On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [28]
Among Kerouac’s many definitions of “Beat Generation,” he includes “a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world.” His sense of being alienated in his native land derived in part from his understanding that something “had gnawed in me to make me strive to be ‘different’ from all this.” He felt a kinship with people “too dark, too strange, too subterranean” to fulfill the credentials of a society in which, as Stephen J. Whitfield argues, “cultural expression was thwarted and distorted” at every turn. On the Road, in its promotion of life lived for “the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being,” can be seen as a response to a certain level of conformity so prevalent in the nation’s cultural consciousness that it had produced anxiety about what William H. Whyte, Jr., in his 1956 bestseller The Organization Man, warned was a society composed of middle-class workers “who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life.” This form of self-criticism that resulted from fears of an “organization man” society, however, merely produced a kind of safe space of dissent in which the most submerged levels of control could continue unchecked.
For Kerouac, it was the very systems through which bureaucratic and militaristic order were filtered that were flawed. In a July 1951 letter to Allen Ginsberg, he wrote, “I’m glad I understood exactly what it is to be a man in an office in the world. In my early days as reporter—I had a desk, a telephone—it was too easy a way to be in the world, though…automatic, as it were.” Kerouac briefly joined the naval reserve in 1943 but once he realized that, according to the psychiatrist performing his evaluation, “individuality is subordinated to obedience and discipline” and anyone “not conforming to this regimen is of no use to the organization,” he feigned madness in order to be discharged and reenlisted, instead, in the merchant marine. In his most vitriolic essay, “After Me, the Deluge,” written at the end of his life in an attempt to disalign himself from both the “Hippie Flower Children” and the “top echelons of American society,” he decides “I’ll go back to the alienated radicals who are quite understandably alienated, nay disgusted by this scene,” because, although in his view they were hypocritical and unproductive, the people who were part of the “neurological drone of money-grub” were worse.
Still, it would be wrong to read On the Road as the manifesto of a generational spokesperson. After the book’s overnight success, Kerouac found himself having to rescue the idea of the Beat Generation and to rid himself of the “King of the Beats” title. At the end of his life, constantly called upon to define his politics and his relationship to the burgeoning counterculture, he explained that On the Road was “hardly an agitational propaganda account.” He did not want the responsibility of helming an entire generation that, in fact, he barely understood. As early as 1959, Kerouac bemoaned the “beatnik routines on TV,” which implied that “it’s a simple change in fashion and manners, just a history crust” that “will only change a few dresses and pants and make chairs useless in the livingroom and pretty soon we’ll have Beat Secretaries of State and there will be instituted new tinsels, in fact new reasons for malice and new reasons for virtue and new reasons for forgiveness…” Kerouac witnessed firsthand the absurd trajectories of avant-garde cultural movements, which often stray from the fundamental ideas that spawn them. He understood how the radical potential of art becomes sanitized in shadow versions that distill the