SOURCE: “The Road as Transition,” in The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac: A Study of the Fiction, Southern Illinois University Press, 1987, pp. 34-56.

The Open Road. The great home of the soul is the Open Road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not ‘above.’ Not even ‘within.’ The soul is neither ‘above’ nor ‘within.’ It is a wayfarer down the Open Road.

—D. H. Lawrence, “Whitman”

If The Town and the City establishes the essential proposition of the Duluoz legend—that is, the loss of spiritual values prophesying the decline of America and its soul—then On the Road [hereafter abbreviated as OR] extends this idea in a picaresque mode. The soul journeys along the open highway of America, in search of permanence, of values that will endure and not collapse. Indeed, as the design of the Duluoz legend unfolds, the progression of Kerouac's career becomes one in which his own persona retreats further and further away from the distractions of this world to the inwardness of writing, “telling the true story of the world in interior monolog,” as he recommends to writers in his “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.”¹

Thus, within the context of the entire legend, On the Road functions as a transition both stylistically and thematically. The road becomes a structural option based on temporal progression as well as a metaphor for the conventional quest myth. The novel takes the central ideas of The Town and the City—disillusion with the American Dream—and develops it into a quest for new values; that quest, however, ends only in increased despair and desolation.

According to the pertinent biographical and critical data, sketches for Kerouac's second novel were written while Kerouac was still working on The Town and the City, during a period of hitchhiking west, as “Kerouac began to appreciate the potential of a novel that would capture the vitality of America.”² Clearly he felt that the earlier novel could not do so, and the criticism that it was “imitative” made him all the more certain to supersede the structural limitations of the conventional The Town and the City. Ironically enough, Kerouac's structural solution in On the Road is amazingly conventional considering all the bravado about breaking tradition attributed to the book at its first appearance. After all, the quest tradition is the oldest convention of the novel itself.

On the Road follows upon The Town and the City as a development of one narrative strand, most predominantly Peter Martin's; and indeed, Kerouac's second novel dramatizes that strand in the outwardly-searching mode of the traditional quest romance. Through the creation of a superlinear motif, a quest of hyperbolic momentum and episodic frequency, Kerouac's fascination with high-speed cross-country excursions brings quest romance into a distinctly twentieth-century mode.

But On the Road requires clarification beyond its explanation as a variation of the quest motif. The essential myth of the novel is the search for something holy, something lasting, something that will allow the narrator, Sal Paradise, the genuine tranquility of his “hearthside” ideals. In the process of that quest, he must renounce the material and follow after Dean Moriarty as his guide. The quest is for something as ephemeral as the holy grail or as the Zen denial of the concrete in favor of the spirit or soul.

Dorothy Van Ghent finds this quest for the holy a redeeming feature of all Beat literature. She sees the Beat myth as following authentic archaic lines. Thus the hero, the angel-headed hipster, comes of anonymous parentage, “parents whom he denies in correct mythological fashion. He has received a mysterious call—to the road, … [to] the jazz dens. … The hero is differentiated from the population by his angelic awareness. … His myth runs along these lines toward the familiar end, some sort of transcendence.”³ Though Van Ghent is correct in focusing upon the heroic quality of the quest and in isolating the special quality of that Beat hero the angel-headed hipster, this definition lacks analysis and as such is far too narrow to encompass the quest myth that is On the Road.

To be specific, On the Road is an elegiac romance. According to the most recent critical theories on the quest romance tradition in Western literature, there are three developmental stages to this genre; elegiac romance is but the latest and most keenly aligned with modernism.⁴ Old romance, that of Gawain and Parzival, directs our attention exclusively to the task and character of the knight, who must overcome weaknesses of his own character in order to merit his noble station and warrant the reputation of chivalric gallantry and valor. Romance changes radically, however, in the hands of Cervantes, where the entire story becomes ironic. In this second stage, the structure of traditional romance is revised so that the knight no longer holds the center of attention, but shares the stage with another figure, the squire. The story's fundamental irony results from the fact that we are never quite sure whose values we are meant to share, the knight's or the squire's, but we are still led to admire chivalric service, gallantry, and valor even as we are also led to doubt them. The third stage, elegiac romance proper, brings us back to Kerouac.

On the Road can be seen as an example of the evolution of quest romance as it turns elegiac. The knight and squire of old are retained in the personages of Dean and Sal. While the knight is obsessed by the goal of the quest, the squire does not share in the knight's preoccupation, but instead seems satisfied to look meekly on. If Dean is driven by the immediate gratification of kicks, of fast cars, women, and drugs, Sal—Kerouac's surrogate—is the observer who views Dean as a catalyst for the only action he knows: writing. In old romance the knight undergoes the pain of change brought on by the rigors of his quest; in the second stage of romance, the knight and squire together undergo development during the course of the quest. In elegiac romance, the knight does not change at all; like Dean, he does not mellow, he experiences no enlightenment, his character remains constant. Instead, the squire, like Sal, is the center of attention. It is his character that develops and it is his enlightenment we must try to understand.

Thus the genre of prose to which On the Road properly belongs is one in which the narrator regains his identity by revealing it to himself. He accomplishes this task of self-enlightenment by telling a story about a person who represents loss to him in some sense—a person, for example, ridden by misfortune, or full of daunted hope—but whom he still admires. Dean's relationship to Sal is thus clarified: he represents a loss to Sal, what Sal hopes to realize by admiring only those who burn out like incandescent roman candles: “The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death” (OR, 124).

A Freudian interpretation of this passage would reveal Sal's attachment to Dean to be far more instinctual and beyond conscious control than would be suggested by the narrative itself.⁵ At times the relationship between Sal and Dean is seen more appropriately as one between a son and lost father or between two brothers lost to one another. At first Sal says of Dean, “he reminded me of some long-lost brother (OR, 10).⁶ In the final lines of the novel Sal sums up: “I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty” (OR, 310).

Sal observes his object lost through his hero, and the novel is shaped to direct our attention to the narrator's sense of this loss, which he transmutes and refines. And because the hero is somewhat bigger than life and to that degree distinguished from humanity, the hero is almost an abstraction which Sal creates through memory and fantasy. It does not matter, therefore, that Dean fails to reach or even embody the goals of his quest for lasting values. What matters instead is that Sal as narrator reaches the goal for which Dean is a catalyst—the understanding and freedom which comes of telling his tale, celebrating the fact that he is both alive and free. He tells the story to celebrate further that he has survived on terms authentically his own.

In On the Road, Kerouac advantageously shifts from one kind of romance to another, from family romance to elegiac romance, to dramatize more effectively the central philosophical preoccupation of The Town and the City: the question of who killed the father. Dean can be seen as a larger-than-life heroic embodiment of the renewal and survival that overcome the “anxiety of influence”—and specifically, the authority of the father—of the earlier novel. In Visions of Cody, the novel that parallels On the Road in legend time, Kerouac refines and transmutes the sense of loss in a totally different manner—into subtle, expansive meditations, into vast tropes on time, memory, and art. But in On the Road he opts for the elegiac romance form.

SPONTANEOUS BOP PROSODY

In the same way that On the Road's overall structure of plot—the zigzagging across America in hyperbolic adventures and kicks—suggests a linearity that eventually renders the elegiac romance form superficial and almost comic, the novel's language starts to take on the unique style we associate with Kerouac. Visions of Cody and Desolation Angels are both more successful exemplars of the language that is beginning to take hold of the temporal progression of On the Road, here initiated by a dissatisfaction with the limitations of a linear structure the novel sets in place only to criticize; but the extraordinary quality of the language in On the Road distinguishes the novel's stylistic break with the limitations Kerouac perceived in his earlier effort. A discussion of Kerouac's language will reveal (1) how linearity or seeming temporal progression is broken down into smaller structures or phrases which can be analyzed as tropes of collapsing and building, and (2) how the texture of On the Road is controlled by a musical metaphor whose seeming onflow contains rhythms and cadences, interior sound systems, in the manner of prose poetry—though the full resources of Kerouac's spontaneous bop prosody have yet to be achieved.

During this “road” or transitional period, Kerouac was in fact evolving his philosophy of spontaneous composition, that spontaneous bop prosody which he wished to develop through each subsequent creation. Kerouac's philosophy is, moreover, one which involves a discovery of language through a new definition of structure. Each novel subsequent to On the Road is an attempt to redefine structure as it solves formal problems through the discovery of resourceful properties of language. Thus the quest for language becomes the solution to Kerouac's problem of form, with language itself becoming the object of the quest motif from Kerouac's own perspective. As he says in his essay “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” “Modern bizarre structures … arise from language being dead, ‘different’ themes give illusion of ‘new’ life.”⁷

Much has been made of the manuscript of On the Road, which provides evidence of Kerouac's linguistic experimentation. It has a scraggly, raw look, jagged and unrevised. Its mode of composition is famous. It was first written on a roll of paper and consisted entirely of one sentence, which uncoils over two hundred pages when finally paginated. Ann Charters refers to the manuscript as a “teletype.”⁸ John Clellon Holmes even recalls Kerouac in the process of writing—how the typewriter clattered without pause, how Kerouac unrolled the manuscript thirty feet beyond the machine, “a scroll three inches thick made up of one single-spaced, unbroken paragraph 120 feet long.”⁹ John Tytell's description is the most specific: Kerouac wrote on “sixteen-foot rolls of thin Japanese drawing paper that he found in the loft, taping them together to form one huge roll.” Calling it a “marathon linguistic flow,” Tytell goes on to describe Kerouac's handling of the 250-foot single paragraph, “as it unreeled from his memory of the various versions he had attempted during the past two years, but writing now with more natural freedom, somehow organically responding to the Zen notion of ‘artless art.’”¹⁰ This methodology goes far to explain Kerouac's purposeful “natural flow,” or “struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind.”¹¹

This methodology, however, is not to be mistaken for the product. After Kerouac's six-year search for a publisher, Malcolm Cowley, Kerouac's editor at Viking Press, finally printed the book—edited, punctuated, and paginated.¹² Gerald Nicosia describes some of the specific revisions of On the Road: how it had been retyped on regular bond, how “the roll had been turned into a 450-page manuscript,” and how the manuscript had been divided into its five “books,” among other changes. Nicosia sums up Kerouac's attitude to the revision: “If the present On the Road were false from the point of view of art, it was the version truest to reality, and so he couldn't dismiss it out of hand. … [A]s he wrote to Holmes, On the Road—even as it now stood—was a good deal less false than The Town and the City.”¹³ When Tytell suggests that On the Road is less successful than Visions of Cody because the latter is unedited and therefore closer to Kerouac's ideals,¹⁴ he misses the artistic import of the earlier book as a transitional phase. Rather, each novel solves the structural problem of unrevised prose through a rhetorical paradigm, based largely on an analogy with the idiom of jazz. And not only does the paradigm work for Kerouac's legend as a whole, but within the linguistic structures of each novel as well.

The specific textual components of On the Road are explained by the jazz reference. First, the musical analogy for temporal progression is made explicit as Kerouac's fundamental modus operandi. He describes his philosophy of composition, “Blow as deep as you want to blow,” as if he were thinking of a writer as a horn-player. But then he ties this description of his methodology to a rationale for the peculiarities of his punctuation: “Method. No periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas—but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases).”¹⁵ The words and phrases that occur between dashes have the semblance of linguistic entities unaligned with the conventional subject-verb arrangement of English sentences.

A different notion of time exists in these linguistic configurations. The sentence traditionally functions by framing statements and ideas within a past-present-future arrangement. The sentence fixes time and does not allow the movement, flashes, and fluctuations of Kerouac's intent. Thus the musical analogy allows Kerouac to work out a notion of time distinct from the temporality of conventional writing, less prosaic and more poetic, less linear than the overall structure of the adventure he suggests, more temporally dislocated than the traditional quest formula. Phrases become poetic utterances, “‘measured pauses which are the essentials of our speech’—‘divisions of the sounds we hear’—‘time and how to note it down’ (William Carlos Williams).” Thus Kerouac's prose has a measured breath, and timing is the key to purity of rendition. Kerouac describes the procedure as follows: “Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.”¹⁶

This is the beginning of Kerouac's aesthetic solution to the time and space problem he had encountered in his first novel. On the Road is the attempt to solve that structural problem. Even though his solution also involves an attempt to follow a prescribed form such as the elegiac romance, the musical metaphor suggests a nonlinear ideal that will eventually explode the superlinear form of “blowing” in On the Road. Kerouac will perfect this form in sections of Visions of Cody and Desolation Angels; On the Road is therefore transitional, not yet exemplary of the form at its fullest.

A continued examination of Kerouac's essay “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” in tandem with a close reading of sections of the text of On the Road will provide concrete evidence of a compositional process analogous to the structures of jazz and of a repetition of these musical structures that provides a deeper pattern than the novel's linear surface narration might suggest.¹⁷ It is useful to remember that jazz music almost always works as the repetition of a series of chord changes. Key to this music is the notion of repeated forms that become redefined and redeveloped through each rendition of the series. Moreover, timing is of course not only important for the phrasing of jazz notes but also integral to the very articulation of certain phrases, ideas, and structures.¹⁸

Kerouac's descriptions usually begin with the privileged image of the “jewel center,” as he calls it in the essay on spontaneous writing.¹⁹ A particularly instructive example occurs when Sal, Dean, and their friends leave Louisiana and “Old Bull Lee” to head further west. The passage begins with an interlude, or introductory phrase: “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. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies” (OR, 156). Here Kerouac is only partially conscious of the meanings of words, conjured up primarily to incite the “semi-trance,” the state “without consciousness” which he recommends for all writers in the essay under examination. Visually, he sets up an impressionistic canvas of forms breaking apart like atoms, but contained by the “world” and “skies,” as though he were looking through a fish-eye lens.

After this first sentence, Kerouac reaches the key word or “jewel center” of this association as he is transported to the unconscious state which he aspires to achieve in the writing of spontaneous prose: “We wheeled through the sultry old light of Algiers, back on the ferry, back toward the mud-splashed, crabbed old ships across the river, back on Canal, and out; on a two-lane highway to Baton Rouge in purple darkness; swung west there, crossed the Mississippi at a place called Port Allen” (OR, 156). The repetition of “back” develops in a typical build-up so that the pacing of the unconscious exposition that follows gains momentum. This momentum is further triggered by the assonance and alliteration that move the line of Kerouac's free prose. The initial w and long e sounds lead into the slant rhymes of “ul,” “ol,” and “Al.” The short a of “back” is echoed in “splashed” and “crabbed,” all intended to emphasize the “wheeling” motion that he is describing. The use of prepositions—“on,” “toward,” “out”—reinforces “wheeling,” so that a great deal of ground is covered in a compact motion.

Note the pacing in the “unconscious” exposition that follows: “Port Allen—where the river's all rain and roses in a misty pinpoint darkness and where we swung around a circular drive in yellow foglight and suddenly saw the great black body below a bridge and crossed eternity again” (OR, 156). First, the repetition of “Port Allen” creates force. Second, the poetic affects are tighter. The rolling r's of “where,” “river,” “rain,” “roses,” are picked up by “darkness,” with “where” again creating a circular motion. The word “swung” is repeated; “around” picks up the rolling r as does “circular drive,” which actually states what the writing accomplishes at the levels of both sound and sense. A change in light from “sultry old” to “yellow fog” signals a change in geographic detail to give the journey its proper significance—enlightenment. In the next breath, Kerouac sums up the meaning of the trip as a whole as a panoramic vision not confined to the concrete geographical detail (the “Suddenly saw” reflects such awareness). And the alliteration of the b's in “black body below a bridge” suggests something still mysterious as the passage comes full circle in crossing the Mississippi (and eternity) again.

The next part of the paragraph picks up after this minirelease or exhilaration with a new “jewel center,” even stronger than the first, building up rhetorically to “What is the Mississippi River?” from which the answer gushes forth:

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 voyaging 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.

(OR, 156)

Here again certain repetitions of sound and punctuation carry the pace as Kerouac's definition of the powerful river at once echoes and reveals his admiration for its spontaneous flow. The short o sound of “washed” and “clod” is repeated in the next phrase, with “soft,” “plopping,” “from,” “drooping,” “Missouri,” and “dissolving” all echoing with subtle changes the movement described. Again concrete physical images in nature remind Kerouac of eternity, the “eternal waterbed” an image for the sought-after ideal—that which never changes—the final end of the search, at rest, in the grave. An earth image of “brown foams” then becomes a point of departure for all the port cities and towns here enumerated. Gerund phrases such as “voyaging,” adjectives such as “endless,” the repetition of “and” (and the long e in between) redramatize ongoing movement, while “down,” “along,” “by,” and “out” carry this movement and its meaning toward the ultimate metaphor for the gaping womb/grave, “The Night's Great Gulf.” In a similar manner, each passage or section comes full circle to a release in a metaphysical image, which explains in part the litanous, lyrical quality of a language that aspires to the state of “semi-trance.”²⁰

In yet another section, the focus is on Sal's narration of the Ghost of the Susquehanna, a story that reveals the same structural ingredients that prevail in the previously quoted passage. The “jewel center” starts off: “I thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me different” (OR, 105). All of the resonant language that follows, with its rhythms and cadences, is related to the central myth of “America.” Moreover, the supernatural element of the ghost is significant because Kerouac's idea of revelation turns on how natural objects can conjure universal, eternal truths. The desired end of the natural flow of language is thus the same as the desired end of myth.

The buildup and repetitive sound patterns mark the now familiar circular motion: “No, there is a wilderness in the East; it's the same wilderness Ben Franklin plodded in the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wild-buck Indian-fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find the Gap, when Bradford built his road and men whooped her up in log cabins” (OR, 105). Starting with the contradiction “No,” emphatic in its signal to set off a new riff, the passage builds on a pioneering image that sees the great men of American history as common people (an idea repeated in Kerouac's image of America in The Book of Dreams). The notion is both Christian and democratic in its vision of each man's place under God and law. The o sounds of “no,” “plodded,” “ox,” and “post” propel Kerouac's language, while the “when” functions to trigger a phrase as “back” does in the previously cited passage. Kerouac's unusual diction—the use of compounds such as “wild-buck” and “Indian-fighter”—and his use of onomatopoetic verbs like “whooped” attempt to create a literary language that echoes the language of America.

Central also—and paradigmatic of our other motif—is the emphasis on the idea of “building” and “collapsing.” Optimism is expressed in the terseness of the adjectives and the idea of “promise.” But this optimism is, of course, followed immediately by the down side of the vision, so that the description is actually controlled by a sense of opposition and contradiction: “There were not great Arizona spaces for the little man, just the bushy wilderness of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, Old Potomac and Monocracy” (OR, 105). This image therefore collapses the optimism of the previous sentence, showing the up-and-down movement of Kerouac's myth about America. The rhythmic and patterned sounds are created to present the optimistic and exuberant but also the sad and mournful. The idea of the “little man” conjures Kerouac's association with his father as he begins to understand the side of the American Dream that is destructive. Here “backroads” and “black-tar” emphasize the sorrowful aspect of the “promise” in the first part. Unlike the “great black body” that was a symbol of eternity earlier, these rivers seem sadly dead and, like conventional sentences, end-stopped.

But the next paragraph, predictably enough, must begin with a new jewel center: “That night in Harrisburg I had to sleep in the railroad station on a bench; at dawn the station masters threw me out” (OR, 105). Here Kerouac continues his narrative with a hobo image of himself, humbled by his “station.” The dawn womb of the station connotes expulsion, leaving the narrator to extrapolate philosophically: “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 that 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” (OR, 105). This is a thematically and structurally important passage, one that sums up much of Kerouac's deepest paranoia about life, and one to which all the narrative circles eventually point as they oscillate between building and collapsing. This is the vision of the innocence from which we start our childhood beliefs, a womblike paradise that becomes revealed through the process of living. Part of Kerouac's litany is a fond reminiscence of this state and the nostalgic sense of loss that accompanies his life. But another part is a sense that dream and reality partake of the same substance. This image of expulsion from paradise leaves Kerouac likening himself (and all of us humble humans as well) to a ghost, not in death but in life. The sense of the dream or of paradise collapsing is thus all too real, whereas the future afterlife is as yet unknown and an end of the quest itself. The sounds build an image of all-inclusiveness to this paranoia of possibilities: “ands” link the adjectives “wretched,” “miserable,” “poor,” “blind,” and “naked,” telling us that we are hallucinatory images, each with the same abject visage—that of the alliterative “gruesome grieving ghost”—which comes from the collapse of the protective structure, the father's roof.

A buildup of images of despair recounts Sal's hunger, until a final apocalyptic image concludes part 1 as we reach its consummate jewel center: “Suddenly I found myself on Times Square.”

I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes 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, just so they can be buried in those awful cemetary cities beyond Long Island City.

(OR, 106)

The passage brings the journey full circle, literally and figuratively. Kerouac speaks of being “back” in Times Square, in a womblike image of America as a body. The sounds reinforce this notion: key words like “millions” are repeated, key syllables such as “ing” elongate action, the short u in “hustling,” “buck,” “among”—all these elements emphasize the circular return enacted thematically. The staccato rhythm of “forever for” moves toward the trope of the “mad dream” at the passage's center, a comment on the American Dream that becomes the key thematic element of the novel, and that finally ends in the grave, “buried” in “cemetary cities.”

This passage goes on to conclude part 1 of On the Road. What is most evident in it is the rhythmic pulse that is taking shape in the writing, a pulse that arises from Kerouac's use of tropes that are original and yet follow a system that can be analyzed and determined. As Kerouac's story progresses, this language—especially in its ability to hold in a sustained tension both optimism and pessimism, up and down—becomes indistinguishable from the myth that it conveys.

“EVERYTHING IS COLLAPSING”

On the Road achieves a rhetorical solution to the philosophical problem Kerouac faced in The Town and the City. The quest myth, in its linear, temporal progression seems adequate for the revelation of adventure. It relies, however, upon the conventional Christian tautologies that become insupportable as modernist notions interrupt the assumptions of absolutes and authority, of God, government, and of the Good. Kerouac's very questioning of these assumptions parallels a fundamental collapse of faith within society at large, which makes Kerouac's redefinition of the quest motif a reexamination of values at every point. Indeed, the language and myth of On the Road reflect an emotive as well as an aesthetic problem.

Integral to the mythic notion of the quest is the idea of the hero. Here he is identified at the outset: “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up” (OR, 3). This sentence appears banal enough, but not so after a reconsideration of On the Road as a system of tropes of collapse and rebirth. Since the narrative begins with an image of collapse and in its larger schema works out a circular pattern of building and collapsing again, the heroic action is unrelated to event and deed. In Tom Jones, by contrast, the picaresque quest motif frames action that is episodic and moves through climactic moments of plot. The dramatic Inn at Upton scene is a climactic turning point. Nowhere in On the Road, however, do we get a sense of one incident or another becoming more or less dramatic or illuminating to either the reader or narrator. Similarly, the contrast is exemplified in the creation of the hero, who in the eighteenth-century novel acquires that identity in the process of the quest. In On the Road, Kerouac extends the characterization described in The Town and the City by ascribing a mock-heroic heightening and diminishing to characters to underscore the up-and-down movement at large. Sal relates the adventures of his friends, especially Dean (“the Holy Goof”), calling them clowns and angels at once. Hence the heroic heightening in On the Road stems from the hyperbolic mood, is ironic, and is derived from the bold assertions of heroism Sal attaches to the comedic gestures of his friends, likening those angels to Groucho Marx and W. C. Fields. We are moved through a series of heightened moments of “meaning-excitement”²¹—each being part “up,” part “down,” as the linguistic experimentation requires them to be—that Kerouac himself terms moments of “IT.” “IT” is both integral to the notion of the hero and to the quest. The cyclical movement of tropes becomes “riffs” that culminate in “IT.” “IT”—as I shall show—is thus the real object of the quest.

Because “IT” is an isolated moment, it is necessarily defined by a solid structure against which “IT” can be contrasted. “IT” is like a chord progression off Kerouac's central red line (Route 6) across America; for Kerouac the country is physical, solid, like a body or “the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent” (OR, 79). This solid structure indicates that the long red line that leads from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and on to Los Angeles is a significant system of signposts, symbolic of something concrete and whole, which might also signify some direction. But, 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” (OR, 13). Sal's sense of direction is thrown off most by Dean. Sal laments, “With frantic Dean I was rushing through the world without a chance to see it” (OR, 205). As we might expect, tropes of collapsing are juxtaposed with tropes of concrete images to strike the overall thematic chord, “Everything is collapsing” (OR, 56, 99). Likewise moments of “IT” shatter the continuity of the cross-country excursions, like variations off the central theme, with each exposition quite technically a riff.

The analogy of “IT” with the action of the jazzman is made explicit in the text. The alto player is described: “He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas. … All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it—everybody looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops” (OR, 206). This description proclaims the terms of Kerouac's aesthetic stance as much as his more explicit statements in the essays and Paris Review interview. He indicates the purposes of establishing such an aesthetic as an effective mediation of time and space. At the moment of “IT,” time stops. But as the description goes on, Kerouac describes a movement in space: “He's filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back to do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it's not the tune that counts but IT” (OR, 206). In other words, it is not the continuity of causal relationship of experience that counts, but the heightened moment.

Kerouac enlarges on the meaning of “IT” by alluding to Wilhelm Reich, whose work Kerouac was reading during the period prior to the writing of On the Road, and who is specifically mentioned as yet another figure of “collapse.” When Old Bull Lee suggests that the others try his orgone accumulator to “put some juice in your bones” (OR, 152), the explanation is that “according to Reich, orgones are vibratory atmospheric atoms of the life-principle. People get cancer because they run out of orgones” (OR, 152). Later, the mention of Reich at moments of “IT” are related to “complacent Reichianalyzed ecstasy” (OR, 200). “IT” therefore represents some form of isolated and radiating pleasure as a feeling and end in itself, unallied to some purpose or spiritual accomplishment.

Rather than heroic action in conventional terms then, “IT” is satisfying as a form of instant gratification, a thrill for the moment, an epiphany. This momentary satisfaction becomes more significant to Sal than the pursuit of more conventional values such as permanence and ultimate security—the delusion of the hearth. Sal's attraction to Dean's amorality is thus explained, albeit fraught with ambiguity and concomitant irony:

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!

(OR, 8)

The heroic ideal is imaged through an ironic stance of madness, which has the ecstatic effect of Reichian energy but, as we might expect, at the same time the impermanence emphasized in the quality of “burn,” three times repeated; “IT” represents the greatest high and the ultimate low simultaneously. The tenorman who has just achieved “IT” says, “‘Life's too sad to be ballin all the time …’” (OR, 199).

In order to create the effect of simultaneity of antithetical images, then, Kerouac uses intertwining rhetorical tropes of building/collapsing with the concomitant emotive response of ecstasy/sadness. In these antitheses/extremes, Kerouac depicts the spiritual decline of America. This decline becomes the object lost in the elegiac romance genre because these values and their loss are personified by Dean. Moreover, as these tropes develop in the narrative, a design takes the place of plot: the intertwining rhetorical tropes intersect at moments of “IT” in Kerouac's schema. Otherwise, they move through the narrative to a syncopated beat. Indeed, the musical metaphor allows Kerouac to solve the artistic problem not only of how to represent these antithetical images, but also how to build into them a double charge of affect. On the Road therefore becomes a paradigm for his state of vision both structurally and emotively. And thus the double signification of “beat” is realized as a thematic end in itself.

This simultaneous rendition of opposites solves the organizational problem of Kerouac's myth by centering itself on the double signification of “beat” in its antithetical meanings of both “down-and-out” and “beatific.” This is the inference of “IT” on the mythic plane as well as on the structural level. Only in this pattern can the shifting ambiguities and complexities of unidealized existence become a parody of the American Dream romance through which Kerouac can take his ultimate ironic stance about America—that it is beat.

The plot of On the Road zigzags just as Kerouac's prose zigzags. The end of the linear road is death, but Kerouac has attempted to resolve the structural problem in a reassessment of linearity. The musical analogy and the redefinition of the quest form suggest a spatial, nonlinear relationship of language and form. On the Road, though, is only a temporary solution. The stylistic progression of the later novels makes this point evident. The structure of On the Road only suggests the desired effect of the simultaneity of antithetical images which is articulated at the next stage of legend in Visions of Cody. The road is merely transition.

Notes

1. Kerouac, “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose,” p. 57.

2. Tytell, Naked Angels, p. 63.

3. Dorothy Van Ghent, “Comment,” in A Casebook on the Beat, ed. Thomas Parkinson, p. 213.

4. See Kenneth A. Bruffee, Elegaic Romance: Cultural Change and Loss of the Hero in Modern Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983).

5. See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (1920; reprint, New York: Norton, 1961). Freud defines an instinct as “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces” (p. 30).

6. Tytell states explicitly, “Kerouac identified Cassady with his lost brother Gerard” (Naked Angels, p. 62). See also my analysis of Visions of Gerard in chapter 6.

7. Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” p. 73.

8. Charters, Kerouac, p. 129.

9. Quoted in Charters, Kerouac, pp. 127-28.

10. Tytell, Naked Angels, pp. 67-68.

11. Kerouac, “Belief and Technique in Modern Prose,” p. 57.

12. In Gifford and Lee's Jack's Book, Malcolm Cowley is quoted as attesting to Kerouac's careful revision of On the Road. Cowley thought that Kerouac should write in regular sentences and not as if writing were like “toothpaste coming out of a tube” (p. 206).

13. Nicosia, Memory Babe, pp. 352, 353, 356, 441.

14. See Tytell's discussion of Visions of Cody in Naked Angels, p. 175ff.

15. Kerouac, “Belief and Technique in Modern Prose,” p. 57; Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” p. 72.

16. Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” p. 72.

17. For a brief analysis of Kerouac's writing in On the Road in tandem with his professed method of composition see LeRoi Jones, “Correspondence,” Evergreen Review 2 Spring (1959): 253-56.

18. See Murray, Stomping the Blues.

19. To quote Kerouac from his essay “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”: “CENTER OF INTEREST. Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion” (p. 73).

20. Of course—and ironically—Kerouac is entirely paradoxical in his insistence upon writing “without consciousness.” As he puts it in his essay “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”: “MENTAL STATE. If possible write ‘without consciousness’ in semi-trance (as Yeats' later ‘trance writing’)” (p. 73).

21. Kerouac explains in “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”: “Satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning-excitement by same laws operating in his own human mind” (p. 72).