness would lead nowhere” (128).
This last passage provides further evidence of Kerouac’s impression of Sal’s
wavering: in the original scroll manuscript of the novel, the word nowhere
is crossed out, and the word everywhere is inserted instead. 5 Kerouac’s
personae are uneasy riders, traveling between the secure and calm world
of “aunt,” mother, and other relatives and the careening, exciting world of
Dean and the Beats, and he is unsatisfied by both: “With frantic Dean I was
rushing through the world without a chance to see it” (206).
Another manifestation of the identity problem in Kerouac’s novels
involves the idealization of childhood and the reluctance to surrender the
innocence and imaginative liberty of childhood. A focus on childhood
has always been popular with American writers, perhaps in part because
America itself is often imaged as a child or adolescent, born of dreams

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of freedom and innocence, bursting with energy, vitality, curiosity, and

idealism, reluctant to relinquish its naïve visions even after attaining the
maturity of major power status. America remains endearingly and exas-
peratingly youthful, and Americans dare to share this quality with their
country—often desperately.
Kerouac’s novels document the American dream of youth, the loss of
these dreams, and an attempt to regain the charm of youth. For Kerouac,
childhood is a mystical spot of time invested with an innocence of delight,
a sense of wonder, and a lust for sensation. He prizes fantasy and childish
imagination, particularly inasmuch as the child can use them as protection
from harsh reality and responsibility. In Doctor Sax, a novel whose story
Sal tells to Marylou in On the Road (171–72), Kerouac provides an episode
illustrating this escape: “I threw a piece of slate skimming in the air and
accidentally caught Cy at the throat (Count Condu! he came in the night
flapping over the sandbank and cut Cy in the neck with his eager blue teeth
by sand moons of snore)” (74).6 Youthful imagination creates a scenario
which exempts the child from guilt. In On the Road, Sal proclaims his own
immunity from blame: he tells Dean, “It’s not my fault! It’s not my fault! . . .
Nothing in this lousy world is my fault, don’t you see that? I don’t want it to
be and it can’t be and it won’t be” (214). His defensive assertion has the sweep
of a child’s blanket denial.
Kerouac repeatedly articulates the yearning to return to childhood’s
simple magic. He writes Holmes, “I feel happy in my overalls in the yard,
like a Lowell Child again” and echoes this motif in a letter to Allen Ginsberg,
saying he wants “to live my own kind of simple Ti Jean . . . life, like in overalls
all day” (Selected Letters: 1957–1969 140, 142). Though these letters were writ-
ten in 1958, the same spirit of childhood’s preciousness appears throughout
On the Road, manifesting itself in Sal’s response to Dean, who “made me
remember my boyhood. . . . And in his excited way of speaking I heard
again the voices of old companions and brothers under the bridge, among
the motorcycles, along the wash-lined neighborhood and drowsy doorsteps
of afternoon where boys played guitars while their older brothers worked
in the mills” (7). Similarly, Sal comments on his Denver acquaintances: “I
wanted to see Denver ten years ago when they were all children, and in the
sunny cherry blossom morning of springtime in the Rockies rolling their
hoops up the joyous alleys full of promise—the whole gang” (59). In addi-
tion, Kerouac explicates his early draft of the novel: “My Smitty in ‘On the
Road’ has a simple, almost childish method of arriving at pure knowledge
of the world” (Windblown 231). Much the same can be said of Sal, with his
whimsical escape into the child’s awe and reverence for life. Pilfering food

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from a California barracks cafeteria with Remi Boncoeur, Sal “went to the
soda fountain. Here, realizing a dream of mine from infancy, I took the cover
off the chocolate ice cream and stuck my hand in wrist-deep and hauled me
up a skewer of ice cream and licked at it” (70). To the young, youth is eternal,
and they expect to live and to remain young forever, the child’s intuitive
and instinctive Peter-Pan assumption. In 1948 Kerouac imagines living on
a ranch where “I can be my childlike self forever” (Windblown 91).
Darker moments intrude upon this idealized world, but even these are
attributed to the exuberance of youth: “At twenty young Joe was the victim
of the early fatalism that says: ‘What’s the use anyway? Who cares what
happens!’ That frame of mind proceeds on towards even greater excesses in
the name of despair, while all the time it is only the sap of youth running
over, running wild” (Town 89). The approach of adulthood, which brings
sudden and frightful acquaintance with the world of sorrow, suffering,
and death, intrudes upon the security of childhood. In his notebook draft
“Gone On the Road” (dated July 26, 1950, when Kerouac was 28), his nar-
rator finds that “the realization came unimpeded like an unkind dream
that I was growing old and I would die” (Windblown 363). With revealing
candor, Kerouac asserts in Visions of Cody, “I’m writing this book because
we’re all going to die” (368).7 The discovery of death brings knowledge of
the fragility and autonomy of life and the human body: in Doctor Sax,
young Ti Jean, walking with his mother across Moody Street Bridge, sees
a man in front of them who is carrying a watermelon suddenly collapse;
betrayed by “the sin of life, of death, he pissed in his pants his last act” (117),
for, “when a man dies he pees in his clothes, everything goes” (129). 8 To the
child, exulting in physical exuberance, this is especially disturbing, and
the epiphanic revelation presages the debilitation which accompanies the
accumulation of adult years.
Throughout his works, Kerouac reveals an anxiety about aging. Dean
tells Sal, “We know life, Sal, we’re growing older, each of us, little by little”
(187). The novel illustrates this condition, in the spring of 1950, in precisely
the athletic activities that Kerouac treasured:
Later in the afternoon we went out and played baseball with the kids in
the sooty field by the Long Island railyard. We also played basketball so
frantically the younger boys said, “Take it easy, you don’t have to kill
yourself.” They bounced smoothly all around us and beat us with ease.
Dean and I were sweating. At one point Dean fell flat on his face on the
concrete court. We huffed and puffed to get the ball away from the boys;
they turned and flipped it away. Others darted in and smoothly shot over
our heads. We jumped like maniacs, and the younger boys just reached

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up and grabbed the ball from our sweating hands and dribbled away. . . .
They thought we were crazy. (On the Road 252)
The boys think they’re crazy, but they’re just growing old, trying to pretend
that the ravages of time have not begun to take their toll on them (Kerouac
would have been 28, and Cassady just 24). In fact, the only argument that
Sal and Dean have is caused by Dean’s comment about Sal’s age; Sal retorts,
“Who’s old! I’m not much older than you are! . . . you’re always making
cracks about my age” (213). The inevitable loss of the freshness and vigor
of childhood is instrumental in the formation of Kerouac’s outlook on life.
When the qualities of youth encompass all ideals, one does not look eagerly
toward tomorrow.
One of the critical factors in the child-to-adult process involves alienation
from the father. Kerouac repeatedly portrays his characters as a generation
of orphans. This is, on occasion, the result of the child’s disappointment
in the father, which becomes the pattern for adult disillusionment. In his
“Forest of Eden” journal (1947–48), Kerouac explains the process:
But when the child grows up and learns that his father knows very little
more than the child himself, when the child seeks advice and meets with
fumbling earnest human words, when the child seeks a way and finds
that his father’s way is not enough; when the child is left cold with the
realization that no one knows what to do—no one knows how to live,
behave, judge, how to think, see, understand, no one knows, yet everyone
tries fumblingly—then the child is in danger of growing cynical about
the entire matter, or despairing, or mad. (Windblown 144)9
Fatherlessness even serves to unify the characters for Sal: “Here were the
three of us—Dean looking for his father, mine dead, Stan fleeing his old
one [actually, his grandfather], and going off into the night together” (267).
Kerouac’s original manuscript highlights the function of loss of the father.
The published version of On the Road contextualizes Sal’s first meeting with
Dean as “not long after my wife and I split up” and after Sal’s “serious illness
that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with
the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead” (1).
However, the manuscript of the novel specifies that the meeting occurs “not
long after my father died” and that the illness “really had something to do
with my father’s death and my awful feeling that everything was dead” (On
the Road: The Original Scroll 109).10 Sal generalizes his haunting memory by
stating, “Either you find someone who looks like your father in places like
Montana or you look for a friend’s father where he is no more” (179). Sal’s
trauma even generates behavioral repercussions in the manuscript version.

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When Dean convinces Sal to have sex with Marylou while he watches, Sal
is unable to perform and notes in the published version that the bed “had
been the deathbed of a big man and sagged in the middle” (131). The scroll
introduces a further complication by explaining that the bed was the one
in which his father had died (On the Road: The Original Scroll 232).
Part of the quest then becomes a search for a surrogate father-figure,
though in the novels the quested father may be actual or symbolic. Father-
figure identification takes place among Kerouac’s real-life friends and among
his characters. In a letter to Gary Snyder, Kerouac says, “here’s your old dad
writin you a letter” and goes on to tell him, “i am your father” (Selected
Letters: 1957–1969 105, 107), though Kerouac was only eight years older than
Snyder. His letters refer also to Philip Whalen as “father” (Selected Letters:
1957–1969 245, 250), but Kerouac was a year and a half older than Whalen. In
Book of Dreams, “Cody and my father mingled into the One Father image
of Accusation” (13), and in Big Sur, “I remind him [Cody] of his old wino
father but the fantastic thing is that HE reminds ME of MY father so that
we have this strange eternal father-image relationship” (134).
Identities within the Beat social group also begin to meld. Kerouac writes
Carl Solomon in 1951 that “the latest things I wrote and have been writing
‘about Neal’ [Cassady] suddenly and curiously are really about myself ”
(Selected Letters: 1940–1956 328–29). In On the Road, Sal’s identity blends
with Dean’s, in his own mind and the minds of others: Sal explains that
Ed Dunkel “was starting to turn to me as well for advice; one Dean wasn’t
enough for him” (123), and Stan Shephard’s grandfather mistakenly, but
symbolically, addresses Sal as “Dean” (266). Misidentification threatens
individuality, and in 1961 Kerouac writes to Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky
that he “can’t think of anything more tedious than becoming Kerouassady
again” (Selected Letters: 1957–1969 316–17).
The result, however, is the establishment of strong-bonded comradeship
among the men. Kerouac celebrates “some kind of new thing in the world
actually where men can really be angelic friends and not be homosexual
and not fight over girls” (Big Sur 135).11 Such friendship appears to be a desire
to return to the point of childhood before Ti Jean “began to distinguish
between sexes—as noble and beautiful as a young nun” (Doctor Sax 73),
when he courted Ernie Malo, a boyhood playmate. This attraction eventu-
ally becomes the “innocent-homosexual” experience which Leslie A. Fiedler
characterizes as including such aspects as “the camaraderie of the joint trip
to the whorehouse (bursting into your buddy’s room with a bottle of booze
to see how he’s doing)” (188).12 The episode at the Mexican whorehouse in
On the Road provides a parallel here, and Dean’s desire to watch Sal have

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sex with Marylou offers another similar motif. These incidents embody the
“homosocial” bonds that Eve Sedgwick explores in her book Between Men,
particularly as they relate to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of “the male traf-
fic in women” and to Gayle Rubin’s insightful critique of this objectification
of women as property. Furthermore, by the latter portion of On the Road,
Sal is virtually pimping for Dean: he makes a point of introducing Inez to
Dean (248); when he learns that Dean is coming to Denver, he wonders, “Are
there any girls for him?” (259); “back in San Antonio,” on the way to Mexico,
Sal “had promised Dean, as a joke, that I would get him a girl” (280).
Unlike Dean, Sal is frequently self-conscious and inept in his relation-
ships with women, and he tends to withdraw to a safe, unthreatening male
innocence, as the novel’s prose juxtapositions subtly but clearly indicate: “I
was the only guy without a girl. I asked everybody, ‘Where’s Dean?’“ (41);
“A whole bunch of girls showed up. I phoned Carlo to find out what Dean
was doing now” (47); in Central City, Sal and his friends stay in a miner’s
shack, where “great crowds of young girls came piling into our place,” and
Sal comments, “I wished Dean and Carlo were there” (53–54). This prefer-
ence for male society reflects the attempt to recapture the camaraderie of
carefree youth. In fact, in 1957 Kerouac writes Ginsberg, “I hunger for final
ultimate friendship with no hassles, like with Neal early days” (Selected Let-
ters: 1957–1969 94). The safety of the male friendships forestalls the “hassles”
of heterosexual bonds.
Youth often feels an urge to deny, or to postpone, immersion in the
adult world. Motion, kicks, and renunciation of the concerns and respon-
sibilities of the adult world characterize the adopted lifestyles of Sal and his
friends. Carlo tells Sal, “I have finally taught Dean that he can do anything
he wants, become mayor of Denver, marry a millionairess, or become the
greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he keeps rushing out to see the midget
auto races” (41–42). Kerouac recommends in 1948 that Cassady “believe in
everything, like a child, a bird; like I do” (Selected Letters: 1940–1956 165).
His reveries of youth are idealized pictures of “beautiful sadness” (Selected
Letters: 1940–1956 122), which he can even admit as partly imaginary: “now
I see there is no such spot in Lowell or in mind but I made it up to fit the
dream” (Book of Dreams 150). His adult dissatisfaction constantly impels him
to revisit the idealized state, to return purposefully for its delicate delights,
because, as he confesses to Ginsberg in 1952, “I wish I was innocent again”
(Selected Letters: 1940–1956 345).
Grown beyond childhood innocence, Sal searches for adult values and
feels the compulsion to travel, for he recognizes “our one and noble function
of the time, move” (134). However, the aimlessness indicated here recalls

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Hemingway’s admonition that one must be careful not to confuse move-

ment with action. Kerouac himself seems to recognize this: a carnival owner
asks Sal and a fellow hitchhiker, “You boys going to get somewhere, or just
going?” and Sal comments, “We didn’t understand his question, and it was
a damned good question” (20). Sal imagines “driving across the world and
into the places where we would finally learn ourselves” (280), implying that
they have not yet learned themselves. The danger is that, without a compass,
he can find himself traveling, like “the Ghost of the Susquehanna,” in the
wrong direction (104). Sal can only abide the rootlessness, the uncertainty,
and the careless abandon of the vagabond life in doses. He recognizes “the
ragged madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it,
the senseless nightmare road” (254). For his own health, he must abandon
the nightmare.
After Sal’s final return to New York, independent of Dean, he meets a
new woman, Laura, and begins making plans for their future life together.
Forced to let Dean make his own way back from New York, Sal provides
a coda in the final paragraph that offers a grudging acceptance of growth
and a reluctant maturity. The passage combines nostalgia for the world
of childhood innocence, affection for Dean (the unwitting agent of Sal’s
growth), suspension of the father search, and sad acceptance of aging and
mortality. Sal’s development may seem limited, but, after all, the very title of
Kerouac’s novel indicates that life is a journey. By the novel’s end, Sal frees
himself from Dean, though wistfully, and he is now enabled to develop his
own independent life and identity, “hopeful of something else” (Windblown
123), as Kerouac had initially projected.

CdiZh
1. Jeff Nuttall treats the effects in his book Bomb Culture.
2. The pseudonym for the prose excerpt upset Malcolm Cowley, who had
been publicly promoting Kerouac and felt that his efforts were undermined by
the nom de plume (Nicosia 474).
3. See Mexico City Blues: “Who am I? / do I exist?” (178).
4. Sal ignores the poverty, deprivation, prejudice, and violence that America’s
minorities faced, but Eldridge Cleaver cites this passage as evidence of the early
stage of “rebellion of the white youth” against the American system (71–72).
5. Over three weeks in April of 1951, Kerouac typed out his first full-length
version of On the Road on strips of paper taped together to form a 120-foot
scroll. This manuscript is currently in the collection of James S. Irsay. From Jan.
19 until March 13, 2005, the manuscript was displayed in full length (lacking
the last several feet, which were accidentally destroyed many years ago) at the
University of Iowa Museum of Art.

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6. Kerouac’s notebooks for Doctor Sax bear the title “A novella of Children
and Evil, The Myth of the Rainy Night” (Charters 27); he also describes it as
“dealing with the American Myth as we used to know it as kids” (Selected Let-
ters: 1940–1956 169).
7. During his appearance on The Steve Allen Show in 1959, Kerouac reads a
variant of this passage as a lead-in to the conclusion of On the Road (Kerouac).
8. Kerouac alludes to this incident in Tristessa: “I’d rather walk than ride
the airplane, I can fall on the ground flat on my face and die that way.—With
a watermelon under my arm” (45).
9. Kerouac provides a variant of this passage as a realization by Peter Martin
in The Town and the City (424).
10. The beginning of the scroll manuscript is photographically reproduced
in Phillips (36). In a journal entry dated Aug. 1949, Kerouac focuses on his
conflicted feelings: “I cannot for instance as yet understand why my father is
dead . . . no meaning, all unseemly, and incomplete. It seems he is not dead at
all. I haven’t cross’t the bridge to knowing that he is dead” (Windblown 204).
11. In an undated letter (circa 1943) to Cornelius Murphy, Kerouac says that
he told his psychiatrist about “being more closely attached to my male friends,
spiritually and emotionally,” than to the women with whom he was involved
(Selected Letters: 1940–1956 62).
12. Fiedler is discussing James Jones’s From Here to Eternity. The essay
originally appeared in 1951, six years before On the Road. The moral prejudice
signaled by the word innocent is characteristic of prevalent attitudes of the early
1950s.
13. Kerouac’s own resolution of the identity problem was less salutary.
Feeling doomed to loneliness and alienated from his friends, he had no sense
of belonging. He self-consciously developed an identification with his ances-
tors: “I’m a French Canadian Iroquois American aristocrat Breton Cornish
democrat” (Desolation 340). His celebration of his nationality, his pride in
his ancestry, and his discovery of the family escutcheon furnished him with
a sense of his place in historical terms: “[I]t should be pointed out that all
this ‘Beat’ guts therefore goes back to my ancestors who were Bretons who
were the most independent group of nobles in all old Europe” (“Origins” 57).
Kerouac also became obsessed with the derivation of his name. He variously
suggested, “Ker—house, ouac—in the moor” (Interview with Stanley Twardo-
wicz 4), leading him to a new identity: “I am Thomas Hardy now” (Selected
Letters: 1957–1969 374); “House (Ker), In the Field (Ouac)” (Satori 72); and
“‘Kern’ being Cairn, and ‘uak’ language of; then, Ker, house, ouac, language
of ” (Vanity 128). He writes Holmes, “Louis Lebris de Kéroualles (descended
of the mistress of Charles II England, Louise de Kéroualle, Dutchess [sic] of
Portsmouth, altho she only borrowed the name from old Fambly there, mine)”
(Selected Letters: 1957–1969 415). The quest for identity became a genealogical
search, as if the secret of the apple were told only in the roots of the apple tree.

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Jack McClintock quotes Kerouac shortly before his death: “But, yeah, as you
get older you get more . . . genealogical” (189); Gerald Nicosia indicates the
extremes to which Kerouac went in tracing his family history, even claiming
relation on his mother’s side to Napoleon Bonaparte (21–22) and extending
his ancestral lineage to Canada, Ireland, Cornwall, Wales, Brittany, Scotland,
England, Russia, and Persia (653–54). This genealogical ploy offers neither a
road to identity nor a solution to essential human problems.

Ldg`h8^iZY
Carroll, Lewis [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson]. Alice in Wonderland: Authoritative
Text of Alice in Wonderland; Through the Looking Glass; and The Hunting
of the Snark: Backgrounds; Essays in Criticism. Ed. Donald J. Gray. Norton
Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1971.
Charters, Ann. A Bibliography of Works by Jack Kerouac: 1939–1975. Rev. ed.
New York: Phoenix, 1975.
Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: Dell, 1968.
Fiedler, Leslie A. “Dead-End Werther: The Bum as American Culture Hero.”
An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics. Boston: Beacon, 1955.
183–90.
Jean-Louis [Jack Kerouac]. “Jazz of the Beat Generation.” New World Writing:
Seventh Mentor Selection. Ed. Arabel J. Porter. New York: New American
Library, 1955. 7–16.
Kerouac. Dir. John Antonelli. Videocassette. Active Home Video, 1985.
Kerouac, Jack. Big Sur. 1962. New York: Penguin, 1992.
———. Book of Dreams. San Francisco: City Lights, 1961.
———. Desolation Angels. 1965. New York: Bantam, 1966.
———. Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three. New York: Grove. 1959.
———. Interview with Stanley Twardowicz et al. (Part 2). Ed. Diana Scesny.
Athanor 2 (Fall 1971): 1–15.
———. Mexico City Blues (242 Choruses). New York: Grove, 1959.
———. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 2005.
———. On the Road: The Original Scroll. Ed. Howard Cunnell. New York:
Viking, 2007.
———. “The Origins of the Beat Generation.” Good Blonde and Others. Ed.
Donald Allen. Rev. ed. San Francisco: Grey Fox, 1994. 55–65.
———. Satori in Paris. New York: Grove, 1966.
———. Selected Letters 1957–1969. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking, 1999.
———. Selected Letters 1940–1956. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking, 1995.
———. The Town and the City. New York: Harcourt, 1950.
———. Tristessa. 1960. New York: Penguin, 1962.
———. Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935–46. New York: Cow-
ard-McCann, 1968.
———. Visions of Cody. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.

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———. Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947–1954. Ed. Douglas
Brinkley. New York: Viking, 2004.
Kerouac, Jack, and Joyce Johnson. Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Let-
ters, 1957–1958. New York: Viking, 2000.
Kerouac, Jean-Louis. “One Hundred and Twentieth Chorus.” Variegation 10
(Autumn 1956): 66.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon,
1969.
McClintock, Jack. “This Is How the Road Ends: Not with a Bang, with a Damn
Hernia.” Esquire Mar. 1970: 138–39+.
Millstein, Gilbert. “Books of the Times.” Review of On the Road, by Jack Ker-
ouac. New York Times Sept. 5, 1957: 27.
Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. Berkeley:
U of California P, 1994.
Nuttall, Jeff. Bomb Culture. New York: Dell, 1968.
Phillips, Lisa. Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–1965. New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art, 1995.
Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of
Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed. Rayna R. Reiter. New York:
Monthly Review, 1975. 157–210.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

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E:G;DGB6C8:>CDCI=:GD69
I^b=jci

Anyone wanting to make sense of the impact of the Beats in the 1950s—and
this question has now come to seem not only academically legitimate but
even academically important—necessarily turns to Jack Kerouac’s On the
Road as a key text. The novel offers a portrait of the period, and its primary
characters are all central Beat figures. Moreover, the book’s reception func-
tions as a microcosm of how the Beat ethos was lauded and reviled, as well
as how its potential for cultural change was partially realized over time
but also partially contained and subverted (and even commodified into
banal tropes for advertising, including what should be an oxymoron but
isn’t—stylish jeans). Thus, it is not surprising that we are still reflecting on
Kerouac’s best known novel more than fifty years after its publication. The
study of literature has become, after all, increasingly the study of cultural
processes, and few books of the last half century offer a richer smorgasbord
of delights for examining how we concoct and consume cultural objects
than On the Road.
I am happy to agree that a significant part of On the Road’s current im-
portance lies in the multiple routes of its cultural circulation in the decades
since its publication and how those highways and byways can be mapped,
and I am also willing to agree that this has something to do with Kerouac’s
achievement in writing it. But after a quarter century of reading and think-
ing about On the Road, I am more drawn to another aspect of the novel’s
continued life—that it still matters as imaginative and aesthetic experience.
We continue to read it not just for academic purposes or for historical inter-
est or as a scene for ideological interrogation and theorizing but because it

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has remained—and remains—imaginatively compelling. We can still expe-

rience this book as if it is in some significant way still contemporary to us
while most other mid-1950s literary artifacts are simply that: artifacts. Why
and how On the Road felt new, compelling, exhilarating, even threatening
when it first appeared in 1957 has been discussed at length. But why did the
book still feel new and contemporary when I first read it in the summer of
1971? And why does it feel as if it matters now—as if it is still new and con-
temporary—to the young students who write me from time to time having
just read the novel, exhilarated and convinced that it is still new, different,
and imaginatively crucial for them now in ways that, say, The Man in the
Gray Flannel Suit (a culturally interesting artifact) is not? Put simply, the
question is why are we still able to read On the Road rather than just study
it? And how might some understanding of this help us not only better ap-
preciate the novel’s achievement but also better understand its significance
as a cultural document, be clearer about the cultural work it has done, and
more adequately assess the cultural work it can and cannot do?
Ironically, part of what has made On the Road matter culturally—the
controversy it generated when published—has helped obscure why it is
imaginatively and aesthetically compelling. When it was first published, On
the Road was hailed and assailed (more the latter) for the series of hedonistic
pilgrimages in search of kicks and “IT” that fill the book. For some, the
travels of Sal and Dean offered a vision of escape from the social expectation
of middle-class conformity in cold war America. For others, their travels
were a sordid threat to social norms and culturally authorized meaning.
The ensuing tug of war over such matters as whether the novel’s version and
vision of mid-twentieth-century America is nihilistic (as detractors claimed)
or beatific (as Kerouac claimed) or a road map to a distinctly American sense
of individual authenticity and freedom (as some of its champions then and
now have claimed) has helped focus our attention on what is represented
in the novel. Clearly, what the book represents is important to understand-
ing its initial impact and the way it is a document of its time. But however
shocking Road’s portrayal of drugs, kicks, and seemingly casual sex might
have been to readers in 1957 (or would have been to readers in 1951 when
the novel was originally drafted), these would hardly merit the literary
equivalent of a PG-13 rating today. While the “what” of On the Road is key
to understanding its significance as a mid-twentieth-century document, it
is a problematic and insufficient basis for understanding its power to compel
contemporary readers—its power to be read as if it is still contemporary.
This power, I would like to suggest, comes less from “what” the novel rep-
resents than “how” the novel represents it. The truly radical quality of On

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the Road is less a matter of benzedrine, fast cars, marijuana, and failed three
ways than Kerouac’s approach to writing about such things. The “how” of
his novel is the basis of its continued imaginative power and the key to un-
derstanding why we can continue to experience Road as if contemporary
a half century after its publication and sixty years after the earliest of the
events on which the novel is based. And understanding this “how” helps
us understand what was, and still is, radical and significant in Kerouac’s
approach to writing. While the socially aberrant actions of the characters in
the novel—especially in the context of the mid-1950s—has encouraged us to
focus our thinking about On the Road on the way the characters act in the
world and on the world they enact, the novel’s continued power comes in
large part from the way Kerouac enacts a particular style of consciousness
in and through the writing that cannot be collapsed into the actions of his
characters and which, in fundamental ways, disrupts and refashions the
relationship between writer, text, and reader in ways that we have still only
partly recognized and assimilated.
Before I try to explain what I think this “how” might involve, I need to
explain what it is not. In defending the artistry and achievement of his book
against his detractors (including Truman Capote, who quipped dismissively
that Road was merely “typing” rather than writing) (Charters, Kerouac
308), Kerouac invoked the concept of “Spontaneous Prose” and offered such
explanations of his practice as “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” Kerouac’s
dicta on Spontaneous Prose have some value for understanding On the
Road’s power for contemporary readers, but they are also problematic.
For one thing, Kerouac didn’t begin writing Spontaneous Prose—at least
consciously and fully—until late spring 1952, nearly a year after the three
weeks he spent writing the basic draft of On the Road, the famous scroll,
in April 1951 (Hunt, Kerouac’s Crooked Road 108–25). (Doctor Sax and the
posthumously published Visions of Cody were the first novels that Kerouac
wrote using Spontaneous Prose as Kerouac defined that practice in state-
ments like “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.”) For another, while Kerouac
wrote the initial draft of On the Road very quickly, so quickly that it must
necessarily have involved a certain degree of improvisation, he revised
the original draft several times, and the novel’s final text, as published by
Viking Press, reflects not only these revisions but also Kerouac’s work with
Malcolm Cowley of Viking and a final round of additional changes when
the Viking copyeditors reworked the prose as the book was produced. These
copyeditors deleted phrases they apparently thought were extraneous,
chopped long sentences into shorter ones, added punctuation, and changed
wording in what Kerouac had thought was the final version of his novel

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(Charters, Introduction xxvi–xxvii). Comparing the prose in On the Road

as Viking published it to the prose in the three excerpts from On the Road
that Kerouac published in periodicals before the novel appeared (which
seem to have been set from typescripts that hadn’t undergone this final,
unauthorized round of copyediting) suggests that the Viking copyeditors
were trying to make Kerouac’s prose as conventional as possible (see “The
Mexican Girl,” “Jazz of the Beat Generation,” and “A Billowy Trip”). While
Kerouac’s ideas about Spontaneous Prose are significant for understanding
the writing following On the Road, they cannot be used directly to explain
his approach to writing in Road, and the process of revision and editing
that led to On the Road as published are a further complication in assessing
the “how” of the book.
Yet even if On the Road was not written spontaneously (as Kerouac de-
fined Spontaneous Prose and practiced it after Road), and even if the prose
we read in the Viking text is a mix of refinements that Kerouac wanted (his
revisions) and those he didn’t (the work of the copyeditors), his approach
to writing in Road is still the key to its power to convince readers it is still
new and contemporary. For all the conventional gloss waxed and buffed
onto the prose by Viking and in spite of the novel’s relatively conventional
structure (influenced, I’ve suggested elsewhere, by Kerouac’s reading of The
Great Gatsby) (Kerouac’s Crooked Road 8–10, 73), On the Road subverts the
form of the modern novel even as it seemingly fulfills that form. If this shows
it to be something of a transitional work in Kerouac’s career—suspended
between the relatively conventional form of The Town and the City and what
Kerouac termed the “wild form” of Visions of Cody and his later books—it is,
nonetheless, a significant transition and a decisive turn. On the Road, that
is, might be said to subvert the category of the “literary” (as that category
was constructed in the 1940s and 1950s) even as it aspires to be literature,
and the way Kerouac references the form of the conventional novel in Road
even as he drives his book beyond this form is a primary reason why the
book has been, and continues to be, more widely read and discussed than
Kerouac’s more experimental work.
Oddly enough, the radical nature of Kerouac’s approach in On the Road is
most apparent in some of the novel’s quieter moments. For instance, midway
through part 1, Sal, the novel’s narrator, brings a waitress he has met back
to the apartment where he is staying in Denver on the night before he is
planning to push on to San Francisco. Throughout his visit, Sal has moved
back and forth between two social groups, unable to fit in fully with either
or commit fully to either. One set centers on Dean; the other set he meets
through his college buddy Chad King. Sal is drawn to both, but the two sets

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have drawn apart into what Sal describes as “a war with social overtones”
(37). That Sal is accepted in both camps but belongs fully to neither has
added to his sense of being adrift and suspended. Sal tells us,
I got her [Rita] in my bedroom after a long talk in the dark of the front
room. She was a nice little girl, simple and true, and tremendously fright-
ened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She
let me prove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing. She sighed
in the dark. “What do you want out of life?” I asked, and I used to ask
that all the time of girls.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Just wait on tables and try to get along.” She
yawned. I put my hand over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to
tell her how excited I was about life and the things we could do together;
saying that, and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned away
wearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what
God had wrought when He made life so sad. We made vague plans to
meet in Frisco. (57–58)

Sal’s behavior here is exploitative. His claim that he wants “to prove” that
sex is “beautiful” is a con, and he knows it. Yet he does want to prove this
for her and not just to her, and he regrets his failure to do so. Similarly, his
question about what she “want[s] out of life” is both a ploy and genuine.
Sal is, it seems, attempting to lessen her sense that she has been used and
thus ease his guilt, but he also does want her to be “excited” about life, even
though what excites him is the prospect of pushing on to “Frisco” and not
the “life and things we could do together.”
Sal’s relationship to this moment, to Rita, and to relating it to us as read-
ers is complex. He wants a genuine relationship with Rita, yet he wants his
freedom. He willingly barters romantic clichés for sex, and yet he also sees
a more fundamental beauty or possibility within the romantic cliché and
his relationship to her. And he celebrates this possibility to Rita and to us
as readers even as he knowingly distorts it to manipulate her into letting
him “prove” what he fails to prove. We might conclude that Kerouac is so
superficial and confused that he doesn’t sense these layerings and reversals,
but that would be a mistake. In the next paragraph, Sal, having walked
Rita home, “stretch[es] out on the grass of an old church with a bunch of
hobos.” First, the “talk” of the hobos makes him “want to get back on that
road” (and presumably away from romantic and potentially domestic en-
tanglements just as the hobos have rejected, transcended, or failed at such
entanglements). Seemingly, their talk “of harvests and moving north” with
the season should evoke for Sal the freedom to follow the warm weather

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and drink in the evening after a day in the field. And it does, but the image
of following warm weather from harvest to harvest seems also to evoke a
sense of the yearly cycle of seasons and a potentially pastoral or romantic,
even domestic, notion of harvest closer to the Tin Pan Alley line of “Shine
on, harvest moon, for me and my gal.” This would, at least, explain how Sal
veers from “want[ing] to get back on the road” as the hobos talk to notic-
ing instead that the evening is “warm and soft,” which in turn (seemingly
through his association with “warm and soft” and his complex encounter
with Rita) leads him to add,
I wanted to go and get Rita again and tell her a lot more things, and really
make love to her this time, and calm her fears about men. Boys and girls in
America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they
submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting
talk—real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is
precious. I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotive howling off to
the mountains. I wanted to pursue my star further. (58)

What might seem odd here, but it is also significant for understanding how
the novel works, is not the way Sal pauses with the hobos (who have, it seems,
rejected romance and domesticity more definitively than he has) but how
their talk drives a desire to “get back on that road,” even as their talk also
leads him to extend his meditation on his encounter with Rita and how, in
turn, his desire for “real straight talk about souls” so quickly transforms
into “want[ing] to pursue my star further” on the road as he listens to the
locomotive in the mountains.
In the three paragraphs that follow Sal’s hollow conquest of Rita and his
moment on the church lawn with the hobos (which end the chapter and
his stay in Denver), Kerouac continues to layer, deepen, and complicate
these desires, reactions, and reflections. And if we read the passage slowly
(allowing the reversals and paradoxes to resonate) rather than reading it
headlong (as the story of its initial composition might suggest we should),
what stands out is that the action of the scene (seducing Rita, lounging with
the hobos, listening to the train whistle) is secondary. The action serves as
an occasion for something else. Rather than represent the action, the writ-
ing represents Sal’s complex and dynamic awareness of self, of other, of
cultural and social conventions, and of cultural context. And actually, the
more accurate claim here would be that the prose does not so much repre-
sent this awareness as enact it. The quality of Kerouac’s imagination in this
passage underscores how much we miss if we focus too closely on what the
novel represents and fail to allow ourselves to respond to how it represents.

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The novel is about being “on the road” and about Dean and about America
and so on, but it is also the experience of Sal’s multiply-layered and volatile
awareness—his often simultaneous senses of engagement and alienation; of
cultural and personal past; of mythic possibility; of gritty reality; of fantasy,
fact, failure, and hope.
It is, of course, possible to see the complexity of awareness in this scene
as simply Sal’s confusion—or Kerouac’s confusion—and conclude that Sal’s
narration of his seduction of Rita points to Kerouac’s failure as a writer and
that he was, as Capote wanted to believe, merely “typewriting” rather than
“writing.” That would, however, be a mistake. There are too many instances
in the novel of Sal’s simultaneous awareness of, and allegiance to, conflicting
desires and values for this feature of the narration to be only accident and
randomness. Moreover, Sal’s awareness—his openness to possibility yet his
awareness of cost and loss—is, ultimately, what defines him as a character
and as a narrator. But perhaps most tellingly, Sal’s persistent commitment
to conflicting possibilities coheres thematically and threads through the
whole book. Later in part 1, for instance, as Sal is traveling by bus to Los
Angeles, he encounters “the cutest little Mexican girl in slacks” (81). Sal’s
time with Terry, first in Los Angeles, then in several agricultural commu-
nities in central California where he attempts to support her and her small
son by picking cotton, further complicates the issues in his brief affair with
Rita and intensifies his experience of his contradictory desires and hopes
and his guilty failures. The way the other relationships in the novel (Dean’s
with Marylou, Camille, and Inez; Remi’s with Lee Ann, Dunkel’s with
Galatea, even Sal’s “miserably weary split-up” that opens the novel and his
liaison with Laura at the novel’s end) similarly play out competing desires
for physical freedom, meaningful domestic stability, and romance not only
reinforce the pattern but layer and complicate it.
I am not trying to claim here that Sal’s brief description of his tryst
with Rita is some sort of previously unnoticed interpretive key. Rather,
I’m trying to point to two things that are central to how the novel works
and its continued power to compel imaginatively, not just historically, for
what is now half a century. First, these few paragraphs do not present (or
represent) the result of awareness (in which the contradictions have been
erased or structured into a series of subordinations that would imply their
resolution). Instead, these few paragraphs enact a process of awareness.
This distinction is central—even foundational—to Kerouac’s imagination.
Second, the way these enactments of consciousness gain additional depth,
richness, and imaginative impact within the frame of the novel and for the
reader is through their associational relationship to other parallel moments

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in the novel. This is central to Kerouac’s approach to writing. Indeed, Road

is best understood as an all but continuous series of associationally related
moments, and once we focus on the motion within passages and the way
the passages and episodes function as a series of variations around a series
of unresolved and irresolvable desires, the novel’s imaginative power and
the underlying coherence to the seeming randomness become clearer. Sal’s
desire to go on the road is both a desire to escape and a desire to settle down.
It is a desire for freedom from structure and obligation but also a desire for
place, significance, meaning. Leslie Fiedler once dismissed Road by suggest-
ing that Kerouac and his characters thought they were playing at being Huck
Finn but were actually playing at being Tom Sawyer and not even managing
that (491–92). But Fiedler is wrong. While Sal and Dean are avatars of Huck,
and arguably failed avatars, they are Huck and Tom wanting to be Huck
and Jim. If Sal and Dean fail to fulfill the agenda Fiedler seems to set for
them, it is not because they fail to understand the difference between Huck
and Tom—or the difference between Huck and Jim. They understand these
matters all too well. They fail at being Huck and Jim (even as they succeed
at not being Tom) because they are both adults, compelled to search for a
way to include Becky on the community of the raft—something that should
have interested Fiedler, given the larger argument he develops in Love and
Death in the American Novel.
The scope of a relatively brief essay doesn’t allow a full reading of the ways
the episode with Rita anticipates the episode with Terry and how, conversely,
Sal’s relationship with Terry intensifies our sense of the episode with Rita,
but the larger patterns of the novel suggest that these repetitions are not
random. Sal senses the contradictions in his various desires for Rita and
Terry, but he also knows that these contradictions cannot be resolved into
a final structure or hierarchy in which, for example, sexual desire and the
freedom (yet isolation) of being on the road is subordinated to the desire for
stability and domestic order or vice versa (or even one where mutual sexual
pleasure permanently transcends the dialectic of freedom from the other and
responsibility to the other). This conflict, as it is projected in the novel (and
as Kerouac seems to have experienced it in his own life), is not resolvable, nor
can it be given some kind of final or stable mapping. Moreover, the conflict
is best understood as an irresolvable dynamic rather than an irresolvable
structure, which is why the novel’s coherence does not come from (and can-
not come from) the linearity of its plot, in which a thematic argument would
develop in parallel with a plot that moves progressively from a start to a fin-
ish, but instead emerges from its recursiveness in which nodal moments of
experience, awareness, and reflection, such as Sal’s narration of his seduction

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of Rita are probed and elaborated through parallel moments (such as Sal’s
encounter with Terry). In Road each recurrence and repetition is a deepen-
ing of the central conflicts rather than a progression forward toward some
final resolution. (Kerouac, like Whitman, is willing to contradict himself
in order to express the multitude of implications he senses.)
The fundamental quality of Sal’s consciousness and the multiple ways
he relates to the world around him require simultaneity not subordination,
and the coherence of On the Road is the coherence of a jazz solo, not the
coherence of a fugue or even of a symphony. As such, Sal’s description of
several jazz solos in chapter 4 of part 3 can be read as an analogy for the
way Kerouac develops Sal’s engagement of his experience and telling of it.
In describing these jazz performances, Sal emphasizes the way the soloist
develops relatively simple thematic and stylistic motifs through repetition,
variation, and layering. In elaborating the multiple possibilities of the rela-
tively simple material in the real time of performance (rather than the dif-
ferent time and space of solitary composing), the soloist enacts a structural
process in which the multiple possibilities of the material are teased out and
celebrated rather than distilled and fixed into hierarchies. In fact, in Sal’s
description of the performances, he celebrates process as itself structural
rather than something that leads to structure.
That Kerouac experimented with modes of writing that would in part
parallel the bop musician’s commitment to improvisational performance
and the action painter’s willingness to foreground the canvas as a field that
records the act of painting rather than the result of painting (or more ac-
curately a deliberated result) has, I realize, been noted a number of times.
But what hasn’t, perhaps, been sufficiently considered is that Kerouac’s
efforts to develop what he termed a “bop prosody” reflected not only his
need for a prose that would have the immediacy and discursive reach of
Charlie Parker’s bop or the sense of kinetic elaboration in Jackson Pollack’s
painting but also his need for a mode of writing that would allow him not
simply to represent the process of consciousness (as he does in the passage
where Sal describes his affair with Rita) but also to enact consciousness.
As such, the significance of his prose is only partly its stylistic register and
tone. As with bop and action painting, Kerouac’s writing is not only at root
performative but it is also a practice that asks us to attend to process and
emphasizes process over product. It is a practice that foregrounds elabora-
tion. Kerouac’s aesthetic is an aesthetic of enactment, not an aesthetic of
compositional construction.
This emphasis on writing as process, performance, enactment is precisely
what Capote missed (or dismissed) when he labeled the writing in Road

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as merely typewriting. For Capote, the writing in Road lacked art because
Kerouac had not planned the prose, then committed it to the page, then
further refined it through revision. For Capote, the way the prose in Road
unfolds reflected Kerouac’s failure to commit himself to writing as a matter
of compositional distillation, in which the traces of the process have been
eliminated from the final product. The writing was tainted by the presence
of these traces, and Kerouac and his novel seemingly celebrated a lack of
aesthetic control and a deliberate rejection of craft—with the somewhat
misleading story of how Kerouac had typed the initial draft in a mere three
weeks as the ultimate sign of the novel’s failure.
That Kerouac’s desire (or need) for what might be termed an aesthetic of
enactment rather than an aesthetic of composed or constructed product or
object led him into modes of writing that emphasized the motion of percep-
tion and the momentum of the language is, I think, generally recognized (if
not, as Capote illustrates, universally celebrated). What is less recognized is
that Kerouac’s desire or need to cast writing as enactment, as performance,
also led him into experimenting with point of view and to modes of writing
that involved a radical recasting of what were then the established norms
for the rhetoric of fiction. And this aspect of On the Road is, I’d suggest,
finally the most powerful reason why readers who come to the book today
can still respond to it as if it is contemporary.
In Crooked Road I tried to make sense of how Kerouac handled point
of view in On the Road. At the time, I was struck by how much more fully
experimental Kerouac’s approach to writing and fiction became as he pushed
on beyond On the Road to write Visions of Cody and Dr. Sax. This led me to
cast On the Road as a transitional text between Kerouac’s largely conven-
tional first novel, The Town and the City, and the work that followed. In my
zeal to demonstrate the importance of the more radical work that followed,
Cody, I underestimated the experimental nature of Road and how much
Kerouac’s handling of point of view in the novel already marked a decisive
turn toward an alternative aesthetic. In that earlier reading of On the Road,
I suggested that the book could be read as a recasting of The Great Gatsby,
with Dean paralleling Gatsby and Sal paralleling Nick. I still believe that
Kerouac’s reading of Fitzgerald’s masterwork (which was regaining promi-
nence as Kerouac worked on earlier versions of his “Road book”) influenced
On the Road and that Kerouac was aware of the parallels between Gatsby
and Dean and Nick and Sal. However, in my efforts to demonstrate that
part of the achievement of Road was the way it succeeded as a relatively
conventional novel, I didn’t attend closely enough to the ways Kerouac
was simultaneously referencing the form of the conventional novel while

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subverting that form by fashioning an alternative rhetoric through the way

Sal functions as narrator.
For those who have continued to believe that Kerouac is a relatively art-
less writer (that he was a typewriter rather than a writer), there is no clear
or purposeful (that is, aesthetic) handling of point of view in On the Road
because the speed of the writing (that is, the typing of the scroll draft) would
have meant that Kerouac had no time for the reflection and planning he
would have needed to construct Sal Paradise as a persona clearly distinct
from himself, to maintain this persona consistently, and to exploit its aes-
thetic possibilities. If the alternatives are casting Sal as simply a pseudonym
for Kerouac or a narrating persona, concluding that Sal is simply Kerouac
(and thus casting the book as rambling autobiography) seems fully justifi-
able, even though to collapse Sal into Kerouac is precisely to miss how and
why the book remains radical and compelling. In my earlier attempt to
address this problem (probably in part because I was emphasizing that On
the Road was relatively conventional when compared to Visions of Cody), I
tried to emphasize the ways in which Sal as narrator and persona in Road
paralleled Nick as narrator and persona in The Great Gatsby. The parallel
is, I believe, there and critically important, but what is, I’d suggest, finally
more important is how the parallel suggests what is different in the way
Nick and Sal each function within the two novels.
In The Great Gatsby, we can, as many commentators have noted, distin-
guish between the time of the novel’s action and the time of its telling. As
Nick narrates his relationship with Gatsby, he is reflecting back on his earlier
actions as a character in his story. There is, in effect, an earlier Nick and a
later Nick, and the narration offers us two intertwined actions: one is the
story of Nick, Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom in which Nick is a character and which
leads from Nick’s first hearing of Gatsby to Gatsby’s death; the other is the
story of Nick’s growing awareness of himself as he reflects on these matters
and projects the bits he knows into a fuller history of Gatsby and a more
complex interpretation of Gatsby’s final and problematic “greatness.” For
Nick, his earlier experience is a text to be interpreted, and the way Fitzgerald
uses the device of Nick implicitly establishes two distinct but interrelated
levels: experiencing (what the naïve Nick does as he interacts with Gatsby,
Daisy, and Tom) and reflecting (what Nick does as he tells the story to make
sense of it). Much of the novel’s richness comes from Fitzgerald’s handling
of the interplay between the earlier Nick who experiences and the later Nick
who reflects and tells.
In On the Road, the way Kerouac casts Sal as a character in the story that
Sal tells after the action of the plot has concluded resembles Fitzgerald’s use

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of Nick as a narrator, but in spite of this parallel, the way Sal functions as a
narrator enacts an altogether different fictional rhetoric. In Gatsby, Fitzger-
ald maintains a consistent distinction between what Nick experiences as a
character and what he learns as he reflects on his story, and the logic of the
relationship between Nick as character and Nick as narrator is consistent.
Nick, as narrator, may well become more thoughtful about his story as he
tells it, but the distinction between the story he tells and the act of telling it
remains clear and aesthetically purposeful. There is a consistent logic to the
relationship between Nick as character and Nick as narrator, and Fitzgerald
plays these two frames, action and telling, against each other in ways that are
highly artful and thematically rich (as has been noted in study after study
of the novel). In On the Road, however, the dichotomy between the Sal who
is a character and the Sal who narrates is neither as fully established nor as
consistently maintained. This would seem to be a failing on Kerouac’s part
and a significant weakness in the novel. But for Sal to be able to enact and
perform awareness (as he does in the episode with Rita), the distinction
between experiencing and reflecting cannot be as absolute or consistent
as the distinction between experiencing and reflecting is in Gatsby. Here,
again, the difference between performance and composition implicit in jazz
and in Kerouac’s portrayal of jazz in the novel is useful.
In a jazz performance, the soloist, among other things, works to subvert
the distinction between experiencing and reflecting. He draws on experience
(previous interactions with musicians, the melodies and harmonic changes
that are the materials for the act of performance, his own musical character
which is partly a matter of the technique and sound he has developed and
his perspective on, his stance toward, his particular musical language), but
in the moment of performing, these structures and possibilities must be
engaged and enacted in the present, driven by present reasons and con-
texts, and managed in the real time of the performance’s actual duration.
The materials of past experiences must be re-experienced and recreated in
the jazz musician’s act of playing for himself, the musicians around him,
and the audience. The text of the past cannot be represented. The text of
the past must be re-presented by engaging its possibilities as if the past
were also the present. It is a process of discovering what is new in what has
been known but can now become known in a differently inflected way that
treats both the material of the past and its performance in the present as
dynamic and changing. While performance clearly builds what was known
and experienced in the past, it exists in, it engages, the present. It is less a
process of packaging past experience than a process of re-experiencing it
in real time in the present. It is a matter of recasting past experience into

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new experience more than it is a matter of reflecting on past experience.

In performance, the materials of the past are not a text to be fashioned but
the raw materials to be enacted through a complex awareness of past and
present, self and other, and in performance the dichotomy between expe-
riencing and reflecting disappears.
If this analogy has any value, it suggests that Sal isn’t treating his past as a
fixed and finished text that can serve as an occasion for interpretation (and
learning through his interpretation), as Nick treats his past; rather Sal is
engaging his past improvisationally and performatively—reflecting upon it
and interpreting it but also re-experiencing it in ways that can (in response to
the contexts and process of performing) not only change his understanding
of the past but lead him into new experiences that change the past even as
he presents it. In his telling about his tryst with Rita, then, we cannot fully
determine which of his awarenesses and his conflicting impulses reflect the
moment of the original experience (the text for his performance) and which
reflect his re-experiencing of it in telling it in the novel. In Road, that is,
Kerouac reshapes (actually transforms) the dichotomy of experience and
reflection implicit in Fitzgerald’s fictional mode into the dialectic of experi-
ence and re-experience. The past is not a fixed text to be glossed. It is a fluid
text shaped by the simultaneous processes of recalling and presenting in
the real time of performance, and the complexity of awareness that occurs
in this re-experiencing through performing both drives and determines
the improvisational elaboration. In this way, Sal is not simply or merely a
pseudonym for Kerouac but neither is he a conventional persona who can
be completely distinguished from Kerouac. Sal is, instead, a performance of
Kerouac, and Road is, in turn, a sequence of performances enacted through
what might be thought of as performative identity (a constructed stance for
performing) that is more akin to the relationship of the biographical Lester
Young to the performance stance of “Pres” or of Billie Holiday’s to “Lady
Day” than of Fitzgerald to Nick. Sal’s full name is Salvatore (i.e. Salvation)
Paradise, which underscores the way it functions as a performative stance
or identity (and the way Remi and Bull pun on Sal’s name further suggests
that Kerouac was aware of what he was doing in naming the version of the
self who performs the story).
If On the Road is in some sense performative rather than compositional,
then Capote’s binary of “typewriting” and “writing” becomes clearly in-
adequate for understanding what Kerouac was doing in the book and how
and why it continues to work for readers. Capote is right to see “typewrit-
ing” as a key to the nature of Road, but where he reads the “typewriting”
as a sign of Kerouac’s rejection of “writing” (in the sense of composing), I

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would suggest that the “typewriting” should be read as both the sign that
he was attempting to compose the novel as if performing and as his means
for doing so. For Kerouac, that is, “typewriting” wasn’t an evasion of “writ-
ing” (in Capote’s sense of that term), it was a recasting of both “writing”
and mere “typewriting” into something else—into a kind of performative
“typetalking.” This underscores the importance of Kerouac’s claim to Ann
Charters (in 1966) that he wrote the Road (that is, typed the scroll draft of
it) soon after he married his second wife, Joan Haverty, “to tell her what
I’d been through” (Charters, A Bibliography 19). In typing the initial draft,
that is, Kerouac was writing quickly to perform his earlier experiences for
another person (Joan Haverty), and this meant that he needed to remember
in a manner that included the possibility of seeing events and situations not
only anew but even differently, and by writing quickly (typewriting) the
process and the time of the writing could resemble performing a story for
an actual “you” in real time (Kerouac’s ability to type rapidly would have
been, clearly, a necessary precondition for what I’m suggesting here).
This attempt to enact writing as if talking is part of what gives On the
Road its performative quality. It enables Kerouac (as he imagines talking
to Haverty through the performing identity of Sal) to enact conscious-
ness—both re-entering the past of the novel’s action and extending the
implications of the past through becoming more fully aware of its multiple
dimensions and implications. This typetalking also shapes the fictional
rhetoric of Road in ways that help clarify how the book recasts (and subverts)
the form of the modern novel even as it seems, on the surface, to fulfill it.
In composing a novel, the reader (as Walter Ong has aptly demonstrated)
is a fiction—an absent fiction. In writing, one usually treats the surface of
the page (both the actual page on which one writes and the produced page
of the eventually published work) as a surface for storing the writing and as
a kind of surrogate other—the fictional “you” to which the language is not
so much directed (as one directs language to another in speaking) as given.
The activity is, that is, more a matter of composing than performing. In the
several versions of On the Road that Kerouac attempted and abandoned
before drafting the scroll that he revised into the published On the Road,
Kerouac was attempting to compose his material rather than perform it. In
typing the scroll, however, he created a quite different rhetoric for the writ-
ing. Talking requires a “you” to whom the talker talks. And telling a story
to an actual person in real time is inherently performative. It is not simply
a reciting of the past as it actually happened; rather, it is an engagement in
the present moment of what happened in the past (a re-experiencing of it for
the sake of the self, for the sake of the story, and for the sake of the listening

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you to whom the story is directed and who to some degree also elicits it). To
tell the story, to engage and perform it in real time, is to improvise on the
text of one’s experience. It is to create a new past. In writing as if talking,
in what I’ve termed typetalking, Kerouac substituted an actual “you” (Joan
Haverty) with whom he wanted to share his story for the empty surface of
the page and allowed her to function as a mediation for the reader who,
though clearly still in Ong’s sense a fiction, could as a result be imagined
(and spoken to) as if an actual and specific you. In Gatsby the “you” that
Nick addresses is generic. We hear the novel not as speech directed to us as
individual readers but as speech directed to the generic, abstracted you and
which we overhear. By writing as if talking to an actual you (Joan Haverty)
Kerouac was, I would suggest, able to engage the page (rather the continu-
ously unfolding roll of paper) as a mediation to the reader cast as a singular
and specific you rather than as a surface to be filled (that is constructed and
composed) for the reader. He was, that is, able to reconceptualize the page
as a medium for recording performance—the performance of enacting Sal
and re-experiencing his past through, and also as, his performance. Here,
again, the analogy of music may be useful. In Road Kerouac functions like a
musician in a recording studio, casting those present at the recording session
as a surrogate for the eventual listeners of the recording so that he can play
for those who are absent and deferred in time as if they are present in both
space and time. Typetalking is not, then, actual talking to the reader but
rather a recorded performance of talking as if talking to the actual reader.
That recordings created through performance can have great immediacy and
impact—in spite of the mediation and deferral involved in the process—is
evident if one considers such recordings as John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme,
Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, or (to pick an example closer to Kerouac) the
various sides Billie Holiday, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker recorded.
Kerouac’s strategy of writing his novel as if he was talking to an actual
person (Joan Haverty) at an actual moment—not his decision to type the
initial draft of the novel quickly onto a long roll of paper—is, I would suggest,
the actual radicalism of On the Road as well as key to why we still read it as
if contemporary. This decision, it seems, allowed him to perform Sal and to
perform the material of the novel. The typewriting was a matter of typetalk-
ing—an essentially improvisational performance. While Sal as narrator
might seem to resemble Nick as narrator, in reading Gatsby we understand
that Nick is a composed voice; it is as if we overhear him; and his relationship
to the past of his experience and his relationship to the implied or abstracted
you that he addresses is consistently maintained; we both fulfill the position
of this abstracted you even as we know that we are finally not this you. We

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accept, that is, that we are reading a novel and that we are actually outside
the frame of the novel—much as, in attending a performance of a traditional
drama, we pretend that what we see beyond the proscenium on stage is real,
giving ourselves up to that illusion but knowing that the proscenium is there.
In Road Sal is a performed voice, and he addresses us as if we are an explicit,
actual, and singular you. In the construction that is Fitzgerald’s Nick, what
matters (for the fictional illusion to work) is Fitzgerald’s artful construction
and control of the persona he has composed to structure the fictional world
structure (in much the way that perspective in a representational painting
orders the visual space and projects a three-dimensional relationship on and
from the two-dimensional surface of the canvas). In the performance that is
Kerouac’s Sal, what matters is less the traditional craft as aesthetic control
than improvisational craft, energy, and motion that reflects experiential
engagement and that creates for us as single, specific, real readerly “you’s” the
sense that the speaker, Sal, is sincere, genuine. By foregrounding sincerity,
and allowing the speaker’s relationship to self, past, and reader/listener to
continually shift in response the emotional demands of the moment rather
than establishing and maintaining a consistent, artful distance, Kerouac in
Road dispenses with the proscenium. The reader, even though the reader
does not speak, becomes an actor in Sal’s performance of his story. In this
way, Sal’s experience—though a fictional act—is “actual” in a way that Nick’s
is not, since Nick and Nick’s experiences and his reflections on them are
composed reflections. The analogy of music may be useful here. In listening
to a recording of a symphony (even a concert performance of a symphony),
one recognizes that one is hearing the realization of a composed text. In
listening to a jazz performance (even one recorded in a studio without an
actual physical audience present), one still recognizes the engagement,
discovery, and immediacy of the performance.
The way Kerouac casts the reader as a genuine and singular “you”
(through the explicit you of Joan Haverty) and asks the reader to read as if
listening to an actual, present moment of an “I” re-experiencing the past
and performing it (and the way the fluidity and momentum of the prose
support this) is at the core of the “how” of Road works and crucial to its
continued power to be read as if not only fully contemporary but fully real.
For some this has made the book seem merely autobiographical; for others,
it has made the book seem authentically confessional. Both responses, I’d
suggest, involve some recognition that the novel is performative rather than
compositional, but neither response adequately characterizes the novel’s
achievement or the significance of Kerouac’s turn away from the fictional
conventions of the first half of the twentieth century. Neither response gives

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us a real basis for understanding why the novel continues to compel read-
ers nor why the novel not only can be studied but should be studied. For
that, we must accept that reading On the Road requires a particular kind of
listening and a willingness to accept its transformation of the relationship
between writer, writing, reader, and reading. And to accept this is to begin
to make sense of its actual importance.

CdiZ
This essay revisits—and recasts—aspects of the reading of On the Road I
offered in 1981 in Kerouac’s Crooked Road. In that study I tried to distinguish
the more conventional aesthetic of On the Road from the radically experi-
mental aesthetic of Visions of Cody. In focusing on the contrast between
the two, however, I failed to credit how aspects of the writing in On the
Road anticipate the experimental practice to come, and how these aspects
of On the Road already initiate a fundamental break with the conventions
for fiction in the 1940s and 1950s. Walter J. Ong’s work, which calls atten-
tion to the relationship between (and differences between) speaking and
writing, started my process of rethinking my earlier readings. The issue of
“orality” in On the Road, which is implicit to the claim in this essay about
“typetalking,” is discussed in “Men Talking in Bars.” The issue of the dif-
ferences between performing and composing as contrasting strategies for
creating works of art, a matter which also threads through the argument
in this piece, is developed in “The Muse Learns to Tape.”
Although Warren Tallman’s excellent 1959 essay “Kerouac’s Sound” is not
mentioned directly in this piece, his sensitivity to Kerouac’s style figures
indirectly in this attempt to consider what might be termed Kerouac’s fic-
tional rhetoric. It remains one of the most subtle and thoughtful discussions
we have of Kerouac as a writer. I would also like to note Ronna Johnson’s
essay, “‘Girls, visions, everything’: Gender and Narrative in On the Road,”
which she generously shared with me in manuscript. Her recognition of
what she terms On the Road’s “liminal status at the postmodern divide” has
been key in helping me realize that On the Road was not simply Kerouac’s
last traditional novel before the breakthrough to experiment in Visions
of Cody but is instead a significant stage in the transition from the more
conventional fiction of The Town and the City to the more radical aesthetic
of Visions of Cody and Dr. Sax.

Ldg`h8^iZY
Charters, Ann. A Bibliography of Works by Jack Kerouac. Rev. ed. New York:
Phoenix Bookshop, 1975.

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———. Introduction. On the Road. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Penguin,
1991. vii–xxix.
———. Kerouac: A Biography. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973.
Fiedler, Leslie. “The Eye of Innocence.” The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler.
Vol. 1. New York: Stein and Day, 1981. 471–511.
Hunt, Tim. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction. Hamden, Conn.:
Archon Books, 1981.
———. “Men Talking in Bars.” Kerouac’s Crooked Road. Rpt. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1996: xiii–xxvii.
———. “The Muse Learns to Tape.” Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in
the Late Age of Print. Ed. Elizabeth Loizeaux and Neir Fraistat. Madison: U
of Wisconsin P, 2002. 189–210.
Kerouac, Jack. “A Billowy Trip in the World from On the Road.” New Directions
16. New York: New Directions, 1957: 93–105.
——— (Jean-Louis). “Jazz of the Beat Generation.” New World Writing: Seventh
Mentor Selection. New York: The New American Library, 1955. 7–16.
———. “The Mexican Girl.” Paris Review 11 (Winter 1955): 9–32.
———. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Ong, Walter J. “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction.” PMLA 90 (Jan.
1975): 9–21.
Tallman, Warren. “Kerouac’s Sound.” 1959. A Casebook on the Beat. Ed. Thomas
Parkinson. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969: 215–29.

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The now iconic novel On the Road seems a likely candidate for recreation in
the medium of film. Road trips, buddy movies, 1950s period pieces are famil-
iar and marketable to audiences of popular culture. Commercially successful
in itself, On the Road is especially screen-friendly. Upon its publication in
1957, On the Road was dismissed as a literary equivalent of pop art, its poetic
structures and language mistaken as ungrammatical and irreverent. Few
critics recognized its deep roots in the traditions of literature—American
and European—and in fact much of its popularity and commercial success
rested on its themes of rebellious youth, reflected less in literature than
in such films as Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild One. That no major
motion picture has been made in the fifty years of the novel’s existence
suggests difficulties that have eluded filmmakers thus far but seem to have
been resolved at least for now, with a film planned for release in 2009. A
look at the challenges of making a film of On the Road may provide some
new insights into the novel and its transcendent resonance.
Let us turn for the sake of comparison to the one Beat book that was suc-
cessfully turned into a film, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch refashioned
as David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991).1 The tropes of Naked Lunch were
simpatico with Cronenberg’s own preoccupations. In Videodrome (1983),
for example, James Woods becomes a human tape recorder, his body used
mechanically. The Fly (1986) showed Cronenberg’s obsession with insects.
Burroughs’s idea of the body as a “soft machine,” his fantastic drug-induced
images, and the characters in his routines ignited the filmmaker’s imagina-
tion. Cronenberg created humanoid Mugwumps, talking typewriters, even a
talking asshole, giant centipedes (their meat made a heavy hallucinogen)—all
extrapolations of Burroughs’s text.

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But commercial films require plot. Organizationally, Naked Lunch had

none. To publish the book, order had to be imposed on the pages upon pages
of typed material yanked from the typewriter and dropped randomly to the
floor in Burroughs’s Tangier hotel. Even assembled, the text alone could not
have provided the necessary narrative.
Several key texts were optioned and employed by Cronenberg in crafting
a coherent script: the novel itself, another Burroughs work, Exterminator,
and the author’s introduction to the first edition of Burroughs’s Queer, 2
written in 1951 but not published until 1986. This collection of texts gave
Cronenberg the source material for the special amalgamation of Naked
Lunch routines, characters, vignettes. “The film is about writing,” said the
director. “Typewriters come to life and insist upon being heard.”3
The story of Burroughs’s early occupation as exterminator, published in
1966, could be melded with an apology and rationale for the most egregious
and notorious episode in a writer’s life, the story of how Burroughs shot his
wife Joan in a so-called William Tell routine in 1951 in Mexico City. The
Queer introduction becomes a vehicle for hindsight speculation. Burroughs
explains his “Ugly Spirit” and his ideas about chance, and ruminates on a
paralyzing accident involving the writer Denton Welch. In short, he con-
nects the personal experience of killing Joan with the fact of his becoming
a writer. Writing, he explains, is an act of redemption.
The accidental killing of Joan has been endlessly mythologized. Cronen-
berg incorporates this cataclysmic act as myth and enlarges it by including
other myths. The resulting Naked Lunch script is paradoxically the most
astute reading of the original text as well as a big cop-out. Less Naked Lunch
per se, and more about “the writer writing Naked Lunch, it is about how a
writer comes to write a book like Naked Lunch.”4 Like many readers of the
novel, the screenplay preferred to reflect on the author’s own story rather
than take up the difficulties inherent in the work. In so doing, Cronenberg
reimagined Beat myth by focusing on the central act of Burroughsian biog-
raphy: the accidental shooting of his wife, Joan. In the film, the protagonist
William Lee does it twice. First, as a consequence of imbibing too much
exterminator fluid; and second, as a reinvention of the parallel myth of Paul
and Jane Bowles in Tangier.5 In Cronenberg’s recreation of “Interzone,” the
character of William Lee meets an odd couple, residents with whom he
repeats the original “sin,” the original William Tell routine that brought
Joan/Jane down.
Put another way, Cronenberg fudged his original intention, retaining his
own way of dealing with sex, exotic sex, wild drug-induced fantasies—the
very substance of the Naked Lunch text. With the three texts together, he

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could craft a narrative of the disparate materials that made up the original.
Considering the need in traditional films for plot, Cronenberg found an
answer: “Throw the book away,” he said and offered the following explana-
tion: “A movie of the book Naked Lunch would cost 400 million dollars and
would be banned in every country in the world.”6
Read: The language cannot be filmed.
Unlike Naked Lunch, On the Road has a readymade plot, a deceptively
simple journey that can be acted out in the American landscape. Still, the
making of the film of On the Road by Francis Ford Coppola and Zoetrope,
written by Jose Rivera and directed by Walter Salles, the team that made
the recent Motorcycle Diaries, has met with much skepticism in the worlds
of Kerouac scholarship and film alike. A half dozen or so screenplays have
been commissioned, written, and discarded by Coppola, some scripted by
such well-known writers as the novelist Russell Banks. The fate of this film
has been off again, on again. This time, however, a film will be made. A script
has been approved, as of this writing. And what will it contain? Playwright
Jose Rivera said he has based his script upon the search for the father, an
idea derived from taped interviews the director Walter Salles conducted
with key surviving Beat figures in researching his work. The script begins
with “Papa Paradise” on his deathbed and ends with Sal Paradise, having
returned from the road, visiting Papa’s grave. Plus material from Beat legend
not found in the text itself. 7
Read: The language cannot be filmed.
Aware that the original scroll starts with “I first met Neal not long after
my father died,” and that the final moments of the novel speak of “The
father we never found,” the filmmakers have chosen a narrative arc that
makes sense. From a literary point of view, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty
questing after the father—a literal father with all Freudian interpretations
operative—can mean so much more. “Father” represents institutions of
stability, establishment, tradition, formality, authority by extrapolation, as
object of that quest.8

Jack Kerouac was a pop culture fan. Like many of his contemporaries, he
listened to The Shadow on the radio and went to movies as often as he could.9
With the advent of television, one could say that the 1950s inaugurated the
eras of visual culture to come. Kerouac was part of a generation that was
accustomed to the narrative possibilities of cinema. He recorded in his
journal on Wednesday, January 7, 1948:
Saw “Crime & Punishment”10. . . . the French movie version with Pierre
Blanchar is still the most Dostoyevskyan: when Raskolnikov goes to give

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himself up, the Inspector is not in (casually), Raskolnikov wanders out

without confessing, but Sonya, Sonya stands there outside looking at him,
. . . When a man presents the world with his own details, and lights them
with his celestial visions of unworldly love, that is the highest genius.
(Windblown World 42)
This entry is relevant for several reasons: first is the clear indication of his
early interest in movies; second is Kerouac’s recognition of the possibilities
of film for narrative; third is his way of presenting the image of saintly Ras-
kolnikov, because it prefigures his manner of characterization throughout
the autobiographically inspired novels he called the Duluoz Legend.
Hollywood is a site in On the Road, the trigger for Kerouac’s character-
istic linguistic flow:
We went to Hollywood to try to work in the drugstore at Sunset and Vine.
Now there was a corner! Great families off jalopies from the hinterlands
stood around the sidewalk gaping for sight of some movie star, and the
movie star never showed up. When a limousine passed they rushed eagerly
to the curb and ducked to look: some character in dark glasses sat inside
with a bejeweled blond. “Don Ameche! Don Ameche!” . . . They milled
around, looking at one another. Handsome queer boys who had come to
Hollywood to be cowboys . . . (87)
The passage illustrates Kerouacean linguistic tropes, the oppositions of
“gaping for the sight of some movie star” versus “the movie star never
showed up.” He sketches this scene using broad strokes. In Visions of Cody,
he creates an in-depth, detailed version of a film set.11
Kerouac used visual techniques in Visions of Cody, a variation of On
the Road written in 1952 and published posthumously in 1972; Kerouac
directs a scene in language. The “Joan Rawshanks in the Fog” section is
a revision of central Kerouacean preoccupations through the filter of the
ultimate American scene, a Hollywood movie shoot featuring the actress
Joan Crawford. Renaming her Joan Rawshanks in his playful slant rhyme,
Kerouac provides a panoramic view of this scene, his eye taking the posi-
tion of a camera panning the central figure against a background of curious
neighbors: “Joan Rawshanks stands alone in the fog. . . . and a thousand eyes
are fixed on her. . . . above Joan Rawshanks rises the white San Francisco
apartment house in which the terrified old ladies who spend their sum-
mers in lake resort hotels are now wringing their hands in the illuminated
(by the floodlights outside) gloom of their living rooms” (Visions of Cody
275–76 ). The camera eye allows Kerouac to double the action by “shooting”
(with words) the scene being shot. The effect is both an objective take and a

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subjective rendering of this image, the actress in her mink coat by the wet
bushes, leaning “against the dewy wire fence separating the slopeyard of
the magnificent San Francisco Deluxe Arms from the neat white Friscoan
street-driveway sloping abruptly at seventy-five degrees.” Behind her, “angry
technicians muster and make gestures in the blowing fog that rushes past
klieg lights and ordinary lights . . . to make everything seem miserable and
storm-hounded” (275). In other words, Kerouac records the lone, solitary
actress backlit in difficult conditions.
His take echoes scene upon scene in his entire oeuvre: in his Book of
Dreams, the same image dominates: “I had the Tolstoyan Dream, a great
movie, with the . . . hero officer . . . the performance of the ‘Peasant’—the
old Fellaheen hero—He is in Cossack soldier uniform, an officer comes into
his strange room to arrest him, the Peasant is just standing there,—with a
sense that not only I but my father is watching this film” (16–17). A central
figure in silhouette—defined by the single detail of his “Cossack soldier
uniform”—is in danger. Like Joan Rawshanks he is solitary—and he is a
hero, just as we might surmise that she is the hero of the movie.
The image recurs in Kerouac’s poetry, in haiku:

The windmills of
Oklahoma look
In every direction

One flower
On the Cliffside
Nodding at the canyon12

What links the image of Joan Rawshanks, the Fellaheen hero, the wind-
mills, and the flower is Kerouac’s ability to render the subject’s essence as
archetype, a vision of everyday humanity juxtaposed with the shimmering,
ephemeral nature of fleeting existence. The central image is set against a wide
expanse or hostile circumstance, in conditions beyond individual control.
Sensitivity to impermanence dominates Kerouac’s characterizations in his
Legend of Duluoz, from The Town and the City, constructed around the
death of the father in the Martin family, through The Book of Dreams, and
on, evoking the frail individual threatened by a harsh, indifferent environ-
ment, at times succumbing, defeated.
Kerouac’s concept of the hero dovetailed with cultural attitudes of the
alienated individual within an emotionally harsh society. With Kerouac’s
characters Sal and especially Dean capturing the zeitgeist, one can imagine
On the Road’s appeal for filmmakers, the competition in Hollywood for film

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rights. But like the book, the would-be film invited misinterpretations. As
Kerouac explained in a 1961 letter to Carroll Brown: “Because of . . . scenes
about ‘criminality’ so-called the book was branded as being a kind of Marlon
Brando Anarchy ‘Wild Ones’ hoodlum blackjacket thing” (Selected Letters
289). That was not what Kerouac had in mind. In part 1, chapter 1, of the
novel, he explains “criminality” as pertains to Dean: “not something that
sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it
was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long
prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for joy rides)” (7–8).
Hollywood was very interested in turning the book into a film. Even
after an offer of $100,000 came in from Warner Brothers, Kerouac’s agent,
Sterling Lord, held out for more. Paramount also contacted Lord, and for
a while it seemed that Brando, a Paramount star, was interested in the
project. But Brando balked, since he considered the novel too “loose” for
Hollywood treatment, or in Kerouac’s words, “says it doesnt have movie
structure” (Selected Letters 78). Kerouac tried, unsuccessfully, to revive
the actor’s interest by describing how he would adapt it to the screen: “told
him I’d write the screenplay myself making one vast roundtrip journey
if he wants” (Sterritt 164). Kerouac’s response shows he was savvy to the
economy needed in the crafting of screenplays. Imagining other possibili-
ties for a film of On the Road, in a letter to Neal Cassady, Kerouac writes of
casting himself to play Sal and Neal to play Dean: “Everybody asking me
‘WHO will play Dean Moriarty’ and I say ‘He will himself if he wants to’
so boy maybe truly you can become movie star” (Selected Letters 72). Since
that time, many actors have fantasized about playing Dean Moriarty or his
sidekick Sal Paradise.13
Hollywood may not have been the right way to go. The only film made of
a Beat property during the Beat period was The Subterraneans (1960). The
film rights to Kerouac’s novel were sold to MGM in 1958. Apparently unwill-
ing to deal with the issues surrounding ethnicity at the heart of the book,
the film took the object of protagonist Leo Percepied’s affection, Mardou
Fox, a woman of black and American Indian ancestry, and transformed her
into a white foreigner played by the French actress Leslie Caron. The movie
was not a success, and On the Road, Kerouac’s most popular novel, was not
headed toward Hollywood treatment anytime soon.
By the late 1960s, after the independent filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker
completed his documentary about Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour, Don’t Look Back,
Sterling Lord simply gave him the option for On the Road. Recognizing the
importance of cars to the subject, and thinking that he would open with
the characters parking cars in a lot, Pennebaker finally decided he did not

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know how to make the film.14 That sentiment was echoed more recently
by Francis Ford Coppola: “I did not know how to make the film,” after his
own attempt at an On the Road screenplay. At one point, he wanted to make
the film in black and white with unknown actors, in the manner of Robert
Frank’s spontaneous filmmaking.15
Kerouac’s career was enhanced by his friendship and collaboration with
the photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. These two artists shared an
immigrant sensibility; Kerouac was born and raised in a French-Canadian
community in Lowell, Massachusetts, and Robert Frank came to the United
States from his native Switzerland in 1947. Each of these artists saw America
from an outsider’s remove. Think of Cody, his face pressed up against the
glass at Hector’s cafeteria in Visions of Cody, eyeing the splendor of its of-
ferings, a panoramic view of America’s plenty. The fictive character Cody
allows Kerouac to express the vision as if he too were seeing it for the first
time, distanced, unfamiliar, yearning. Indeed, Frank’s work in photography
and film is a visual correlative to Kerouac’s writing, as the critic David Ster-
ritt has observed. When Frank asked Kerouac to write the introduction for
his collection of photographs, The Americans, the novelist responded with
a “gut-level excitement at discovering a sensibility very similar to his own,
confronting a vast range of American experience with the sort of energy,
enthusiasm, and spontaneity he sought in his writing” (Sterritt 85).
Look at the photo called “U.S. 91, Leaving Blackfoot, Idaho” (Frank 75)—
it’s a buddy movie in itself: two men, cowboys, judging by the hat and jean
jackets in close-up behind the wheel of a car, transfixed by the road ahead.
Or, “Car Accident—U.S. 66, between Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona”
(Frank 81): four people in a cold, desolate environment staring over a body
covered by a blanket. As Kerouac pointed out, “After seeing these pictures
you finally end up not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than
a coffin” (Introduction, The Americans 5). This image amid images of lunch
counters, dirty dishes, a lone man seated against a wall, signage emblematic
of an America seen through eyes of wonder, makes myth, as the photogra-
pher Walker Evans observed, of the most ordinary subjects. Another mirror
of Kerouac’s preoccupation is “U.S. 285, New Mexico” (Frank 83), “a flat
road in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, a broken white
line running down the right side of the black road, a solid white line on the
left, one black car approaching” (Frank 83). The road in this photo is that
single entity, alone in a wide, black expanse. The road is Kerouac’s flower,
his Joan Rawshanks, his father, his fellaheen hero, his windmill. But more,
as the critic Greil Marcus quotes Walker Evans observing Frank’s photos,
“The road was the American thing itself” (Marcus 114).

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Kerouac may have admired Frank’s eye, but Kerouac added something
of his own to the visual mix. He added ears. On the Road has its own
soundtrack, in the music of his poetic cadences, bluesy, jazzy, with some of its
scenes taking place in clubs, the drinkers egging on, emboldening the players
who have “IT.” In Visions of Cody, his variation of On the Road, Kerouac’s
concern is the creation of the hero’s voice. The section called “Frisco: The
Tape,” is a tape-recorded conversation between Cody and Jack Duluoz. The
concern is more than literary. Though the narrator and his subject talk about
the act of writing with reference to writers of the past, the conversation is
an experiment in contemporary dialogue. Furthermore, Duluoz refers to
the section called “Imitation of the Tape,” an interior monologue utilizing
a variety of invented voices, as “this movie house of mine in the dream”
(Visions of Cody 251).
In his play, The Beat Generation (1957), Kerouac explores the possibilities
for speech as emblematic of America, tuning in with the same fascination
that Frank brought to the peculiarly American details registered in his pho-
tos. Milo the brakeman makes his first appearance here, in blue uniform,
his hat, cap, racing form, Bible, and flutes sharing space in his pockets. “It
was an extryspecial day,” he says to Buck (57). It is clear Kerouac wants to
create his own lingo imitative of the language of America, but dotted with
thoughts of Buddha, astral bodies, karmic debt, rebirth, ruminations on
God, the selling of Jesus, dreams—and literary, with reference to H. G. Wells.
Starting out “early morning in New York near the Bowery, standing in the
kitchen, cheap kitchen” (1)—in fact, in Al Sublette’s kitchen, there is a “crazy
scene” wherein Neal and Al Hinkle play chess. Al Sublette and Kerouac toast
Khayyam tokay, and the scene ends with the characters playing flute solos
“straight off that Visions of Neal tape of 1952” (Selected Letters 72).
The Beat Generation reads like a precursor to Pull My Daisy, Kerouac’s
collaboration with Robert Frank in film.16 In fact, it is acts 1 and 2. Pull My
Daisy was act 3 of the three-act play Kerouac was commissioned to write
for Broadway, which he planned as “the night of the Bishop, . . . of the new
Aramean church” (Selected Letters 72), improvised and filmed in January
1959 in a Lower East Side loft studio. The ensemble cast included David
Amram, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Larry Rivers,
and others; filmed by Frank, the short film was codirected by Alfred Leslie,
with narration by Kerouac, and released later in 1959 (Selected Letters 72,
Charters’s note).
Now considered a classic in experimental filmmaking of that era and a
model for verité filmmakers to come, Pull My Daisy can be seen as a polemic
in its pitting the “squares” against the “hipsters,” illustrating essential dif-

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ferences with spontaneity winning out; the Beat characters come off more
compassionate, human, real than their visitors. Societal formality and be-
havior are examined in Pull My Daisy. On the Road presents similar scenes
of the central figures in situations where their antic behavior is set against
a backdrop of convention, order, and tradition. In fact, much of the effect
of the novel at its first appearance relied on the reader’s understanding of
its representing an alternative life, an alternative American dream, scene
after scene. Episodes like characters speeding along the American landscape,
hitchhiking, or pissing off the back of a truck reveal a cultural shift away
from then-current societal norms. Similarly in Pull My Daisy, Allen Gins-
berg as actor impersonating a cockroach, his movements a bizarre contrast
to the polite, serious, conventional image of the bishop and his family seated
on the couch, their hands folded in their laps, is humorous and poignant.
People simply do not do that in proper society, and for a 1959 audience, the
meaning would have leapt out. When the “characters” question the bishop
on the nature of God, the film takes a serious turn, revealing the depth of
Beat inquiry and quest for a convincing spiritual reality; their dissatisfaction
with the uptight bishop’s response is palpable. It is a beatific moment.
On the Road may be considered a series of such beatific epiphanies. At
the same time, many critiques of the novel cite its episodic structure as a
failing. In terms of a film, the key scenes on the road in a moving American
landscape, in a jazz club, at Old Bull Lee’s, would have to be made visual
in an extended narrative. The novel resolved those aesthetic issues in its
language, in its use of repetition, of key phrases triggering verbal riffs, in
Kerouac’s expansion of language as a storytelling medium. In film, viewers
are accustomed to cuts, sometimes well-thought-out transitions, sometimes
jarring and abrupt jumps. To use the genre of film as an exploration of
storytelling possibilities, new idioms would have to be explored. The road
motif is readymade for film. But, we have already seen that film. Two guys
against the world, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, two girls, Thelma
and Louise, heading over the cliff in a shiny car, two guys on motorcycles
silhouetted against the landscape: Easy Rider, Motorcycle Diaries. To make
it new, film idiom would have to come to its next moment. Can the medium
of film be stretched in the manner in which On the Road expanded narrative
possibilities for literary fiction?
Greil Marcus offers some possibilities in his examination of the 1997
movie Lost Highway by David Lynch. “The story unfolds solely to get Fred
Madison [Lynch’s protagonist] to that point where he can take a car down
a broken yellow line on a black road at night as fast as the car will go”
(Marcus 115). He might as well be describing Dean, who is “the perfect guy

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for the road because he actually was born on the road” (On the Road 1).
“‘Whooee!’ yelled Dean. ‘Here we go!’ And he hunched over the wheel and
gunned her” (134).
But more to the point, the observer of that fascination, the filmmaker
or the onlooker/novelist Sal/Kerouac takes the road with his protagonist
and makes something of it, thereby using it to explore issues that transcend
the road itself. In Lynch’s case a la Marcus, the road as “American thing”
presents the drama of the iconic—the idea, or the faith, that certain images,
that certain postures, expressions and movements, framed and allowed to
hold a moment of time, can embody very nearly the whole of a country’s
identity, or its fantasy, its received but still felt and imagined self” (Marcus
115). Lynch’s art suggests that “the apparent insistence on a secret hiding
inside the movie and the American landscape, the physical landscape, the
psychological landscape is a con” (Marcus 130), much as Kerouac’s motifs
of red brick against neon hint at a false reality. But Kerouac’s road wants to
cut through that neon American dream to a belief system that is solid, on
one level, the end of his quest. In On the Road, Route 6—which “intersects
Route 66 before they both shoot west for incredible distances” (13) cuts
across Kerouac’s America, “the great raw bulge and bulk of my American
continent” (79), the long red line that leads from “the tip of Cape Cod clear
to Ely, Nevada, and there dipped down to Los Angeles” (12)—is a significant
system of signposts akin to Frank’s visual equivalent and Lynch’s vision of
America. And further, says Sal, “It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid
hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across
America instead of trying various roads and routes” (13).
If one follows the idea of Kerouac’s legend as a legend of language,
Kerouac’s “road” is less a physical place and more a conceit or poetic map
of an interior landscape, an America that exists only in a dream vision.
Finding a film idiom to accommodate a dream vision is a challenge that
has been met by many auteurs such as Fellini and Bergman as well as more
conventional directors such as Frank Capra, whose It’s a Wonderful Life is
clearly a dream vision. In contemporary cinema, David Lynch has invented
a visual language corresponding to dream vision.
Several ideas link Lynch to Kerouac—thematically, the focus on America,
on American landscape, and the meaning of that exploration. Aesthetically,
“Lost Highway is the freest of Lynch’s movies. . . . Lynch’s artiest film, the one
that calls attention to its own composition. . . . The artiness leaves a perfume
of transcendence, the transcendence of reality and ordinary life” (Marcus
130). In his new film, Inland Empire, a three-hour epic referring to Holly-
wood, at least one of the strands on which the “story” or plot is based is a

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film being filmed. In speaking about his craft and his use of video in making
this feature, David Lynch said, “I love dream logic. I write scenes just before
shooting them.” He would get an idea for a scene and shoot it, get another
idea and shoot that. “I didn’t know how they would relate.” The story unfolds
for actors as it does for him and for viewers.17 From this spontaneous and
instinctive creation, eventually a grand design emerges in several strands:
an actress lands a coveted role but the movie, a remake, may be cursed by
the double murder of the leads in the original. Folded in are a Baltic radio
play, a Greek chorus of scantily clad prostitutes, and a sitcom featuring
rabbit-headed characters. While winning prizes and standing ovations as
well as its share of boos, the film asks “what does it mean?” which comes to
be beside the point. As a narrative, it is hard to pin down. As a movie filled
with extraordinary visual images, it is mesmerizing.18 To extrapolate from
Marcus’s analysis, in place of conventional storytelling, Lynch creates a
visual vocabulary that extends the possibilities of film in a powerful, risky,
and fresh way—fresh in the way that On the Road felt when it first appeared.
Each artist’s work calls attention to itself, its own artistry and composition,
creating its own language toward a vision of something else.
Compared to Lynch’s road vision, Kerouac’s is lucid, familiar, and old-
fashioned. Called to the task of having to clarify the theme of On the Road,
Kerouac wrote: “Dean and I were embarked on a tremendous journey
through post-Whitman America to FIND that America and to FIND the
inherent goodness in American Man” (Selected Letters 289). Whitman
becomes a benchmark for a new journey in American experience/writing,
creating a mandate for exploring the essence of America: that is Whitman’s
“Prophecy.”
Similarly in search of “that America” and the “inherent goodness in
American Man,” Allen Ginsberg went on road trips of his own. The critic
John Lardas calls his 1953 poem “The Green Automobile” Ginsberg’s poetic
rendition of Kerouac’s On the Road (Lardas 213):

If I had a Green Automobile

I’d go find my old companion
In his house on the Western ocean . . .

In the Green Automobile

Which I have invented
Imagined and visioned
On the roads of the world.
(Ginsberg, Collected Poems 1947–1980 83–87)

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Commemorating their love affair, Ginsberg imagines himself riding around

with Neal Cassady with Cassady’s sexuality seen as a “‘vehicle’ for cultural
procreation” (Lardas 213). Ginsberg, as Kerouac had before him, mytholo-
gized Cassady as an American Adam, a Huck Finn unspoiled by societal
acculturation—a new child/man in Paradise and a regenerative force. He
was also the outsider, the lone figure, his face pressed against the glass, a
representation of the immigrant sensibility. In his last appearance in On the
Road, the character based on Cassady has been denied the ride that will take
Sal and friends uptown for a concert: “[T]he only thing I could do was sit
in the back of the Cadillac and wave at him. . . . and the last I saw of him he
rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent
to it again” (306–7). Cassady was for Ginsberg and Kerouac a liberating
inspiration, a catalyst for experiencing a freedom in America that would
lead to greater visions of what America might become.
Unlike Kerouac, Ginsberg operated in a political arena. Yet much of his
sensibility regarding the individual was formed in relation to Kerouac and
is the stuff of early Beat history. Liberated in his visions of America by the
mid-sixties, Ginsberg’s most vital road epic is the poem “Wichita Vortex
Sutra” (1966)—as panoramic and documentary as Frank’s The Americans.
Triggered by his memory of a powerful 45-minute long reading of this poem
at St. Mark’s Church, by Ginsberg in 1994, Greil Marcus identifies this poem
as a statement of America’s promise, both envisioned and thwarted, the
“American thing” and the con. The poem is a record of America reeling
from the Vietnam War, and so Ginsberg had thrown in images in a vortex
like a Kansas tornado: “street signs, store names, billboard slogans, talk
shows, advertisements for Pepsi” (Marcus 269). This was a littered Ameri-
can road that had its own bleak promise. Writing nearly a decade after
Kerouac’s Road had appeared, Ginsberg was preoccupied “with what . . . he
would call Whitman’s ‘Prophecy’”—that is, the “prophecy that the nation
would . . . be called to judgment and leave behind an irresistibly seductive
image of perdition” (Marcus 269). Ginsberg was intent on depicting “the
American pastoral as it passed by under his eye on the highway, unable to
outrun the American berserk in Vietnam. He was there, ‘lone man from
the void, riding a bus / hypnotized by red tail lights on the straight / space
road ahead,’ to judge the country. And he was there to save it” (Marcus
269). The poem declares,
I’m an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas
but not afraid
to speak my lonesomeness in a car,
because not only my lonesomeness

&.-
 8VcDci]ZGdVY<ddci]ZHXgZZc4

it’s Ours, all over America,

O tender fellows—
& spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy.
(Ginsberg 405)

The critic John Lardas identifies the Beat message: “to resist that which
is given you and create a world as divine as possible out of everyday ma-
terials” (256). In “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” Ginsberg asserts that the artist
accomplishes that mission through “Language,” saying “Language” again
and again. Indeed, that is the great innovation of the Beat writers, embed-
ded in Burroughs’s word horde, Kerouac’s spontaneous bop prosody, and
Ginsberg’s strophes. Invoking a line from Mexico City Blues, Lardas writes,
“As this evolution continues, American may once again become, in Kerouac’s
words, a ‘permissible dream’” (257).

On the Road, the film, may attempt to create a new visual vocabulary, as
Lynch does in Lost Highway or in the more recent Inland Empire. No mat-
ter how it is conceived, the film will do as films do, bring this road movie,
this American odyssey, to the devoted and uninitiated alike. Walter Salles’s
approach is more attuned to the goals associated with “indie” filmmaking,
not Hollywood, even though his plot is linear, and he distills from Kerouac’s
spontaneous prose episodes of sex and adventure more in keeping with the
American western. As he works on bringing On the Road to screen, Walter
Salles writes: “Road movies . . . are about experiencing above all. The con-
flicts that consume their characters are basically internal ones,” and as such,
road movies “need to trace the internal transformation of their characters.
They are about the journey.” He suggests that he is forging a film gram-
mar to incorporate Kerouac’s spontaneity with his own assertion that “the
most interesting road movies are those in which the identity crisis of the
protagonist mirrors the identity crisis of the culture itself.” (32). His filmic
concerns bring his methodology close to Kerouac’s aesthetic and the Beat
political agenda for prophesy as exemplified by Beat road literature, includ-
ing Ginsberg’s “Green Automobile” and “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” at least
in theory. Kerouac’s road as “American thing” is a transition, the medium
from here to there.
As Salles transforms the American road trip into a familiar American
film genre, a question arises: can the language be filmed? Further, what is
the filmic language for an internal journey, a transformation? As recon-
figured by Salles and Rivera in keeping with Kerouac’s original intentions,
the road starts with a “father” and leads back to a “father”: his own father,
father surrogates, Dean’s father (the Denver wino “we never found” [307]),

&..
 GZ\^cVLZ^cgZ^X]

and God the father, who may or may not be Pooh Bear. How much of these
literal and metaphoric layers will make it into the final film? With this in-
tention to use Kerouac’s road trip as an itinerary of cultural change, let us
hope something will reach out from behind the celluloid: the shimmering
specter, the prophecy that gives Kerouac’s iconic novel its enduring and
transcendent value as art.

CdiZh
1. A late 1960s attempt to produce a musical version by Antony Balch and
Brion Gysin, to star Mick Jagger, fizzled.
2. The Queer manuscript had been sold to a collector in Liechtenstein and
remained there until Burroughs was able to re-acquire the book in 1986.
3. David Cronenberg. Interview with author, Fall 1990.
4. David Cronenberg. Interview with author, Fall 1990.
5. David Cronenberg. Interview with author, Fall 1990.
6. David Cronenberg. Interview with author, Fall 1990.
7. Jose Rivera. Interview with author, Spring 2006.
8. See Weinreich, Spontaneous Poetics.
9. It is perhaps tangential to consider here what Kerouac might have gleaned
from listening to the “behind-the-veil-of-illusion effects that go back to 1930s
radio plays—the ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow
knows!’ shock-horror of an unreadable boogeyman face” (Marcus 105). The
picture (that is not a picture) that comes to mind is the Shrouded Traveler or
the Ghost of the Susquehanna. See also Isaac Gewirtz’s extensive exhibition
catalogue for the New York Public Library’s comprehensive homage, Beatific
Soul: Jack Kerouac On the Road.
10. See Hrebeniak for a discussion of Kerouac’s extensive interest in the
Russian novel.
11. See Weinreich, Spontaneous Poetics. See Carolyn Cassady, Heartbeat 27.
12. See Weinreich, Introduction, Kerouac’s Book of Haikus. Poems copyright
2003 by John Sampas, literary representative, the estate of Stella Kerouac.
13. Brad Pitt, James Franco, Billy Crudup are some of the actors who had
read the various scripts that Francis Ford Coppola had commissioned.
14. Interview with the author, Nov. 28, 2007.
15. Francis Ford Coppola, interview with author for the film Youth Without
Youth, press conference Dec. 2, 2007.
16. As pointed out in Sterritt’s Screening the Beats, Pull My Daisy would have
been entitled The Beat Generation had there not been a Hollywood exploitation
movie with that title made a few years before (108–9). For a history of On the
Road’s early fate in Hollywood and its incarnation as the television series, Route
66, and a comic spin-off in the character of Maynard G. Krebs, The Many Loves
of Dobie Gillis, see Sterritt, Mad to be Saved 163–169.
17. Press conference for Inland Empire, Oct. 9, 2006.

'%%
 8VcDci]ZGdVY<ddci]ZHXgZZc4

18. An early pioneer in “spontaneous bop” filmmaking, John Cassavetes made

Shadows; improvisational and spontaneous, the characters had the affect of the
Beat subculture. See Sterritt, Mad to be Saved 174–180. Cassavetes’ ambitions,
though similar in many ways to Lynch’s, fell short.

Ldg`h8^iZY
Burroughs, William. Exterminator. New York: Viking, 1966.
———. Queer. New York: Viking, 1985.
Frank, Robert. The Americans. New York: Aperture, 1958.
Gewirtz, Isaac. Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road. New York: New York
Public Library, 2007.
Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems 1947–1980. New York: Harper and Row,
1984.
———. The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems: 1937–1952.
Ed. Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan. Cambridge: Da Capo
Press, 2006.
Hrebeniak, Michael. Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 2006.
Kerouac, Jack. The Beat Generation. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005.
———. Book of Dreams. San Francisco: City Lights, 1961.
———. Book of Haikus. Ed. Regina Weinreich. New York: Penguin, 2003.
———. Introduction to The Americans, by Robert Frank. New York: Grove
Press, 1959.
———. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 2005.
———. On the Road: The Original Scroll. Ed. Howard Cunnell. New York:
Viking, 2007.
———. Selected Letters: 1957–1969. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking, 1999.
———. The Town and the City. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950.
———. Visions of Cody. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.
———. Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947–1954. Ed. Douglas
Brinkley. New York: Viking, 2004.
Lardas, John. The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg,
and Burroughs. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2001.
Marcus, Greil. The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice.
New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006.
Salles, Walter. “Notes for the Theory of a Road Movie.” New York Times Maga-
zine Nov. 11, 2007: 66+.
Sterritt, David. Mad to Be Saved: The Beats, the ’50’s, and Film. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 1998.
———. Screening the Beats: Media Culture and the Beat Sensibility. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 2004.
Weinreich, Regina. The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac: A Study of the
Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.

'%&
8DCIG>7JIDGH$>C9:M
8DCIG>7JIDGH

Mary Paniccia Carden is an associate professor of English at Edinboro

University of Pennsylvania. She is a coeditor, with Susan Strehle, of
Doubled Plots: Romance and History (2003) and the author of essays on
American writers, including Diane di Prima, Jane Smiley, Toni Morrison,
and John Edgar Wideman.

R. J. Ellis is the author of Liar! Liar! Jack Kerouac, Novelist (1999) and Har-
riet Wilson’s “Our Nig”: A Cultural Biography (2003) as well as numerous
articles on American literature. He is the editor of Comparative American
Studies and the head of the Department of American and Canadian
Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Hilary Holladay is a professor of English and the director of the Jack and
Stella Kerouac Center for American Studies at the University of Massa-
chusetts, Lowell. Her most recent books are Wild Blessings: The Poetry of
Lucille Clifton (2004) and The Dreams of Mary Rowlandson (2006). She is
completing a biography of Beat Movement icon Herbert Huncke.

Robert Holton is a professor of English at Carleton University in Ottawa,

Canada. He has published Jarring Witnesses: Modern Fiction and the
Representation of History (1995) and “On the Road”: Kerouac’s Ragged
American Journey (2000) as well as a number of articles on twentieth-
century literature and theory. He is completing a study of conformism
and alienation in mid-century America.

Tim Hunt is a professor of English at Illinois State University. He is the author

of Kerouac’s Crooked Road: The Development of a Fiction and numerous
articles on modern American literature as well as the editor of Stanford
University Press’s multivolume Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.

'%*
 8dcig^Wjidgh

Lars Erik Larson is an assistant professor of English at the University of

Portland in Oregon. His research centers on American literature and its
connections with landscape, geography, and the visual arts. He is cur-
rently working on a study of the twentieth century’s dialogue between
the space of the U.S. highway and its literary versions.

Rachel Ligairi teaches at Brigham Young University and is an editor at

ProQuest. Her research focuses on encounters with Mexico in the works
of Katherine Anne Porter, Jack Kerouac, and Cormac McCarthy.

Michael Skau is a professor of English at the University of Nebraska at

Omaha. His books include Constantly Risking Absurdity: The Writings
of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1989) and A Clown in a Grave: Complexities
and Tensions in the Works of Gregory Corso (1999). He has also published
essays on Kerouac, Burroughs, Brautigan, and Kosinski.

Matt Theado is the author of Understanding Jack Kerouac (2000) and The
Beats: A Literary Reference (2003). He has presented and published a
number of papers on Beat-related topics and is a professor of English at
Gardner-Webb University.

Regina Weinreich is the author of Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics (2002) and

the editor of Book of Haikus by Jack Kerouac (2003). A documentary film-
maker, she is a producer/director of Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider
and a writer/producer of The Beat Generation: An American Dream. Her
articles have appeared in the Village Voice, the Paris Review, the New
York Times Book Review, and the Washington Post. She is a professor
in the Department of Humanities and Sciences at the School of Visual
Arts in New York.

'%+
>C9:M

abandonment scenes: Mexico, 52, 91, 128; Ballantine, 27

San Francisco, 109–10, 158–59 baseball, 18, 148
Ace Books, 23, 25, 136n5 basketball scene, 161–62
Adams, Rachel, 153 Bataille, Georges, 71, 74n6
aesthetic power, On the Road: 169–72, Baudrillard, Jean, 139–40, 143, 149, 151,
184–85; from conflict dynamics, 176– 152–53
77; Great Gatsby compared, 178–80, Beat Generation: and bohemianism, 60–
183–84; jazz parallels, 177–78, 180–81; 61; celebrity factors, 66, 74n3; term
Rita/hobos scene, 171–75; from Sal’s origins, 27, 63, 100–101
multiple awareness, 175–76; with type- Beat Generation, The (Cook), 22
talking, 181–84 Beat Generation, The (Kerouac), 194
agents, Kerouac’s, 24–27, 32, 192 Beats, The (Krim), 5
aging anxieties, 161–62. See also rejection Belgrad, Daniel, 153
scene, New York Bell Jar, The (Plath), 115n2. See also Esther
Alice comparison, 155 Greenwood, in The Bell Jar
Amburn, Ellis, 96n8 Benzedrine, 15
Americans, The (Frank), 193 Bettencourt, Rita, in On the Road, 88, 173,
angel image, 128–29 174–75, 176–77
Ann Stubbins, in The First Third, 80–81 Between Men (Sedgwick), 164
anomics, 74n4 Big Sur (Kerouac), 22
apocalypse allusion, 72–73, 134, 152 “Billowy Trip in the World, A” (Kerouac),
“Ariel” (Plath), 116n7 27
Ariel (Plath), 115n2 Blanton, Casey, 78
Aronowitz, Alfred, 21, 119 Bobbs Merrill, 23
arrow images, 105–6, 112, 115, 116n7 bohemianism, 60–63, 70–71
atomic bomb, 72, 134, 140, 152 Boncoeur, Remi, in On the Road, 53, 113,
Atop an Underwood (Kerouac), 13 133
aunt, in On the Road, 108, 149 Book of Dreams (Kerouac), 163, 191
autobiography, identity complexities, Bourdieu, Pierre, 63
95n2, 153n1 Brando, Marlon, 192
auto-eroticism, 82–84. See also masculin- Brierly, Justin W., 30
ity themes Brinkley, Douglas, 16
autopia, 54–56 Brown, Carroll, 192

'%,
 >cYZm
Buddy Willard, in The Bell Jar, 105, 107
Bull Lee, in On the Road, 31, 74n2, 134,
158
Burroughs, Joan, 187, 188
Burroughs, William, 30–31, 64, 74n2, 136n5
bus seductions, 23, 83
Canary, Jim, 18
Cannastra, Bill, 10
Capote, Truman, 14, 177–78, 181–82
Carlo Marx, in On the Road, 30–31, 124–
25
Carr, Lucien, 20, 22, 32–33
car thievery, Cassady’s, 82–83
Cassady, Carolyn, 9, 29, 96n9, 157
Cassady, Curtis, 9
Cassady, Eva, 80
Cassady, Joan, 20
Cassady, Neal: “auto-erotocism” quip, 77;
as Kerouac fantasy, 85, 96n10; limou-
sine scene, 8–9; at mother’s apartment,
9–10. See also The First Third and Other
Writings (Cassady)
Cassady, Neal, correspondence with Ker-
ouac: bus seductions, 83; childhood
reverie, 39; coffee, 15; film adaptation,
192; as inspiration for On the Road, 11,
17, 130; narrator voices, 156; publish-
ing efforts, 19; as spontaneous prose
inspiration, 96n8; writing of On the
Road, 18–19, 48
Cassady, Neal, Sr., 80–82
Certeau, Michel de, 68
Chad King, in On the Road, 142, 172–73
character revisions/disguises, 22–23, 28,
30–31, 85
Charters, Ann, 19, 54
Chelsea neighborhood, 10–11
Cheyenne, Wild West Week, 142
childhood: Kerouac’s, 2, 12–13; road space
freedom, 39–40
Christie’s Auction House, 32
Christmas scene, in On the Road, 142
cinema. See film entries
circulation theme. See road space, tension
portrayals
Cleaver, Eldridge, 146, 165n4
'%-
coffee, 14–15
Commager, Henry Steele, 66
commercial economy, 38–39, 78, 79–80
communism, 61, 66, 141
Communist Manifesto, The (Marx), 61
conformism, 65–67, 70–71, 74n4, 140–41.
See also road space, tension portrayals
consumption and male power, 83–84, 91–92
containment and disillusionment, as road
space theme, 37–38, 48–54
Cook, Bruce, 22
Coppola, Francis Ford, 193, 289
Corber, Robert, 57n8
cotton-picking scene, 148
cowboy representations, 146
Cowley, Malcolm, 10, 26, 27–30, 31, 85,
165n2
“Crime and Punishment” (film), 189–90
criminality theme, 40, 82–83, 192
Criterion, 23
Cronenberg, David, 187–89
Cru, Henri, 8–9
Dean Moriarty. See specific topics, e.g.,
homosocial bonds; lumpenproletariat;
race; rejection scene, New York; road
space, tension portrayals; Visions of
Cody
death scenes/images: in The Bell Jar, 107;
and childhood idealizations, 161; in On
the Road, 109–10, 113, 198; in Tristessa,
166n8
Deleuze, Gilles, 35, 36, 56n7, 58n14
delivery myth, scroll manuscript, 19–20
Denver: in The First Third, 81, 84; in On
the Road, 110–11, 146, 148, 160, 172–74;
as pivot point, 129
Denver D. Doll, in On the Road, 30
desire lines, in architecture, 54–55
desires and freedom, as road theme, 38–
48
Des Moines, in On the Road, 108
Desolation Angels (Kerouac), 60
Dharma Bums, The (Kerouac), 22, 28
Dime Western magazine, 12
disguise efforts, character, 22–23, 28, 30–31,
85
 >cYZm
disillusionment and containment, as road
space theme, 48–54
Disneyland, 56–57, 140, 149
Doctor Sax (Kerouac), 160, 166n6, 171
Dodd, Mead, 27, 28
dog story, 20, 22
Doll, Denver D., in On the Road, 30
Doreen, in The Bell Jar, 105
drugs, 15
Duluoz, Jack, in Visions of Cody, 120, 121,
127–28, 194
Dunkels, in On the Road, 89, 111, 159, 163
Dutton, 23
Dylan, Bob, 10–11
Eakin, Paul John, 95n2
economics/money, 38–39, 141–42, 149
Ed Dunkel, in On the Road, 89, 159, 163
Edie, in On the Road, 31, 126
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,
The (Marx), 61–62, 63
Ellington, Duke, 8, 53
energy portrayals, 62–63, 64–65, 67–68,
73
Esther Greenwood, in The Bell Jar: au-
tomotive metaphor, 103; as Beat rep-
resentation, 101, 114–15; depression
roots, 103–4; dual nature, 106–7; grave
scene, 115n6; Rosenberg preoccupation,
102–3; Sal Paradise parallels, 102–3,
106, 107–14; self-denial and disassocia-
tion, 104–7
ethnicity. See race, in On the Road
Evans, Walker, 193
Everitt, Rae, 24–25
[Excerpts from] Visions of Cody (Kerouac),
120–21
Faber and Faber, 115n2
farewell scene. See rejection scene, New
York
Farrar Straus Young, 23
fathers, 80–82, 99, 156, 162–63, 166n10,
189
Faulds, David, 115n3
Fellaheen, in On the Road, 46–47, 72–73,
152
'%.
feminine spaces. See masculinity themes;
mothers/mother figures
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 85
Fiedler, Leslie A., 163, 166n12, 176
fiftieth anniversary recognition, x, 118
film adaptations, of On the Road: appeal
of, 187, 191–92; Coppola’s efforts, 189,
193; father theme, 189; Lost Highway
parallels, 195–96; Naked Lunch com-
parison, 187–89; and Pull My Daisy,
194–95; structural challenges, 192–93,
195
film industry: in Kerouac’s journals, 189–
90; Kerouac’s script writing, 11, 24; in
On the Road, 142–43, 150, 190; in Vi-
sions of Cody, 190–91
First Third and Other Writings, The (Cas-
sady), 77–78, 79–85
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 178–80, 183–84
“Forest of Eden” journal, 162
Fox, Joseph M., 26–27, 33
Fox, Mardou, in The Subterraneans, 192
Frank, Robert, 193, 194
freedom: and desires, 38–48; in The First
Third, 82–85; lumpen portrayals, 68–
69. See also aesthetic power; masculin-
ity themes
French, Warren, 4
Galatea Dunkel, in On the Road, 89, 111
garbage/refuse images, 64–65, 67–70, 71,
72
Gartman, David, 83
Gatsby, in The Great Gatsby, 178–80
ghost images, 108–9, 114
Giamo, Ben, 111
Gilling, Joan, in The Bell Jar, 107
Ginsberg, Allen: as celebrity, 3; criticisms
of Viking, 21; and Esther in The Bell
Jar, 105; in On the Road, 30–31, 124–25;
in Pull My Daisy, 195; road poems,
197–99
Ginsberg, Allen, correspondence with
Kerouac: agent relationship, 24–25;
Benzedrine myth, 15; childhood, 160;
friendship, 164; identity, 163; manu-
script rejection, 27
 >cYZm
Giroux, Robert, 11, 19–20, 25
Go (Holmes), 11
Goodman, Paul, 68
Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 178–80,
183–84
“Green Automobile, The” (Ginsberg),
197–98
Greenwood, Esther. See Esther Green-
wood, in The Bell Jar
Guattari, Felix, 35, 36, 58n14
Guilty of Everything (Huncke), 63–64
Guinea, Philomena, in The Bell Jar, 104
Hall, Donald, 19–20
Hanns, Joe, in The First Third, 84
Hansen, Diana, 9
Harcourt, Brace, 19, 20, 23, 25
Harper and Row, 115n2
Harris, Oliver, 43
Hassel, Elmer, 69, 74n2
Haverty, Joan, 130, 182
Herr, Michael, 5
highway system, 36–38, 55–56, 56n2
Hipkiss, Robert, 4
Hitchcock, Alfred, 58n15
hobos, 68–69, 112–13, 173–75
Hogan, William, 119
Holiday magazine, 37
Hollywood, in On the Road, 142–43, 150,
190
Holmes, John Clellon: agent suggestion,
24; on Beat Generation, 101, 104, 114;
correspondence from Kerouac, 160,
166n13; Kerouac’s identity comment,
156; on Kerouac’s typing style, 13, 19;
Mademoiselle description, 100; publi-
cations, 1, 11; on sentence style, 119
homosexuality: as hidden theme, 43–44;
Plymouth driver scenes, 43–44, 90–91,
121–22; revision edits, 30–31, 57n9; in
Visions of Cody, 122, 125; World War II
impact, 123–24, 136n14
homosocial bonds: ambivalent nature,
113; as continuum, 87, 96n12; as family
substitute, 79; as identity confusion,
163–64; in Kerouac’s life, 87, 166n11; and
misogyny, 122–23; power complexities,
89–90; with traveling economy, 85,
'&%
87–89; during World War II, 123–24.
See also masculinity themes
Hughes, Ted, 99, 100, 107, 115n3, 115n115
Huncke, Herbert, 17, 63–64, 74n2
hyperreality: Baudrillard’s theory, 139–40;
Mexico as, 150–51; race as, 141
identity confusion: Beat Generation con-
text, 155–56; in childhood idealiza-
tion, 159–62, 164; as continuous motif,
157–59; and fatherlessness, 162–63; ho-
mosocial bonds, 163–64; in Kerouac’s
life, 156–57, 166n13; and motion, 159–60,
164–65; race and ethnicity, 110–11; Sal-
Dean interchangeability, 163; Sal-Es-
ther parallels, 108; in The Town and the
City, 158; from travel, 92, 108; in Visions
of Cody, 125
Inland Empire (dir. Lynch), 195–97
intellectuals, in On the Road, 141, 142
international visions, in On the Road,
133–35. See also Mexico
Interstate Highway System, 36, 55–56
Irsay, James, 32
Jack Duluoz, in Visions of Cody, 120, 121,
127–28, 194
“Jack Lewis’s Baseball Chatter Number 3”
(Kerouac), 18
Jackson, Phyllis, 25–26
Jameson, Fredric, 68, 71, 74n6
James Woods, in Videodrome, 187
“Jazz of the Beat Generation” (Kerouac),
27
jazz performances, 147, 177–78, 180–81
Jennison, Chris, 32
Jennison, Keith, 27–28, 31–32
Joan Anderson letter, 83–84, 96n8
Joan Gilling, in The Bell Jar, 107
Joan Rawshanks, in Visions of Cody, 190–
91
“Joe Hanns” (Cassady), 84
Johnson, Joyce, 3
Johnson, Ronna, 185
Kerouac, Gabrielle, 9–10, 96n11
Kerouac, Jack: as celebrity, 3; childhood,
2, 12–13, 156; death, 4; Huncke meet-
 >cYZm
ing, 63–64; limousine experience, 8–9;
marriages, 10, 21; New York writing
period, 9–15; publisher relationships,
25, 27
Kerouac, Joan, 9–10, 11
Kerouac, Leo, 12–13, 156
King, Chad, in On the Road, 142, 172–73
Kirouack, Jean-Baptiste, 156
Knopf, 26–27
Krim, Seymour, 5
Kristeva, Julia, 65, 73, 74n6
“Labeled Generation, The” (Raphaelson),
100–101
La Onda, 153
Lardas, John, 197
Laughlin, James, 120
Laura, in On the Road, 53, 113, 165
Lazarus, Emma, 69
Lee, William, in Naked Lunch film, 188
Leed, Eric, 78
Lenny Shepherd, in The Bell Jar, 105
Leon Levinsky, in The Town and the City,
158
Leo Percepied, in The Subterraneans, 192
lesbians, 123, 136n14
Levinsky, Leon, in The Town and the City,
158
Levitt, William, 144–45
Lhamon, W. T., Jr., 37
Limerick, Patricia Nelson, 95n2
limousine scene. See rejection scene, New
York
list-making, for lumpenproletariat con-
tainment, 62–63, 64
Literary Situation, The (Cowley), 27
Little, Brown, 23
Lolita (Nabokov), 58n15
Lonely Crowd, The (Reisman), 65, 74n4
Lord, Sterling, 26–27, 32, 192
Los Angeles, in On the Road, 111, 149–50
Lost Highway (Lynch), 195–96
Louanne, in On the Road, 31
lumpenproletariat: as bohemian category,
60, 63; and conformism debates, 65–67;
energy images, 62–63, 67–68; Marx’s
portrayals, 61–62; nonproductivity
'&&
theme, 71–73; rags/raggedness, 67–68,
70, 73; refuse theme, 64–65
Lynch, David, 195–97
Mademoiselle magazine, 30, 100–101
“Mad Girl’s Love Song” (Plath), 101
Mad to Be Saved (Sterritt), 143
Mailer, Norman, 144, 145–46
male power. See masculinity themes
Marcus, Greil, 193, 195, 198
Marcuse, Herbert, 66–67
Mardou Fox, in The Subterraneans, 192
marijuana, 15
Martin, Peter, in The Town and the City,
157, 158
Martinez, Manuel Luis, 151
Marx, Carlo, in On the Road, 30–31, 124–25
Marx, Karl, 61–62, 67–68
Marylou, in On the Road, 31, 88, 109, 110,
163
masculinity themes: consumption, 83–84,
91–92; cultural traditions, 57n8, 79–80;
exchange model, 77–78, 79–80; in fe-
male resistance, 57n8, 79, 80–82, 87–88;
in freedom/containment tensions, 42–
44; sexuality, 82–84; traveling truths,
86–87; travel traditions, 78–79. See also
homosocial bonds
Maude, in The First Third, 81
MCA, 24, 25–26
McClintock, Jack, 166n13
McDowell, Linda, 144
McManamy, John, 115n5
McNally, Dennis, 140
Mehlman, Jeffrey, 62
Metropolitan Opera House, 8–9, 53
“Mexican Girl, The” (Kerouac), 27
Mexico: abandonment scene, 52, 91, 128;
apocalypse allusion, 72–73, 134, 152; as
authenticity idealization, 147, 151–53;
freedom/containment tensions, 45–47,
51–52, 57n13; as hyperreal, 150–51
MGM, 192
Miles, Barry, 96n8
Mills, C. Wright, 70
Millstein, Gilbert, 1, 156
Milo, in The Beat Generation, 194
mirror destruction, in The Bell Jar, 106–7
 >cYZm
Mississippi Gene, in On the Road, 68–69
Mississippi River, 16–17
money/economics, 38–39, 141–42, 149
Moore, Charles, 56
Moore, Dave, 21
Morgan Library, 32
Moriarty, Dean. See specific topics, e.g.,
homosocial bonds; lumpenproletariat;
race; rejection scene, New York; road
space, tension portrayals
Morley, Frank, 23
mothers/mother figures, 80–81, 103–4,
108, 158–59
motion: and authenticity, 144–45; as free-
dom, 78–79, 112; and identity confu-
sion, 159–60, 164–65; race car driver, 84;
as resistance, 39; for reverie, 39–40; as
violence, 50–51; writing styles, 96n9
Murger, Henri, 61, 62–63, 73, 73n1
Murphy, Cornelius, 166n11
Nabokov, Vladimir, 58n15
Nadel, Alan, 37
Naked Lunch (Burroughs), 187–89
Naked Lunch (dir. Cronenberg), 187, 188–
89
names: character disguise efforts, 22–23,
28, 30–31, 85; Kerouac’s multiplicities,
156
“New Colossus, The” (Lazarus), 69–70
New Directions, 27
New World Writing, 27
New York: Kerouac’s writing period, 9–15;
in On the Road, 85–86, 165. See also
rejection scene, New York
New York Post, 21, 119
New York Times, 1, 156
Nick, in The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald),
178–80, 183–84
Nicosia, Gerald, 15, 166n13
nipple scene, 127–28
One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse), 66–67
Ong, Walter J., 185
On the Road (Kerouc): critical attention,
x–xiii, 4–5; journey significance, ix–x;
long-term appeal, x, 4–6; publication
reception, 1–4, 170. See also specific
'&'
topics, e.g., aesthetic power; Ginsberg,
Allen; scroll manuscript
Orlovsky, Peter, 163
Pacifico, Massimo, 112
Paramount Pictures, 192
Paris bohemians, 60–63, 70–71
Paris Review, 27
Patricia, in The First Third, 83
Peel, Robin, 116n7
Pennebaker, D. A., 192–93
Percepied, Leo, in The Subterraneans,
192
performance, writing as, 177–85
Peter Martin, in The Town and the City,
157, 158
Philomena Guinea, in The Bell Jar, 104
Plath, Sylvia, 99–102, 115nn1–2, n5, 116n7.
See also Esther Greenwood, in The
Bell Jar
Plummer, William, 82, 96n11
Plymouth driver scenes, 43–44, 90–91,
121–22
poaching theory, 148–49
police station scene, 126
Porter, Arabelle, 27
Potchky (dog), 20
promiscuity, societal, 37–38, 56n6. See also
road space, tension portrayals
Psycho (dir. Hitchcock), 58n15
Pull My Daisy (Kerouac), 194–95
punctuation myth, 21
purity/impurity theme, 49–50
Pynchon, Thomas, 4
Queer (Burroughs), 188
race, in The Bell Jar, 104–5
race, in On the Road: as hyperrealiza-
tion, 141; idealizations, 44–45, 57n11,
110–11, 159, 165n4; impulse stereotype,
145–46; jazz portrayals, 147; Los An-
geles representations, 149–50; poach-
ing interpretation, 148–49; progress
interpretation, 147–48; refuse images,
64–65, 69; traditional interpretations,
139, 146–47. See also Mexico
race car driver, in The First Third, 84
 >cYZm
rags/raggedness, 67–68, 69, 70, 71–72, 73
Raphaelson, Joel, 100–101
Raskolnikov, in “Crime and Punishment”
film, 189–90
Rawshanks, Joan, in Visions of Cody, 190–
91
refuse/garbage images, 64–65, 67–70, 71
rejection scene, New York: ambivalence in,
36, 53; death allusion, 113, 198; depletion
portrayal, 73, 93; as national allusion,
133; as writing inspiration, 8–9
religious themes, 68, 72, 74n6, 128–29
Remi Boncoeur, in On the Road, 53, 113,
133
retread image, in The Bell Jar, 103
revisions and edits: myths about, 19–20,
21; and reading experience, 118–20,
129–30; T2 manuscript, 20, 22–23,
32–33; T3 manuscript, 26–31, 33; by
Viking, 28, 171–72. See also Visions of
Cody (Kerouac)
Riesman, David, 65, 74n4
Rita Bettencourt, in On the Road, 88, 173,
174–75, 176–77
Rivera, Jose, 289
“Rivers and Rains” journal (Kerouac),
16–17
road poems, Ginsberg’s, 197–99
road space, tension portrayals: overview,
35–36, 38, 54; cultural context, 36–38,
54–56, 56nn3–6; desires and freedom,
38–48; disillusionment and contain-
ment, 48–54; international visions,
45–47; with literary style, 47–48; sexu-
ality, 42–44
Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 10
Roland Major, in On the Road, 142
Roolfe Schwartz, in The First Third, 81
Rosenbergs, in The Bell Jar, 102–3
Ross, Andrew, 37
Rubin, Gayle, 164
Rutgers University, 32
Rycroft, Simon, in On the Road, 142
sadness-joy duality, 111–12. See also Esther
Greenwood, in The Bell Jar
Sales, Walter, 289
salesman comparison, 91–92, 145
'&(
Sal Paradise: The Bell Jar parallels, 102–3,
106, 107–14; character edits, 30–31; The
Great Gatsby parallels, 178–80; multi-
voice nature, 153n1; name allusions,
54, 71, 181. See also specific topics, e.g.,
aesthetic power; homosocial bonds;
identity confusion; rejection scene,
New York; road space, tension por-
trayals
Sampas, Stella, 156
San Francisco: in On the Road, 108–9, 111,
147, 158–59; in Visions of Cody, 190–91
Saturday Review, 26, 27
Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (Murger), 61,
73n1
Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 141
Schwartz, Roolfe, in The First Third, 81
scientific progress, 141–42
Scribner’s, 23
scroll manuscript: disposition of, 31–32;
energy characteristics, 126; exhibition
of, x, 165n5; myths about, 11, 15, 19–24,
119; origins, 10; reading experience,
129–30; as typetalking, 182–83; writing
of, 11, 14–15, 16–19, 21. See also revisions
and edits
Sedgwick, Eve, 96n12, 164
self-denial theme, in The Bell Jar, 104–5
sewing circle, 89
sexuality themes: The Bell Jar, 107; contra-
dictions and complexity, 122–25; and
fatherlessness, 163; in freedom/con-
tainment tensions, 42–44; post-World
War II context, 123, 124–25. See also
homosexuality; homosocial bonds
Shepherd, Lenny, in The Bell Jar, 105
Shrouded Traveler image, 51, 92–93
Simon Rycroft, in On the Road, 142
“Simulacra and Simulations” (Baudril-
lard), 139–40
Slim, in On the Road, 147
Snyder, Gary, 163
social relationships, in freedom/contain-
ment tensions, 40–44, 50, 52–53
soda fountain scene, 161
Solomon, Carl, 23, 163
speech as America, 194
Spengler, Oswald, 72, 152
 >cYZm
Spontaneous Prose, 16, 23–24, 96n8, 171– Van den Abbeele, Georges, 78
72 Vanity of Duluoz (Kerouac), 22
Stallybrass, Peter, 72 Videodrome (dir. Cronenberg), 187
Statue of Liberty, 69 Viking, 21, 27–30, 31, 171–72
Stephenson, Gregory, 91 Visions of Cody (Kerouac): angel scene,
Sterritt, David, 143, 148 128–29; Cody identity, 125; Cowley’s
Steve Allen Show, The, 22, 166n7 submissions, 27; experimental nature,
Stevenson, Adlai, 66 119–20, 126–27, 130; film scene, 190–91;
Stimpson, Catharine R., 87, 95n7 homosocial bonds, 122–23; as outsid-
Stone, Robert, 5 er’s view, 193; Plymouth driver scene,
Stubbins, Ann, in The First Third, 80–81 121–22; Spontaneous Prose plan, 23–24;
Subterraneans, The, 192 typewriters, 13; writing conversation
Swartz, Omar, 148 scene, 120–21, 194
Vital Center, The (Schlesinger), 141
T1 manuscript. See scroll manuscript
T2 manuscript, 20, 22–26, 27, 30, 32–33 Warner Brothers, 192
T3 manuscript, 26–31, 33 Watergate, 140, 143
Tallman, Warren, 185 Western Journal, A (Wolfe), 57n12
tape transcripts. See Visions of Cody (Ker- West themes, 85, 86, 95n2, 131–32, 142,
ouac) 147
Taylor, Helen K., 28 Whalen, Philip, 163
teletype paper myth, 22 “white ambitions,” 45, 103, 159
Terry, in On the Road, 109, 111, 149, 150, Whitehorn, Nathaniel, 30
175, 176–77 “White Negro, The” (Mailer), 144, 145–
theater scene, 64–65, 71 46
Tillich, Paul, 66 “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (Ginsberg), 198–
Torgovnick, Marianna, 147 99
Town and the City, The (Kerouac), 13, 25, Willard, Buddy, in The Bell Jar, 105, 107
119, 156, 157 William Lee, in Naked Lunch film, 188
Tristessa (Kerouac), 166 Wolfe, Thomas, 10, 57n12
typetalking, 182–84 women. See masculinity themes; moth-
typing skills, Kerouac’s, 11–14. See also ers/mother figures
scroll manuscript Woods, James, in Videodrome, 187
Tytell, John, 4 Wyn, A. A., 23

'&)
 Beat Studies / Literary Criticism

“What’s Your Road, Man? shows how pertinent Kerouac’s On the Road is
to critical concerns and functions as a compendium of current debates
about Kerouac and the Beats.”
—James T. Jones, author of Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend:
The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction

T he ten essays in this groundbreaking volume cover a broad range of

topics and employ a variety of approaches—including theoretical inter-
pretations and textual and comparative analysis—to investigate such issues
as race, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as the novel’s historical and liter-
ary contexts. What’s Your Road, Man? illustrates the richness of the critical
work currently being undertaken on this vital American narrative.
Featuring essays from renowned Kerouac experts as well as emerging
scholars, What’s Your Road, Man? draws on an enormous amount of re-
search into the literary, social, cultural, biographical, and historical contexts
of Kerouac’s canonical novel. Since its publication in 1957, On the Road has
remained in print and has continued to be one of the most widely read
twentieth-century American novels.

Hilary Holladay, a professor of English and the director of the Jack and Stel-
la Kerouac Center for American Studies at the University of Massachusetts in
Lowell, is the author of Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton.

Robert Holton is a professor of English at Carleton University. His most

recent book is On the Road: Jack Kerouac’s Ragged American Journey.

Contributors: Southern Illinois University Press

Mary Paniccia Carden 1915 University Press Drive
R. J. Ellis Mail Code 6806 Carbondale, IL 62901
www.siu.edu/-siupress
Hilary Holladay
Robert Holton isbn 0-8093-2883-6
Tim Hunt isbn 978-0-8093-2883-3
Lars Erik Larson
Rachel Ligairi
Michael Skau
Matt Theado
Regina Weinreich Cover illustration: iStockphoto © Alexander Hafemann
Printed in the United States of America