On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [29]
Kerouac fielded the more sinister side of this misrepresentation by challenging the absoluteness that taxonomies, with all of their attendant qualifications, require. By the end of “After Me, the Deluge,” his only solution is to “see everyone in the world as unconsolable orphans yelling and screaming on every side to make arrangements for making a living” and ultimately “all so lonered.” Kerouac refused the rigidity and reductiveness of categories. On the Road asks that people find the beauty in failed journeys, in the discovery of personal excess, in feeling the sting of limits, but these are the boundaries around which humanness is constructed. Labels, on the other hand, can sometimes evacuate the presence of that which they attempt to contain. Kerouac criticized “those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality,” he wrote in 1959. These were the misinformed tactics of “those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearnings of human souls…woe unto those who don’t realize that America must, will, is changing now, for the better I say.” Rather than write in willful resistance to mainstream America, Kerouac mapped the human geography of a “land that never has been yet—/ And yet must be,” in the words of Langston Hughes. For Dean, the character based on Neal Cassady, “Everybody’s kicks, man!” But for Sal, a stand-in for Kerouac, people are “like fabulous roman candles.” People amuse and serve Dean. For Sal, they are purveyors of light.
Kerouac felt too deeply the gaps between what life was supposed to be and how people actually lived it. He lamented in a journal entry from 1949, “I feel that I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t know the feeling of calm irreverence—the only madman in the world therefore—the only broken fish. All the others are perfectly contented with pure life. I am not. I want a pure understanding, and then pure life.” Kerouac felt a profound sense of loneliness; this stemmed partly from a spiritual understanding of human suffering that was so embedded in his Catholic upbringing, and partly from his artist’s interiority, which heightened the sense of his difference even as it produced solidarity between him and people who were “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.” Sal understands the compulsive need of the creative mind to collaborate: “But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me.” At the same time, Kerouac found himself in uniquely marginal territory, searching for ways to define the particular parameters of his selfhood. On his first road trip, Sal awakes in Des Moines, in the middle of America, and doesn’t know who he is: “I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.” Here, the road momentarily eradicates Sal’s identity in order to root it in a long lineage of wanderers and searchers.
On the Road radiates hope that communities might function unmediated by the sublimating forces inherent to modern society. When Sal leaves San Francisco to go to Denver at the beginning of part three, he envisions himself settling “in Middle America, a patriarch.” But when he actually gets there, he finds himself “in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.” He explains, “I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a ‘white man’ disillusioned.” Critics have rightly pointed to the racial primitivism expressed in this passage, which can have the effect of obscuring the actual lived experience of people of color during this period. For Kerouac, however, these oppressed minorities were the most honest evocation of what an “American underground” might really mean. It is no coincidence that the “magic land at the end of the