by Jack Kerouac
“This is the story of America,” Kerouac explains in On the Road, when describing Sal Paradise’s frustrated attempt to bend the rules during a brief stint as a security guard. “Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do.” The period after World War II that marked the start of the cold war endorsed a mythology of national unity. In NSC 68, a classified report prepared for the U.S. National Security Council in April 14, 1950, a year before Kerouac sat down to compose the On the Road scroll, three “realities” emerge in a section entitled “Fundamental Purpose of the United States”: “Our determination to maintain the essential elements of individual freedom, as set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights; our determination to create conditions under which our free and democratic system can live and prosper; and our determination to fight if necessary to defend our way of life.” In this section, the rhetoric used in defense of liberty is unmistakably threatening, even imperialist, in its tone. Almost a century earlier, Walt Whitman wrote, in “Democratic Vistas,” of “perfect individualism” that “deepest tinges and gives character to the idea of the aggregate.” In the 1950s, this paradigm seemed to reverse directions: It was the state structuring the requirements of the individual, both within national borders—a sacrifice that amounted to doing one’s part for the war effort—and without.
In the year that Kerouac composed the scroll of On the Road, the United States expanded its bomb testing from the South Pacific to the Nevada desert, literally bringing the war home. The House Committee on Un-American Activities began its second round of hearings, in which artists and intellectuals were required to prove their innocence and loyalty to the United States and to renounce their Communist ties. Any minor offense could have been labeled deviant, and citizens suffered the curtailment of civil liberties in the name of upholding freedom from totalitarianism. This period of compulsory confession was the performance mode of a vast movement of secrecy that was so effective, as Joyce Nelson argues, because of “the purposeful fragmentation and compartment-alization of information.” The less people understood about the connective tissue both within and between politics and culture, the more effective the government could be in manipulating its own population while seeking global influence and authority.
In the article that formulated the cold war policy of containment, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published in 1947, George Kennan stressed the connection between social harmony at home and control overseas. The United States, he argued, had to market itself as a country that was “coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power” and “holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time.” Signs of weakness, according to Kennan, could have drastic consequences across the globe, as “exhibitions of indecision, disunity and internal disintegration within this country have an exhilarating effect on the whole Communist movement.” In other words, dissent and contradiction were seen as malignancies threatening the very sovereignty of the nation by bolstering the enemy. The antidote, by implication, was homogeneity and consensus, no matter how compulsory.
Among Kerouac’s many definitions of “Beat Generation,” he includes “a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world.” His sense of being alienated in his native land derived in part from his understanding that something “had gnawed in me to make me strive to be ‘different’ from all this.” He felt a kinship with people “too dark, too strange, too subterranean” to fulfill the credentials of a society in which, as Stephen J. Whitfield argues, “cultural expression was thwarted and distorted” at every turn. On the Road, in its promotion of life lived for “the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being,” can be seen as a response to a certain level of conformity so prevalent in the nation’s cultural consciousness that it had produced anxiety about what William H. Whyte, Jr., in his 1956 bestseller The Organization Man, warned was a society composed of middle-class workers “who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life.” This form of self-criticism that resulted from fears of an “organization man” society, however, merely produced a kind of safe space of dissent in which the most submerged levels of control could continue unchecked.
For Kerouac, it was the very systems through which bureaucratic and militaristic order were filtered that were flawed. In a July 1951 letter to Allen Ginsberg, he wrote, “I’m glad I understood exactly what it is to be a man in an office in the world. In my early days as reporter—I had a desk, a telephone—it was too easy a way to be in the world, though…automatic, as it were.” Kerouac briefly joined the naval reserve in 1943 but once he realized that, according to the psychiatrist performing his evaluation, “individuality is subordinated to obedience and discipline” and anyone “not conforming to this regimen is of no use to the organization,” he feigned madness in order to be discharged and reenlisted, instead, in the merchant marine. In his most vitriolic essay, “After Me, the Deluge,” written at the end of his life in an attempt to disalign himself from both the “Hippie Flower Children” and the “top echelons of American society,” he decides “I’ll go back to the alienated radicals who are quite understandably alienated, nay disgusted by this scene,” because, although in his view they were hypocritical and unproductive, the people who were part of the “neurological drone of money-grub” were worse.
Still, it would be wrong to read On the Road as the manifesto of a generational spokesperson. After the book’s overnight success, Kerouac found himself having to rescue the idea of the Beat Generation and to rid himself of the “King of the Beats” title. At the end of his life, constantly called upon to define his politics and his relationship to the burgeoning counterculture, he explained that On the Road was “hardly an agitational propaganda account.” He did not want the responsibility of helming an entire generation that, in fact, he barely understood. As early as 1959, Kerouac bemoaned the “beatnik routines on TV,” which implied that “it’s a simple change in fashion and manners, just a history crust” that “will only change a few dresses and pants and make chairs useless in the livingroom and pretty soon we’ll have Beat Secretaries of State and there will be instituted new tinsels, in fact new reasons for malice and new reasons for virtue and new reasons for forgiveness…” Kerouac witnessed firsthand the absurd trajectories of avant-garde cultural movements, which often stray from the fundamental ideas that spawn them. He understood how the radical potential of art becomes sanitized in shadow versions that distill the critiques behind the original creative articulations.
Kerouac fielded the more sinister side of this misrepresentation by challenging the absoluteness that taxonomies, with all of their attendant qualifications, require. By the end of “After Me, the Deluge,” his only solution is to “see everyone in the world as unconsolable orphans yelling and screaming on every side to make arrangements for making a living” and ultimately “all so lonered.” Kerouac refused the rigidity and reductiveness of categories. On the Road asks that people find the beauty in failed journeys, in the discovery of personal excess, in feeling the sting of limits, but these are the boundaries around which humanness is constructed. Labels, on the other hand, can sometimes evacuate the presence of that which they attempt to contain. Kerouac criticized “those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality,” he wrote in 1959. These were the misinformed tactics of “those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearnings of human souls…woe unto those who don’t realize that America must, will, is changing now, for the better I say.” Rather than write in willful resistance to mainstream America, Kerouac mapped the human geography of a “land that never has been yet—/ And yet must be,” in the words of Langston Hughes. For Dean, the character based on Neal Cassady, “Everybody’s kicks, man!” But for Sal, a stand-in for Kerouac, people are “like fabulous roman candles.” People amuse and serve Dean. For Sal, they are purveyors of light.
Kerouac fe
lt too deeply the gaps between what life was supposed to be and how people actually lived it. He lamented in a journal entry from 1949, “I feel that I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t know the feeling of calm irreverence—the only madman in the world therefore—the only broken fish. All the others are perfectly contented with pure life. I am not. I want a pure understanding, and then pure life.” Kerouac felt a profound sense of loneliness; this stemmed partly from a spiritual understanding of human suffering that was so embedded in his Catholic upbringing, and partly from his artist’s interiority, which heightened the sense of his difference even as it produced solidarity between him and people who were “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.” Sal understands the compulsive need of the creative mind to collaborate: “But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me.” At the same time, Kerouac found himself in uniquely marginal territory, searching for ways to define the particular parameters of his selfhood. On his first road trip, Sal awakes in Des Moines, in the middle of America, and doesn’t know who he is: “I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.” Here, the road momentarily eradicates Sal’s identity in order to root it in a long lineage of wanderers and searchers.
On the Road radiates hope that communities might function unmediated by the sublimating forces inherent to modern society. When Sal leaves San Francisco to go to Denver at the beginning of part three, he envisions himself settling “in Middle America, a patriarch.” But when he actually gets there, he finds himself “in the Denver colored section, 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.” He explains, “I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a ‘white man’ disillusioned.” Critics have rightly pointed to the racial primitivism expressed in this passage, which can have the effect of obscuring the actual lived experience of people of color during this period. For Kerouac, however, these oppressed minorities were the most honest evocation of what an “American underground” might really mean. It is no coincidence that the “magic land at the end of the road” is in Mexico. As Sal and Dean drive to Mexico City, the “Fellahin Indians of the world” stare at the “ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land” and know “who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth,” a viewpoint shared by Kerouac. His profound desire to empathize with marginalized people while also reaffirming his commitment to what he admits in On the Road are “white ambitions,” even as he understood the near impossibility of staking equal claim to both identities socially and politically in 1949, stemmed from his own conflicted ethnic and class status.
Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac of French-Canadian parents who immigrated to New England to find work. He grew up speaking joual, a French-Canadian working-class dialect, and throughout his career as a novelist considered himself more comfortable with joual than English, which he did not speak until he was six years old. In his introduction to Lonesome Traveler, he mentions that his ancestors were both Bretons and Indians. Expressing pride for both heritages, he wavered between the “Faulknerian pillar homestead” and the “steel of America covering the ground filled with the bones of old Indians and Original Americans,” as he writes in The Subterraneans. Tim Hunt argues that Kerouac’s immigrant history “left him suspended between categories—neither a person of color nor a white middle-class American—and unable to resolve either the dissonance between the period’s rhetorics of ethnicity and class (by which, because he was white, he was in the cultural and social mainstream) or his sense of marginality—his sense that he was finally alien and an outsider.” Those who identify first and foremost as American possess a sense of entitlement that is uniquely theirs. It is something only immigrants and first-generation Americans, perhaps, can ever truly understand, because it is a sense of proprietorship they will never fully have. Writers do not dedicate a book to a nation that is unproblematically theirs, much less include a clause that admits an inability to define it (“whatever that is”).
The discordant elements of Kerouac’s identity turn the anthropological lens of On the Road to the margins of daily American life in the 1950s. Ann Douglas writes that reading the book for the first time taught her and her friends “that we were part of a continent rather than a country,” and, furthermore, that “the continent had been strangely emptied out of the people usually caught on camera, yet it was filled with other people, people in motion, of various races and ethnicities, speaking many tongues, migrating from one place to another as seasonal laborers, wandering around as hobos and hitchhikers, meeting each other in brief but somehow lasting encounters.” Although being a white man, no matter how compromised by other, less privileged categories of identification, still guarantees one greater advantage in On the Road, Kerouac also provides those considered undesirable in that era—homeless men riding the backs of trucks or penniless saxophone players, for example—some form of agency, if only because they share the stage as subjects of the road experience. Howard Zinn argues that the telling of America in terms of heroes and their victims, which entails “the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress,” functions as “only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders.” If On the Road is about defining America, it is also about staging an intervention into Official definitions of history and nationhood.
Kerouac revisited ethnicity and class in sampling and crafting what he saw as real Americans, but he also challenged the confines of gender and sexuality. In the postwar period, fear of infiltration by a foreign enemy spread to include anyone who did not fit white, heteronormative standards. As Wini Breines argues in Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties, “The changes that accompanied the formation of an advanced capitalist society were perceived and experienced as threats from those outside American borders and from those who had been excluded within those borders, women and blacks and homosexuals.” While Kerouac’s concern with race is apparent in both the scroll of On the Road and the published version, all blatant references to sexuality—especially homosexuality—were edited out of the 1957 edition. Sex acts are more explicit and egalitarian in the scroll. According to Ginsberg, LuAnne is “all for” divorcing Neal so that he can marry Carolyn but “says she loves his big cock—so does Carolyn—so do I.” This version explores women’s sexuality and freedom in an era when, as Joyce Johnson writes in her Beat memoir Minor Characters, people frowned at a girl from a “nice family” who left her parents’ house, knowing “what she’d be up to in that room of her own.” Women did not have the same degree of mobility as men and the costs of rebellion were much greater. Johnson writes, “Once we had found our male counterparts, we had too much blind faith to challenge the old male/female rules,” yet “we knew we had done something brave, practically historic. We were the ones who dared to leave home.”
Although the road that Kerouac depicted was only fully open to those who had the luxury of traveling it without major consequences, its liberating possibilities extended to whoever could find a way to interpret them. Marylou, Dean’s lover, is on the road for a good part of the novel and seems an even stronger presence in the scroll. She never gets much of a voice in either version, but she is the witness, using the men as much as they use her, siphoning their energy and road wisdom without accountability. This, too, is a form of freedom. Although the book is about the search for the lost father, it is also about the potential for women to wrest control in the end by gaining access to experience ordinarily denied them and revising it to suit their own formulations of the road narrative. Women are catalysts for broader change as well. In the scroll, Jack remembers his mother telling him of the need for men to expiate the
ir offenses, which instigates a train of thought ultimately left out of the exchange between Sal and his aunt in the published version: “All over the world, in the jungles of Mexico, in backstreets of Shanghai, in New York cocktail bars, husbands are getting drunk while the women stay home with the babies of the everdarkening future. If these men stop the machine and come home—and get on their knees—and ask for forgiveness—and the women bless them—peace will suddenly descend on the earth with a great silence like the inherent silence of the Apocalypse.” In this passage, Kerouac anchors the relationship between America and the rest of the world on a collective redressing of wrongs, represented here through a critique of gender roles. He suggests that borders, both within and between nations, have the potential to erode if we begin to untangle our human histories of oppression, negligence, and shame through a prism of love and empathy.