Aquarian Weekly 10/3/07

ON THE ROAD AT 50
Jack Kerouac's Peripatetic Ode Comes Home
PART II

The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye.
- Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac's On The Road may be one of the more misinterpreted literary works of the 20th century, but that's only where its contradictions begin. It is more widely read today than ever, while also being ignored as a seminal literary benchmark. It is celebrated as vehemently as a groundbreaking effort as it is vilified for being an overrated mess. Stories of its creation and influence are in many ways more intriguing than the book itself, and the shadow of its most worshipped character has forever enshrined its author as a pop culture immortal.

At the epicenter of all this is Kerouac's hymn to "Beat", a secret "hustler culture" of social outcasts, hipsters, transients and jazz cats who are literally "beaten down", immune to rehabilitation, and most importantly, protective of its hobo freedoms. And while On The Road spawned an unlikely "beatnik" movement, which gave way to a hippie counter-culture yearning in generations to follow, the book's solemn and reverential themes refused to be buried beneath spicier scenes of unbridled exploits.

Kerouac's adventures across America with nary a penny to his name and no sense of coherent direction or purpose seem to embody a sense of itinerancy as sacrament, a rolling stone gathering no moss, the spiritual wanderer as rejected inhabitants of Eden looking for a home. As long as the characters keep moving, specifically Sal Paradise (Kerouac) and Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), they will enact an almost physical return to divinity. Through the very act of perpetual traveling, the peripatetic existence becomes the holy journey through life; growing, maturing, and abandoning the fantasies of youth for the harsher but more meaningful realities of adulthood.

For most of the novel the insane pace and erratic tendencies of Dean Moriarty represent for Paradise the purest soul of an America once wild and free, but now wounded by economic tragedy (The Great Depression) and reborn in glorious victory (World War II). Moriarty is, like real-life friend and companion, Cassady, an angelic "holy goof", a man without boundaries, inhibitions or guilt, who embodies the seductive jazz rhythms that cannot be tamed. But by novel's end there is only a hero's shell. Abandoned by his best friend and left to flail alone, Moriarty literally disappears into the fog. Paradise cannot keep up, but, instead, must grow up.

"There is that wonderful Dean Moriarty character and that ode to cowboy freedom that Dean represents," notes John Leland, author of a revealing new book, Why Kerouac Matters. "But there is also the book of Sal Paradise, the narrator, that follows a different course. And as much as Sal falls in love with Dean the way we all do, he outgrows him over the course of the book and puts some distance behind him."

In a very real sense On The Road is a warning for those who Kerouac later despised when the book's success made him a famous guru for the desperate runaway baby boomer romantics, who refused to see the damage of Moriarty's trip into the unknown and the scars left by brothers adrift. They chose to ignore the visage of a resolved Paradise (the name is no coincidence) shuffling off into the womb of domestic bliss, arm in arm with his new girl to sip hot tea in her inviting upstairs apartment where he (Kerouac) will mature into the writer he longs to be.

And that is, beyond all else, On The Road's lasting legacy; the naked force of the writer's vision. The bold leap for a post-war, relatively unknown novelist to challenge the structure of his art in order to express the forgotten faces of a burgeoning American Century; the dark faces, the soft faces, the young faces, the failed faces, the wild faces, and ultimately the face in the mirror, strung out on fractured dreams in steamy gin joints and lonely highways and endless nights teetering between revelry and misery - thrashing it together in one long scroll over three weeks, after several painstaking revisions, to finally rescue the honesty in the experience, warts and all.

This is why the feral call of jazz music reverberates as the central theme in Kerouac's travels. His uniquely spastic descriptions of the music and its emotional affects move the narration along as if swept up in a wave, giving credence to Kerouac's beloved "spontaneous prose" and its concussive affect on the reader.

But tall tales of Kerouac jacked on speed and controlled madness whipping off phrasing and imagery in Herculean spurts in mere weeks are greatly exaggerated. While he did unfurl his "scroll version" of the novel in 1950 (released this summer as On The Road - The Original Scroll) the final published version we know today was carefully revised several times and in many voices.

"Kerouac's often been accused of having a rather shallow view of jazz," Leland explains. "That his idea of jazz is some primitive guy blows whatever's in his head and gets off the stage. But if you look at the way jazz musicians really put together their solos, with tremendous wood-shedding beforehand, working out phrases or connections or ideas through hours and hours of practice and then putting them together in some kind of spontaneous way onstage in a solo, but not inventing everything whole cloth, that's the way Kerouac wrote On The Road. He'd written a lot of these scenes in his journals or his letters, and even in previous drafts of the book, but he cranked them all together fast in ways that probably felt new to him in the composition, so that draft becomes a performance, and that gives the book its pace and feel."

Still, as Leland puts it, the book's staying power in the American consciousness, whether selling khakis for The Gap or an escape route for youth, is rooted in a deeper "longing for a place in this world and a direction, a sense of meaning, an idea - and that questioning of how you are going to get on as a man in the world, what type of man are you going to be, that will allow you to live an authentic life. I think those questions are as elusive to us and as relevant to us today as they ever were."

On The Road wasn't the first "road" story, and it certainly won't be the last. Homer, James Joyce, Henry Miller, and many others have hit the mark - some of them an obvious influence on Kerouac's winding tale. Hell, I even wrote one that unabashedly heisted from those guys. But there is something eminently penetrating in the American spirit that Saint Jack tapped into 50 years ago. When he hit the road in 1947, a decade before the novel's publication, this was a very different country to travel. By '57 the highway system would eradicate our mysterious back roads and the quaint towns they led us through would begin to die out, leaving an homogenized nation bloated with malls and fast food chains, stripped of individuality and geographical pride, and a vast underbelly of furtive wanderers would be left to fade like the ghost of Dean Moriarty to haunt the pages of this most extraordinary book.

PART I

Reality Check | Pop Culture | Politics | Sports | Music