I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up. And my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. (Kerouac, 1957:7)
I shall dwell at some length on this rather
ominous
beginning. It is
clearly similar to another American 1950s fictional beginning, namely
that of
J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye which famously parodies
the
conventions of the Bildungsroman in the following words:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield crap, but I don't feel like going into it. (Salinger, 1951:5)
Holden, the protagonist of Salinger's novel, has the same desire to bury his past in a territory beyond speech that Sal expresses. Of course, both narrators are caught in the insoluble paradox of having to say that they don't want to say certain things, thereby already saying too much. And both narrators come to learn that there is no escaping from their illnesses, misery, lousy childhood etc.
But Kerouac's protagonist is of course also similar to Jake Barnes in his "feeling that everything was dead". Sal is also finished with the life of a married man, (although his sexual apparatus is not permanently damaged by any war as Barnes' was) and ready to embark on another life (on the road), but this time with another man as the most important figure in his life. He does attempt a form of heterosexual domesticity with Terry, a Mexican girl, but rather perfunctorily dumps her after a week or so of mixing with this "Fellahin" member of the salt of the Earth, "a Pachuco wildcat" (86), and other "wild-buck Mexican hotcat[s]" (88).
Other than that the domesticity in Sal's life is represented by his aunt, on whom he can always rely for shelter from "life on the road" and financial aid to get off the road and come home. Thus Sal is less definitively wounded than Barnes, since he has a safer, more conventional refuge available to him, and while he, like Barnes, claims to be the happiest when among his male friends, in reality he is better off with the maternal figure in his life, his aunt. Still, the similarity remains that a male-bonding, moving utopia is constructed by Kerouac's novel (life on the road becomes "the road is life" (199)), no less than by Hemingway's fisherman's utopia in Burguete ("We stayed five days at Burguete and had good fishing. The nights were cold and the days were hot, and there was always a breeze even in the heat of the day." (Hemingway, 1926:129-130))
Looking now at the role of Dean, as we are introduced to him in the initial Keoruac quote, it is evident that he is presented both as a direct substitute for the wife of Sal, first as the direct successor in time "not long after", and also much in the same manner that one would expect the next woman to enter Sal's life, as the remedy, albeit temporary, of Sal's depression and existential crisis. Secondly, the sound of the phrase "the coming of Dean Moriarty" seems to signal a rather portentous event, not unlike some religious comings or even second comings, certainly signifying new beginnings. But yet, the past tense narration, inevitably gestalts a feeling in the reader that the "life you could call my life on the road" is already past and over at the time of telling, a gestalt which the completed reading of the novel indeed bears out.
After the setting of the past desiring erasure, and the future (perfect) waiting to be lived by Sal has been established, the whirlwind narrative of Sal's many roads begins. The rest of the novel is taken up with motion and talk as the protagonists pendulate back and forth across the North American continent in search for something indefinable known to them and us only as "IT", the thing to have, or "kicks", sensuous enjoyment. After several futile east-west-east crossings (see appendix C for full details), through a gallery of minor characters which tend to either be representatives of the common man, down and out or downright bumming around, or of more 'primitive' races such as Mexicans or Afro-americans, the characters embark on the ultimate road which is to take them south into the unspoiled heart of darkness, the Mexican jungle. This quest also ends in sickness and betrayal and the characters then separate and Sal is left to muse over the state of God ("don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?" (Kerouac, 1957:291), and realizing that "nobody, nobody knows [echoing a well-known negro spiritual] what's going to happen to anybody" (291), and that lost fathers can never be found.
Thus the novel does not indicate any permanent escape from the "miserable weary split-up[s]" of the opening quote, but at best a passing of time while waiting around to grow old and die. This world-weariness is contradicted throughout the novel by the breathlessness and insistence of the prose it is narrated in, which occasions us to query whether the haste of the narrative might not be a large scale displacement of the fear of old age and death, and again, as in Hemingway, we may benefit from looking at the micro-thematics as found primarily in dialogue scenes between Dean and Sal and other hipster friends. We shall investigate the thematics formed by items of lingo such as 'blow', 'hip', 'dig', 'gone' and 'beat', as well as the thematic significance of attaining 'it' or 'it'-ness and of 'knowing time'. These thematics add up to themes of questing (for meaning), remembering, talking and suffering, and are inscribed in a wistful eulogy to madness as the ultimate state of illumination.
Before entering the micro-thematics analysis, we need to place the novel within a stylistic parameter. Where Hemingway's prose was terse and extremely paratactic, Kerouac's is in many ways the opposite. He develops a form of stream of consciousness, free association, lyrical prose, which tends to aggrandize and mythologize the subject of his descriptions or characterizations. His favourite rhetorical figure involves the use of unusual noun phrases, consisting of compound predicates, where an adjective/noun combination precedes the final noun of the phrase, which produces a feeling akin to that of the oxymoron and the pleonasm, although not technically speaking forming exactly those figures. Some examples are: "The raw road night" (16), "the dawn of Jazz America" (192), "the senseless nightmare road" (239), "the hillbilly night of Charleston, West Virginia" (240), "the strange, ragged W. C. Fields saintliness of his later days" (115), and famously "the pit and prunejuice of poor beat life itself in the god-awful streets of man" (187). The overall effect of all these examples is that the diction is hasty, that there is too much to say and not enough time to say it, and therefore the nouns must do double duty as adjectives as well as nouns. This feeling is reflected in the thematics of the novel, where several scenes feature Dean and other characters trying to catch up in their talk with the sensory impressions they have gathered on their tours across America, or emotions felt during their relationships (see f. ex. Part 1, chapter 8, where Dean and Carlo meticulously rehearse every motive behind every emotion and act they have shared the previous week, until Sal is exhausted from just listening and cries out to them to "Stop the machine" (50).
The machine of language is of course unstoppable within the novel which in its own right is a machine of language. Part of the project of the novel is also explicitly that of recording in a visionary form the events it is based on in Kerouac's life. Therefore the writing forms a dense web of recollections, set down in an attempt to preserve them before they are forgotten and lost forever. Kerouac explicitly engaged in this Proustian search for time lost, and cast himself in the role of the great recorder, "Memory Babe". Because the novel attempts such a spontaneous, non-revised act of recording, it is filled with dialogue and street speech set down faithfully (probably this was what prompted Truman Capote to dismiss the novel as "typing, not writing"). Much as Hemingway's narrator commented about the English upper class language it can be argued that Kerouac's characters use a very limited vocabulary with a few phrases repeated with minute context and inflection shifts to produce a whole gamut of meanings. This is a characteristic feature of subcultural language use, or argot.[T]he 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 middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany? (11)
We first hear about 'blowing' when Sal is
just at the
beginning of
his road and finds himself in Chicago, with a night to spend listening
to jazz.
He comments that "The fellows at the Loop blew, but with a tired air"
(17). Still he sums up the role of bop music for his peer group:
And as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop has come to represent for all of us, I thought of all my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing-about. (17)
Thus
bop has become the overt sign that signifies the
group's entire
lifestyle and bonding together, as well as a sign that carries the same
essential
signification as the thing it stands for, the frantic activity of bop
is
parallel to the frantic activity and speed of the peer group. The
frantic
nature of 'blowing' is epitomized in the scene in part 3, chapter 4,
where Dean
and Sal hear "a wild tenor man bawling horn" (185) and run over to
'dig' him. In this scene all the micro-thematics melt together: The
audience
are exhorting the man "Go, go, go" (185), Dean is screaming
"Blow, man, blow" (185), and the conclusion is that:
[T]he tenorman had it [Kerouac's italics] and everybody knew he had it. Dean was clutching his head in the crowd, and it was a mad crowd. They were all urging that tenorman to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes. (185)
At the beginning of this road trip we have a key
scene
for the
'beat' philosophy of the novel. Dean wants to summarize: "'Now, man,
that
alto man last night had IT - he held it once he found it.'" (194) Sal
wants to analyze:
"I wanted to know what 'IT' meant. 'Ah well' - Dean laughed - 'now you're asking me impon-de-rables - ahem! Here's a guy and everybody's there, right? Up to him to put down what's on everybody's mind [...] he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. 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. He's filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remeberance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. [...] Dean could go no further; he was sweating telling about it. (194)
The chapter concludes: "[T]he road is life." (199)
Thus this chapter accomplishes a set of couplings of the micro-thematics culled from speech habits and phrases, to a deeper theme of a philosophical nature. 'It' becomes synonomous with the life force itself. Talking and living become directly coupled to one another, and the mechanism that pairs them is "joy". Joy on its part is only attainable through excitement and the rhythm that is the prerequisite for reaching it in/through music. Thus it is all different expressions of the life force, and the key to life is "knowing time". When you know time, you have 'it', when you have 'it', "time stops". The stopping of time, which is equal to the knowing of time is the ultimate goal of life, and since the road is life, there can be no goal other than motion along the road in time. These operations of equations all add up to the beat philosophy as evinced by Dean Moriarty. <>'I want to be like him. He's never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he's the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you finally get it.'
'Get what?'
'IT! IT! I'll tell you - now no time, we have no time now.' (121-122)