‘‘It Was My DreamThat Screwed Up’’:The Relativity ofTranscendence inOn the Road

Jason Haslam

Abstract: This paper interrogates Jack Kerouac’s appropriation and trans-formation of a Thoreauvian-style transcendentalism by reading On the Roadthrough Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of the chronotope. Kerouac’s chrono-topic resistance to dominant visions of the United States brings with it aproblematic identity politics, specifically in terms of the racialization of therepresentation of transcendent identity. Rather than a personal or specificfailure of a particular author or text, this tension can be read as a portrayalof the inevitable failure of social critiques that are based on notions of find-ing an ‘‘authentic’’ identity in a transcendence beyond, and disconnectedfrom, historical and personal contexts. In other words, On the Road can beseen as a portrayal of the problems of an American romantic notion ofidentity, which makes universal claims about the transcendental poten-tial of the individual. On the Road thus points to a difficulty surroundingdominant US notions of the self-reliance of the individual per se.

Keywords: Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), On the Road (1957), Mikhail Bakhtin(1895–1975)

Resume : A la lecture de On the Road par le truchement de la discussion deMikhail Bakhtin sur le chronotope, le present article s‘interroge sur l’appro-priation et la transformation par Jack Kerouac d’un transcendantalismedans le style de Thoreau. La resistance chronotopique de Kerouac auxvisions dominantes des Etats-Unis comporte une politique identitaire prob-lematique, plus particulierement en termes de racialisation de la repre-sentation d’une identite transcendante. Plutot qu’un echec personnel ouparticulier d’un auteur ou d’un texte, on peut evaluer cette tension commeun portrait de l’echec inevitable des critiques sociales basees sur la notionqu’il faut trouver une identite « authentique » dans une transcendance

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deconnectee qui va au-dela des contextes historiques et personnels. End’autres mots, on peut considerer On the Road comme la representationdes problemes d’une notion romantique americaine de l’identite qui elargitle potentiel de transcendance de l’individu a l’echelle universelle. On theRoad souligne ainsi la difficulte entourant les notions americaines domi-nantes de l’autonomie de la personne meme.

Mots cles : Jack Kerouac (1922–1969); On the Road (1957); Mikhail Bakhtin(1895–1975).

The writings of the beat generation have long been seen as a spaceof cultural and political contestation. Bridging, as Robert Holtonhas noted, post-war ‘‘optimism and prosperity,’’ on the one hand,and ‘‘Cold War tension’’ and McCarthyism, on the other (Kerouac’sRagged Journey 5), beat writing in general, and Jack Kerouac’s workin particular, also appear at the tail-end of the paradoxically radicalconservatism of American high modernism and New Criticismand look forward to the equally radical questioning of the counter-cultures of the 1960s and, later, of postmodernism.1 This tensepositioning has led to the myriad (and conflicting) political andaesthetic readings of beat works, a fact perhaps best signalled inthe materials of conspiracy theorist and more-than-occasional pre-sidential candidate, Lyndon LaRouche. The seemingly paranoidramblings of, for example, the LaRouche-commissioned Dope, Inc.,claim that the beat culture of the 1950s and the (leftist) counter-cultures of the sixties and seventies were all parts of a vast con-spiracy to addict America’s youth to drugs and thus bring about anew cult of Isis. Other writings by LaRouche similarly indict HenryDavid Thoreau as an ‘‘evil man’’ for espousing ‘‘the nobility of‘the simple life’ ’’ (Larouche). The beats, however, are partially re-covered in this narrative by their supposed lack of connection tothe politics of the ‘‘conspiracy’’ of the ‘‘hippies’’—the anti-war anddrug counter-culture that, according to Dope Inc., was a fully cohe-sive movement, consciously ‘‘created as a method of social control,[and] used to drain the United States of its commitment to scientificand technological progress’’ (qtd. in ‘‘Aquarian’’).2 This understand-ing of 1960s counter-culture runs parallel to LaRouche’s visions ofthe ‘‘evils’’ of Thoreauvian simplicity and the desire for transcen-dence. Thus, the beats come across as an intermediary step, a linkalmost, between the wholesome Christian America whose fate thesewritings bemoan and the evil, Isis-worshipping (and yes, liberal)culture they fetishistically detail.

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LaRouche’s vaguely humorous (and nearly frightening) conclu-sions about the beats are mirrored, albeit ‘‘demonically,’’ in recentscholarship on the beats and Kerouac. Those who could be calledrevisionist beat critics see not only the challenge Kerouac’s textspresent to the dominant white and middle-class culture of the1950s but also note, in Holton’s words, that his work ‘‘legitimatesas much as it challenges the master narratives’’ that it tries ‘‘toundo’’ (‘‘Kerouac’’ 266). As Holton demonstrates, On the Road repro-duces, for example, certain racist stereotypes that are embedded inthe discourse of the very culture that the novel ostensibly critiques.This conclusion is often expanded to include a critique of Kerouac’sgender stereotyping (see, also, Eburne; Grace; Panish; Stimpson).These moments in Kerouac’s works of the reproduction of oppres-sive stereotypes are generally portrayed as failures in vision or,at best, as moments that highlight the difficulty of maintaining acritical stance towards that culture. As Deleuze and Guattari write,Kerouac and writers like him may ‘‘shatter . . . the capitalist barrier’’but ‘‘of course they fail to complete the process, they never ceasefailing to do so’’ (133). Such readings are, indeed, supported byKerouac’s oft-cited right-wing extremism near the end of his life.

The tension in Kerouac’s work (specifically in On the Road) betweenhis radical social critique of post-war white suburban culture and,for example, his unabashed repetition of that culture’s stereotypingof various ‘‘others’’ can, however, be expanded. Like their literaryand philosophical forebears in the nineteenth-century transcenden-talist circle, the beats have an approach/retreat relationship withthe politics of their day. This tension is, in part, due to the neopla-tonic, romantic traditions of transcendentalism itself, which dictatea removal from society as the first step in any attempt to better thatsociety. In order to draw attention to the way in which Kerouac’sOn the Road, in particular, lends itself to recurring readings thatcomplicate American political dynamics, this paper will interrogateKerouac’s appropriation and transformation of a Thoreauvian-styletranscendentalism by reading On the Road through Mikhail Bakhtin’sdiscussion of the chronotope, a concept I outline below. That is, Iread the novel in terms of its reliance on the ‘‘American’’ space ofthe road and its transformation, through a re-visioning of Ameri-can transcendentalism, of the progress-oriented, post-war temporalvision of the nation. To this point, my argument runs parallel toErik. R. Mortenson’s discussion of ‘‘time’’ in On the Road, in which,relying on Georg Lukacs and Martin Heidegger instead of Bakhtin,

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he writes that the novel encourages us to ‘‘question accepted notionsof temporality in whatever way [we] can if [we] want to reachthe infinity beyond time’’ (73). While he notes that this positionis ‘‘not without its problems’’ (73), however, Mortenson’s readingtends towards a romanticized vision of the liberating possibilities ofKerouac’s project. The problems to which Mortenson alludes deservemore attention, though, since, as I argue, Kerouac’s chronotopicresistance to dominant visions of the United States brings with it aproblematic identity politics (or at least baggage) of its own, specifi-cally, in terms of the racialization of the spatial and temporal repre-sentation of transcendent identity. Rather than a personal or specificfailure of particular authors or texts, this tension can be read as aportrayal of the inevitable failure of social critiques that are basedon notions of finding an ‘‘authentic’’ identity in a transcendencebeyond, and disconnected from, historical and personal contexts. Inother words, On the Road can be seen as a portrayal of the problemsof an American romantic notion of identity that makes universalclaims about the transcendental potential of the individual. On theRoad can thus be read as pointing to a difficulty in dominant USnotions of the self-reliance of the individual per se.

The Relativity of the Road

The transcendental moments in the novel generally take place ‘‘onthe road.’’ The novel, split into five parts, consists of several sepa-rate trips across the United States, leading to a circular structure,wherein the narrator, Sal Paradise, and the ostensible hero, DeanMoriarty, careen from east to west and back again. These tripsculminate in a north–south trip from New York to Mexico City.Taking place in the late 1940s, these various journeys and thecharacters’ actions during them were, on the novel’s publication in1957, read by many as direct attacks on the values and morals ofpost-war America. One early reviewer, according to Gerald Nico-sia, ‘‘warned that Kerouac’s characters flirted with depravity andthat his road led nowhere’’ (556). The emphasis on the lack of direc-tion ‘‘on the road’’ and the association of this lack with ‘‘depravity’’touch on the central romantic function of the image of the road inthe novel—destinations are less important than is the act of goingitself.

This emphasis on the journey rather than its goal moves beyondtraditional metaphors of ‘‘the journey of life’’ to contemplate thetemporal and spatial dynamics of the act of travelling on the road.

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That is, On the Road analyses the ways in which journeying can beseen in terms of its relation to the physical space of America andrelays that analysis as a function of the temporality of the jour-ney. Bakhtin, in his writings from between the two world wars,describes this device as a formal function of the novel genre; bor-rowing from contemporary physics, specifically from the theoryof relativity, Bakhtin uses the term ‘‘chronotope’’ to delineate ‘‘theintrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships thatare artistically expressed in literature’’ (84). Gary Saul Morson andCaryl Emerson explain: ‘‘A particular sort of event, or a particularsort of place that usually serves as the locale for such an event,acquires a certain chronotopic aura, which is in fact that ‘echo ofthe generic whole’ in which the given event typically appears’’(374). In Kerouac’s novel, then, the road serves as a chronotopicmotif, unifying the novel by presenting a series of events takingplace over time that are localized (as it were) in the space of theroad.3

Bakhtin specifically discusses the general function of the road aschronotope. He writes,

On the road . . . , the spatial and temporal paths of the most variedpeople—representatives of all social classes, estates, religions,nationalities, ages—intersect at one spatial and temporal point . . .On the road the spatial and temporal series defining human fatesand lives combine with one another in distinctive ways, even asthey become more complex and concrete by the collapse of socialdistances . . . Time, as it were, fuses together with space and flowsin it (forming the road) . . . (243–4)

In other words, the road serves as a site where people from avariety of backgrounds meet and journey together. The movementin space and time that defines the road journey causes, for Bakhtin,the historically specific divisions between people to break down.Social and cultural hierarchies are implicitly portrayed as con-textually specific entities that nonetheless attempt to force a per-manence on their existence by asserting their universal applicabilityacross time and space. The continual movement that characterizesthe road, however, exposes this permanence as a fiction, as thetraveller moves through multiple specifics of time and space.4 Thedifferences that, of necessity, the traveller both encounters andengages with on the road explode the hierarchical assertions of arigid social structure.

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Despite Morson and Emerson’s assertion that the chronotope ofthe road has ‘‘changed greatly over time’’ (375), this definition ofthe function of the road fits Kerouac’s novel neatly. Sal and Deando, indeed, cross the ‘‘paths of the most varied people’’ and attemptto ‘‘collapse’’ the ‘‘social distances’’ wrought by, among otherthings, class, age, and geography. Take, for example, what Saldescribes as ‘‘[t]he greatest ride in my life,’’ which occurs duringhis first cross-country hitchhiking trip:

a truck, with a flatboard at the back, with about six or seven boyssprawled out on it, and the drivers, two young blond farmersfrom Minnesota, were picking up every single soul they found onthat road . . . both [were] thick-wristed and earnest, with broadhowareyou smiles for anybody and anything that came acrosstheir path. I ran up, said ‘‘Is there room?’’ They said, ‘‘Sure, hopon, ‘sroom for everybody.’’ (24)

Populated by hobos, farmboys, and two ‘‘city boys’’ who were‘‘high-school football players’’ (25), this truck functions as a com-munity-in-movement that Sal idealizes specifically because of itsheterogeneity of class (25–33). The truck—which is itself constantlymoving and which Sal needs to ‘‘run’’ to—and the road, in general,allow Sal to break through socio-historical conditions of class andcommunicate with a variety of people. Elaborating on a romanticquest narrative, Sal’s journey only reaches such ideals when he ismoving, when he can transcend the spatial and temporal specificsof his own life and surroundings.

Transcendent Road

While Kerouac’s focus on the road journey locates this transcen-dence within a specifically urban setting, the most clear precursorsto this refigured romanticism still lie in Thoreau’s writings.5 In‘‘Walking,’’ especially, Thoreau defines the notion of a transcendentmovement that breaks through culturally prescriptive chronotopicboundaries. Indeed, Thoreau’s call in ‘‘Walking’’ to ‘‘[g]ive me formy friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones’’ (287) couldbe read as a central allusion in On the Road’s famous introductorytestament that

the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are madto live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything atthe same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplacething, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candlesexploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you seethe blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘‘Awww!’’ (8)

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Kerouac’s passage is obviously more frenetic than Thoreau’s rela-tively ‘‘tame’’ prose, but Thoreau himself calls for this type of figu-ration of time later in his essay:

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He isblessed above all mortals who loses no moment of the passing lifein remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cockcrow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated . . . Hisphilosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There issomething suggested by it that is a newer testament,—the gospelaccording to this moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got upearly and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season, inthe foremost rank of time. It is an expression of the health andsoundness of Nature, a brag for all the world,—healthiness as of aspring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate thelast instant of time. (‘‘Walking’’ 301–2)

The emphases on living in the present, on the ‘‘foremost rank oftime,’’ as the prime indicator of the exemplary ‘‘wild’’ or ‘‘mad’’life rings throughout these two passages. The transcendentalistfigure lives only in and for the moment.

In Thoreau’s text, this radical anti-conservatism (in that it activelyignores the past) quickly leads to a transcendental politics, withthe passage quoted above concluding, ‘‘Where he lives no fugitiveslave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many timessince last he heard that note?’’ (302). Thoreau thus envisions thesame radical departure from social hierarchies in his definition oftranscendental time that Bakhtin sees in the chronotope of theroad. A similar move would allow Thoreau to write elsewherethat John Brown, who attempted to steal weapons to arm an anti-slavery revolt, was ‘‘a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideasand principles’’ (‘‘A Plea for Captain John Brown’’ 115). For Thoreau,a transcendental lifestyle (for want of a better word) could lead topolitical action.6

The transcendental aspect of Sal’s ideal community transformsitself, however, from a specific critique of the class structure toa more abstract, nearly religious worship of the transcendentmoment that cements one’s own particular self-reliance. In otherwords, the classless moment of the truck ride is just one aspect ofthe larger road-construction project of the novel. Sal and DeanMoriarty specifically theorize about the ability of the road to breakthrough temporal boundaries. Indeed, beyond the universal acces-sibility of the road that Bakhtin defines, it is the very ability of

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Kerouac’s road journey to break through time that gives the roadits attraction for the two characters. At the beginning of the secondpart of the novel, Sal writes, ‘‘The madness of Dean had bloomedinto a weird flower’’ (113). Dean’s madness shows itself in an exor-bitant energy that allows him to compress a three-day driving tripinto one long monologue and to control completely the space andpeople around him:

This was the new Dean, grown to maturity . . . Fury spat out of hiseyes when he told of things he hated; great glows of joy replacedthis when he suddenly got happy; every muscle twitched to liveand go. ‘‘Oh, man, the things I could tell you,’’ he said, pokingme, ‘‘Oh, man, we must absolutely find the time—What hashappened to Carlo? We all get to see Carlo, darlings, first thingtomorrow. Now, Marylou, honeythighs, you sit next to me, Salnext, then Ed at the window, big Ed to cut off drafts . . . And thenwe’ll all go off to sweet life, ‘cause now is the time and we all knowtime!’’ He rubbed his jaw furiously, he swung the car and passedthree trucks, he roared into downtown Testament, looking inevery direction and seeing everything in an arc of 180 degreesaround his eyeballs without moving his head. Bang, he found aparking space in no time . . . (114)

Moving so fast that, one could say, he propels the car into ‘‘notime,’’ Dean transcends the temporal and physical limits of theaverage man, embodying an Emersonian transcendence, becomingwhat Emerson calls a ‘‘transparent eyeball’’ that can ‘‘see all’’ (189).As Bradley J. Stiles writes, much beat writing has

an underlying concept of identity that is directly related toEmerson’s soul/ego selfhood. The soul is ordinarily ‘‘clothed’’ inthe not-me of body and mind, and the aim is to transcend theordinary, to become transparent even to the self’s own range ofvision, and to see the world from the pure, unobstructed view-point of the soul . . . and the mechanism by which this self-locationwas discovered similarly recalled [Emerson and Whitman’s] tran-scendental perspective on reality. (67–8)

Happening on the road rather than in nature (what Stiles refers toas ‘‘the landscape of America’’ as opposed to Emerson’s more gen-eral, and natural, ‘‘landscape’’ [68]), this transcendence manifestsitself in a frenetic speed. The emphasized phrase ‘‘we all know time’’suggests Dean’s ability (in Sal’s eyes) to transcend the linear neces-sities of time, rising to a higher state where time as a whole can beseen and understood. Mortenson correctly sees this, in part, as ‘‘an

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attack on the corruption of time by capitalism,’’ where Sal andDean are ‘‘unconstrained by schedule or routine’’ (58, 59). Onthe Road expands on this specific portrayal of time, however: Saldescribes Dean as one who experiences everything in heightenedproportions, more ‘‘mature’’ proportions than those that othersexperience, once again echoing Emerson’s description of the tran-scendent moment, the effect of which ‘‘is like that of a higher emo-tion coming over me’’ (190). Sal’s description of Dean, unlike that ofthe truck ride, focuses on the transcendent moment, not as themeans through which social barriers, be they racial and/or capital-ist, can be brought down (the moment is entirely free of social tiesor aims), but as constituting, in and of itself, the chronotopic goal ofthe journey.

This division between a transcendental politics and a transcendencedevoid of politics is made even more clearly in Desolation Angels,during a conversation between the narrator, Jack Duluoz, and hisfriend Irwin Garden. Irwin says,

‘‘It’s time for the poets to influence American Civilization!’’Garden, like a contemporary American novelist who claimed hewas a two-fisted leftwing hipster leader and hired out CarnegieHall to announce such, in fact like certain Harvard scholars inhigh places, was a scholar interested in politics eventually tho hemade his mystic point about visions of eternity he’d seen—

‘‘Irwin if you’d really seen a vision of eternity you wouldnt careabout influencing American Civilization.’’

‘‘But that’s just the point, it’s where I at least have some authorityto speak instead of just stale ideas and sociological hangups out ofhandbooks—I have a Blakean message for the Iron Hound ofAmerica.’’

‘‘Whoopee—and whattaya do next?’’

‘‘I become a big dignified poet people listen to—I spend quietevenings with my friends in my smoking jacket, perhaps—I goout and buy everything I want in the supermarket—I have a voicein the supermarket! ’’ (253)

As opposed to the true, Blakean ‘‘vision of eternity’’ that Dean seesin On the Road, Irwin sees Jack’s ‘‘ ‘Road’ [as] a big mad book thatwill change America!’’ (253). Irwin’s transcendence is portrayed inDesolation Angels as corrupt. His vision is reduced to an explicitlyclassed impetus to wear a ‘‘smoking jacket’’ and to ‘‘buy every-thing’’ he wants. Perhaps to indicate this fact, Irwin’s language, inthe passage above, also remains largely bound to the traditional

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rules of grammar, whereas Jack eschews traditional punctuation sothat his words are closer to Kerouac’s own style of spontaneousprose, discussed later in this article. This structural difference echoesthe passage’s content: for Jack Duluoz—as, it seems, for Sal—anyattempt to pin the transcendent to the political results in a failureto transcend. In fact, as Fiona Paton notes, citing Michael White,‘‘Kerouac once claimed that ‘The Beat Generation has no interest inpolitics, only in mysticism, that’s their religion’ ’’ (189). Rather thanThoreau’s transcendence, which led him to protest against slaveryfrom within a prison cell, we are left with a transcendence thatmust either ignore the social context altogether or be put up forsale in the supermarket. Jack’s desultory, ‘‘Whoopee,’’ makes itclear which vision he prefers. Truly ‘‘knowing time’’ means escap-ing history.

Epitomized in the road, the ability to ‘‘know time’’ is also availablein On the Road through drugs and jazz. Generally, the transcenden-tal moment achieved through these methods is referred to as anundefined ‘‘IT.’’ While ‘‘IT’’ is largely amorphous, in keeping with‘‘its’’ chronotopic, pseudo-religious character, ‘‘IT’’ exists beyondsocio-historical and spatial constraints and seems, superficially atleast, to act in a universalizing and community-building manner.‘‘IT’’ transforms the romantic, individualist moment back into amore social Utopia, a Republic of hopped-up philosopher kings.During their last road trip east, Dean and Sal discuss a recent nightin a jazz bar:

Dean and I sat alone in the back seat . . . and talked. ‘‘Now, man,that alto man last night had IT—he held it once he found it; I’venever seen a guy who could hold so long.’’ I wanted to knowwhat ‘‘IT’’ meant. ‘‘Ah well’’—Dean laughed— ‘‘now you’reasking me impon-de-rables . . . ! Here’s a guy and everybody’sthere, right? Up to him to put down what’s on everybody’s mind.He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah,yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equalto it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus hegets it—everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks itup and carries. Time stops. He’s filling empty space with thesubstance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain,remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old ideas. He has to blowacross bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feelingsoul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybodyknows it’s not the tune that counts but IT— ’’ Dean could go nofurther; he was sweating telling about it. (206)

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‘‘IT’’ is a moment of bridge-building and community-formationthat arises from the artistic creation of one individual but is ulti-mately expressed as a communal feeling of transcendence: ‘‘it’s notthe tune that counts but IT.’’ ‘‘IT’’ becomes a form of universal com-munication—a prelapsarian, or pre-Babel monologism—that none-theless fragments itself, destroying that very communicability. ‘‘IT’’is not only imponderable but can only exist in the dashes thatdisrupt even the meaning of ‘‘im-pond-erables.’’ This incommuni-cability is, then, mirrored in the unreadability of the dashes, thecharacteristic signature of Kerouac’s much-discussed ‘‘spontaneousprose,’’ which, in the name of capturing the spontaneity of themoment, instead conveys to the reader only the unknowable natureof the ‘‘im-pond-erable.’’7 Dean’s attempts to explain this phenom-enon, then, must ultimately be transformed into a need to enact itby attempting to speak in a series of juxtapositions and ramblingsentences that try to go beyond the linear constraints of grammar,just as the alto man’s riff ‘‘stops’’ time.

This style is not just Dean’s, though; Kerouac’s ‘‘spontaneous prose’’attempted to codify a style of writing that would itself mimic themystical temporal and spatial dynamics of jazz. Much has beenmade of Kerouac’s construction of an aesthetics of ‘‘spontaneousprose,’’ whereby the writer would, ideally, compose a novel with-out revision.8 In one essay, he describes this form: ‘‘No periodsseparating sentences already arbitrarily riddled by false colons andtimid usually needless commas—but the vigorous space dashseparating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breathbetween outblown phrases)’’ (qtd. in Weinrich 42). Regina Weinrichnotes that

[a] different notion of time exists in these linguistic configurations.The sentence traditionally functions by framing statements andideas within a past–present–future arrangement. The sentencefixes time and does not allow the movement, flashes, and fluc-tuations of Kerouac’s intent. Thus the musical analogy allowsKerouac to work out a notion of time distinct from the tem-porality of conventional writing. (42)

This ‘‘vigorous’’ style is supposedly characterized by a lack of‘‘arbitrary’’ pauses, an attempt to capture speed and spontaneityitself. Also mentioning its relationship to jazz, Mortenson summa-rizes the role of this structure in terms of On the Road, noting that‘‘Kerouac too is trying to catch the ‘IT’ through his work’’ (72). In

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Kerouac’s definition and in these critics’ readings, spontaneousprose is an attempt, like Dean’s ‘‘IT,’’ to capture a style free ofspace-time constraints.

These formalist and romantic efforts to escape time are mirrored by,and help to reinforce, Sal’s attempt to escape tradition and the pastand explicitly to escape his socio-historical position in the whitemiddle class. The actions of hitchhiking, smoking pot, going tojazz bars, and ‘‘knowing time,’’ as well as the chronotope of theroad, all work against the normative social structures in which hefinds himself. As Kris Lackey notes, ‘‘Kerouac’s ardor for the roadis a yearning for novel and elemental experience denied by therepetition and hierarchical abstractions of bourgeois life’’ (43–4).The negative ramifications of this life are apparent in Sal’s feelingat the opening of the narrative that ‘‘everything was dead’’ beforehis ‘‘life on the road’’ (3). Opposed to this very modernist feelingof death and alienation sits Dean, who seems to find a new senseof authenticity and identity beyond tradition and beyond the struc-tures of the dominant society. This opposition is ironically summedup in the manner and place of Dean’s birth: he was born in a carwhile his parents were driving through Salt Lake City, a situationdescribed by Sal: ‘‘Salt Lake City at dawn—a city of sprinklers, theleast likely place for Dean to have been born’’ (59).

Lines on the Road

The flight from middle-class values is even more problematic thanthis structure would suggest, since it is also construed as a flightfrom whiteness into a heavily stereotyped version of non-whiteness.The suburban or middle-American figured in the ‘‘city of sprinklers’’is represented as and by whiteness; as Jane Kuenz argues in her dis-cussion of George Schuyler’s Black No More, being white means ‘‘tobe included in the conceptual realm of ‘America’ ’’ (185). This nor-mative value of whiteness and the need to flee from it are madeexplicit in one oft-quoted passage in On the Road. While in Denver(at the beginning of the novel’s third section), Sal

walked with every muscle aching among the lights . . . in theDenver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that thebest the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me,not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night . . . Iwished 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. (180)

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Sal and Dean’s desire to transcend time is ultimately a desire toescape the ideological structures around them and to escape theirown ‘‘dreary’’ life as white men. Indeed, the placing of ‘‘whiteman’’ in this passage inside so-called scare quotes signals that Salalready feels that his ‘‘membership’’ in white masculinity and there-fore, synecdochically, his connection to the dominant culture is, atbest, unstable.

Their various attempts to escape these dominant structures, though,are based on the racist stereotypes perpetuated by those very struc-tures. While the passage above may, as Holton has recently argued,provide an alternative subject position for white readers, the repre-sentation of racial otherness elsewhere in the novel is less easy toread in that way.9 Perhaps the single most disturbing instance ofthis use of stereotypes occurs when Sal is living in a tent village,picking cotton while living with Terry, a Mexican woman, and herson. He states that ‘‘I knew nothing about picking cotton . . . Therewas an old Negro couple in the field with us. They picked cottonwith the same God-blessed patience their grandfathers had prac-ticed in ante-bellum Alabama . . . My back began to ache. But itwas beautiful kneeling and hiding in that earth’’ (96). In order togain a sense of authenticity for himself through an attachment tonature, Sal first denies the entire brutal history of slavery. Hewishes instead to replace his own ‘‘incompetent’’ whiteness with amythical and blatantly racist construction of the contented slave—indeed, an apparently hereditary transferral of contentment fromslaves to free people. Black labour and physicality are here nothingbut a bolster to white thought, in an explicit use of what Toni Morri-son has called the ‘‘Africanist’’ narrative of American literature:‘‘the story of a black person, the experience of being bound and/orrejected,’’ which is used ‘‘as a means of meditation—both safeand risky—on one’s own humanity’’ and provides ‘‘opportunitiesto contemplate limitation, suffering, rebellion, and to speculate onfate and destiny’’ (53). This passage in On the Road, in which Salcritiques his whiteness as a means of gaining a sense of autonomyfrom the ‘‘incompetence’’ of the dominant culture, his attempt tofind free will in the face of an overly constrictive society, is placedin relief by and gains its moral and ethical force from the stereo-typical, racist portrayal of silenced black characters.10

Dean’s and Sal’s use of a stereotyped ‘‘other’’ as a means of escap-ing their own ‘‘disillusioned’’ identities, their past, and indeed time

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itself, is apparent in a heavily symbolic scene near the end ofthe novel. Dean, Sal, and another character are driving throughMexico, when they pass a village in the mountains. When some ofthe villagers approach the car to sell them crystals, Dean says,

‘‘They’ve only recently learned to sell these crystals, since thehighway was built about ten years back—up until that time thisentire nation must have been silent! ’’ The girls yammered aroundthe car. One particularly soulful child gripped at Dean’s sweatyarm. She yammered in Indian. ‘‘Ah yes, ah yes, dear one,’’ saidDean tenderly and almost sadly. He got out of the car and wentfishing around in the battered trunk in the back—the same oldtortured American trunk—and pulled out a wristwatch. Heshowed it to the child. She whimpered with glee. The otherscrowded around with amazement. Then Dean poked in the littlegirl’s hand for ‘‘the sweetest and purest and smallest crystal shehas personally picked from the mountain for me.’’ He foundone no bigger than a berry. And he handed her the wristwatchdangling. Their mouths rounded like the mouths of choristerchildren. (298–9)

For Dean, this particular road— literally and figuratively the highroad—forms the very mode through which intercultural communi-cation can supposedly happen. Before the road was there, he says,‘‘this entire nation’’ was ‘‘silent.’’ However, the communicationenabled here is still a ‘‘silent’’ one, with the ‘‘girls’’ only able to‘‘whimper’’ and ‘‘yammer,’’ while their mouths can only silently‘‘round[ ] like the mouths of chorister children.’’ The road here doesnot ‘‘collapse . . . social distances’’ as Bakhtin would have it (243),but instead functions as the capitalist artery that both enablesand limits the communication. Both Dean’s escape from time (theremoval of his watch) and his gaining of purity and sweetness arereliant on a racialized and gendered other who is both infantilizedand voiceless outside of a relationship to (white, male) America.

Precisely because of this reliance on obviously inadequate imagesof the authentic, whole identity of the ‘‘noble savage,’’ though,Sal’s visions of transcendence are always already falling apart. Themajor refrain of the novel is not ‘‘IT’’ but rather ‘‘everything wascollapsing.’’ This phrase (including minor grammatical variantsand such related phrases as ‘‘everything was dead,’’ from the openingparagraph, and ‘‘everything was falling apart’’ [77]), which appearsseveral times in the novel, indicates a slippage in Sal’s worldview.

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This slippage, in turn, indicates that it is impossible to maintaina rebellion against the dominant society on the basis of a culturalothering, a ‘‘slumming’’ in the racist (and sexist and classist) stereo-typing that is, in fact, created by that society.11 The problem is sym-bolized near the end of Sal’s relationship with Terry. Sal has tosleep in a barn at one point while Terry goes to her parents’ house:‘‘I was all set except for a great hairy tarantula that lurked atthe pinpoint top of the barn. Terry said it wouldn’t harm me if Ididn’t bother it. I lay on my back and stared at it . . . I made loveto her under the tarantula. What was the tarantula doing?’’ (99–100). This passage, occurring shortly after one of the instances of‘‘[e]verything was collapsing’’ (99), is not merely a foreshadowingof Sal’s and Terry’s impending break-up but is also evidence thatSal feels he is ‘‘bothering’’ something—his worries about the taran-tula while making love ‘‘to’’ Terry can be a reflection of the prob-lems of his stereotyped vision of their relationship in the cottonplantation; this vision is ‘‘collapsing’’ because of the actuality oftheir day-to-day lives. What is represented as an exotic attractionbecomes a terror of an equally exotic venom; Sal’s desire for Terryinverts in his own mind into a threat, in an archetypal representa-tion of an unconscious fear.

However, such recognition of the failure of his vision is alwaysvague and not tied to a similar recognition of the racism of his‘‘othering’’ practices. Despite this failure to connect the two, though,the novel ends with a denial of the possibility of ‘‘knowing time,’’ adenial of the ability to exist completely beyond the constraints ofone’s own past:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the oldbroken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over NewJersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievablehuge bulge over to the West coast, and all that road going, all thepeople dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know bynow the children must be crying in the land where they let thechildren cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you knowthat God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping andshedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before thecoming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers,cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobodyknows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlornrags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think ofOld Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of DeanMoriarty. (309–10)

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Rather than knowing and understanding ‘‘EVERYTHING,’’ asDean does once while he’s high, and rather than finding a sense ofauthenticity within the ‘‘American night’’ of a racialized and stereo-typed other, as Sal tries to do on the cotton plantation, Sal hererealizes that no one can escape the boundaries of time and place.This fact is indicated by the geographically specific framing ofthe final paragraph within another east-to-west description of theUnited States, which is represented as closing into night. Mean-while, the possibility of transcendent knowledge—beyond thesespecifics of time and place— is both equated with childish inno-cence and simultaneously called into question— ‘‘don’t you knowthat God is Pooh Bear?’’—but the inevitability of the ‘‘forlornrags’’ of the passage of time is unquestioned. And finally, in themeditation on the two Deans, Sal represents himself and Dean asproducts of a past that needs to be thought about and interrogated,despite the difficulties of fully comprehending it.12

This is not a simple failure of vision, however. This is a vision thathas its failure already encoded into it. Sal’s vision of Dean slips intime, he and his father becoming nearly indistinguishable, evenas the past is ‘‘never found.’’ The romantic vision of ‘‘IT’’ and themodernist malaise of ‘‘everything is collapsing’’ are shown to beone and the same. In order to experience ‘‘IT,’’ the very nostalgia(including the racist nostalgia) that can lead to ‘‘IT’’ has to collapse.Sal’s quest is fuelled by the rigid boundaries he wants to deny. Inconclusion, then, throughout the novel, in order to escape timeand reach a new sense of authenticity, Sal must escape his tradi-tions (both literary and otherwise); in order to do this he mustescape the ideological structures of middle-class whiteness, but theonly other discursive options he sees are shaped by racist stereo-types that themselves are part of the tradition he is trying to escape.Jonathan Paul Eburne notes the same dynamic in Kerouac’s TheSubterraneans and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, writingthat the authors’ attempts at ‘‘evacuating a bankrupt subject posi-tion by identifying with the ‘otherness’ of the American culturalmargins ends up . . . implicating [them] in the same process of nor-mativity and containment that they attempt to leave behind’’ (55).What Eburne does not note is that this process of identificationwith a stereotyped ‘‘other,’’ and the collapse it precipitates, are pre-ordained by the characters’ very notion of the possibility of a com-plete metaphysical transcendence of their socio-historical contexts.As Sal says early in the novel, ‘‘It was my dream that screwed up’’

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(13). Because the notion of transcendence is reliant on a quasi-En-lightenment concept of authentic identity, on the isolated subject,which is, as Susan Hekman writes, defined in exclusively ‘‘[white]masculine terms’’ (195), it necessarily brings with it the otheraspects of that subjectivity.13 Sal’s use of a stereotyped othernessthrough which to escape his own identity is one possible upshot ofthat identity. Sal’s attempted transcendence is, itself, reliant on his,and Kerouac’s, ontological traditions and therefore always fails. Onthe Road, therefore, highlights the problems not only of dominant,modernist identificatory systems but also of attempts to reject thosesystems based on denials (transcendental or otherwise) of spatialand temporal (read, ‘‘socio-historical’’) specificities. Such denialsoften bring with them the very oppressive traditions they try todeny, albeit hidden in the trunk.

Notes

1 For an historical view of the beats and their ties to post-war rebellion,see George and Starr; for an excellent overarching reading of the radi-cal conservatism of New Criticism, see Franklin; for an analysis of therelation between Kerouac’s work and postmodernism, see Johnson.

2 Passages cited here are from the Modern History Project website, whichstates that its article ‘‘The Aquarian Conspiracy: Huxley, Isis, LSD andthe Roots of the American Hedonist Culture’’ is an excerpt from Dope,Inc. This particular passage appears only in the article, however,though it does capture the spirit of the book’s overall argument.The article repeats the reference in Dope, Inc. to the ‘‘beatnik cult’’(Kalimtgis, Goldman, and Steinberg 374).

3 I am here echoing Morson and Emerson, who explain Bakhtin’s chro-notope in more detail: ‘‘A particular sort of event, or a particular sortof place that usually serves as the locale for such an event, acquires acertain chronotopic aura, which is in fact that ‘echo of the genericwhole’ in which the given event typically appears’’ (374).

4 For a discussion of Kerouac (specifically Doctor Sax) that echoes thisargument but does so in relation to Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossiaand dialogism rather than in terms of the chronotope, see Paton.

5 Phillips, among others, briefly discusses Kerouac’s generalindebtedness to Thoreau (51–2). Nicosia notes that Kerouac hadat one time planned to write a film biography of Thoreau (274).

6 As many revisionist critics have shown, though, Thoreau’s politicalstance is not without its own problems (to echo Mortenson); seeHaslam, Fitting Sentences for a discussion of these readings.

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7 One could even read the title, On the Road, as an indication that thereaderly perspective is also supposed to exist in this paradoxicallynon-communicative monologic, where our reading is itself in a stateof flux ‘‘on the road.’’

8 Such an aesthetics, of course, is a construction, and, as Hunt andNicosia have pointed out, Kerouac constantly and consistently revisedand reworked his novels and other pieces; see Hunt 108–20; Nicosia,e.g., 352–3, 356. Kerouac did, however, attempt formally to capturewhat he saw as the energy of spontaneous writing.

9 A long note is needed here to explain how my argument differsfrom some recent Kerouac criticism, which has moved into what couldbe called a ‘‘recovery mode’’ in terms of Kerouac’s representation ofrace (and which I summarize here in order to put into relief my insis-tence on critique). In ‘‘ ‘The Sordid Hipsters of America’: Beat Cultureand the Folds of Heterogeneity,’’ Holton makes a convincing argumentthat, while ‘‘Kerouac’s image of African America is . . . naive’’ andhas been ‘‘dismissed as ignorant of the actual living conditions ofAfrican Americans, if not outright racist,’’ still ‘‘[m]any white readers. . . , reacting less to the portraits’ accuracy than to the sense of possi-bility they evoked, responded positively to such images of hetero-geneity’’ (22). Indeed, if one judges by Eldridge Cleaver’s famousremarks about this passage, some early African American responsesto this dynamic were likewise positive ( James Baldwin, of course,disagreed): Cleaver characterizes this very passage from On the Road asan example of ‘‘a rejection of the conformity which America expected . . .[t]he howl of the beatniks and their scathing, outraged denunciation ofthe system’’ (Kerouac 72; qtd. in Cleaver). Richard Quinn, in fact, reads‘‘spontaneous prose’’ itself as an attempt at an heterogeneous, ‘‘cross-cultural’’ form, writing of both Kerouac’s prose and Charlie Parker’sbebop that ‘‘[l]isteners and readers, in actively discovering traces ofwhite modernism, popular song, and black jazz within these texts, willhopefully experience similar cross-cultural understandings’’ (154).From a different disciplinary perspective, Howard Campbell likewiseattempts to recover the ‘‘value’’ of Kerouac’s writing as anthropologi-cal ‘‘method,’’ despite its being admittedly ‘‘hopelessly naive, essen-tialist and romantic’’ (212). Daniel Belgrad expands these positions toargue against criticism of beat writing that arises from a ‘‘ ‘culturalimperialist’ paradigm,’’ since such readings tend to ‘‘reduce all actsof cross-cultural inquiry to one-dimensional caricatures in which amonolithic imperial power, acting through individual emissaries,exploits a passive, colonized society’’ (29). While I certainly agree withthese critics to a point, I would argue that more readings of the many‘‘one-dimensional’’ characterizations of non-whites in beat writing, andin On the Road in particular, still need interrogation, especially since, asClinton R. Starr notes, ‘‘Beat counterculture was by no means immuneto white racism’’ (48), and since, as I argue, those stereotyped charac-

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terizations can therefore illuminate larger cultural lacunae. Perhaps thestrongest support for maintaining an explicitly critical stance comesfrom Manuel Luis Martinez, who points out, in part, that Kerouac’scross-racial identification only goes in one direction:

Kerouac establishes the necessity of a sort of consumption andappropriation of various identities and ethnicities. Yet those shiftsare never dangerously liminal, for they become products, merchan-dise for which Kerouac advertises . . . This disabling of the possibleredressive action entailed in ‘‘difference’’ minimizes the possibilitythat the black subject might want to exchange places with the whitesubject . . . An illusory egalitarianism of white subjectivity is estab-lished at the cost of objectifying ethnic identity for consumption.(91; emphasis added)

10 Panish sees a similar dynamic at work in Kerouac’s description ofCharlie Parker in The Subterraneans: ‘‘Kerouac needs a de-historicizedsymbol of suffering and outsiderism so that he can link himself to it’’(114). I elaborate on the complexities of this relationship betweenwhiteness and the ‘‘Africanist’’ narrative in Haslam ‘‘Coded Discourse.’’

11 Deleuze and Guattari point towards this, writing that Kerouac’s corpus,as a figure for all American writing, may cause ‘‘deterritorialized flowsof desire to circulate, but also always mak[es] these flows transportfascisizing, moralizing, Puritan, and familialist territorialities’’ (278).

12 Johnson notes a similar ‘‘failure’’ in the overall structure of Kerouac’sDesolation Angels, arguing that ‘‘the protagonist Jack Duluoz endeavorsto escape the prison of scrutiny through the liberating act of narrating,ultimately to no avail’’ (46).

13 In this, my argument differs from Abel’s, in which, relying onDeleuze’s reading of Kerouac, he states that ‘‘Kerouac render[s]writing non-ontologically—that is, without concern for writing’spossible metaphysical properties’’ (233). Interestingly, Abel usesthe same quotation I use in my title to argue this. For an excellentdiscussion of Enlightenment constructions of identity and issues ofrace and gender, also see Smith, esp. 1–23.

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