On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [30]
Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac of French-Canadian parents who immigrated to New England to find work. He grew up speaking joual, a French-Canadian working-class dialect, and throughout his career as a novelist considered himself more comfortable with joual than English, which he did not speak until he was six years old. In his introduction to Lonesome Traveler, he mentions that his ancestors were both Bretons and Indians. Expressing pride for both heritages, he wavered between the “Faulknerian pillar homestead” and the “steel of America covering the ground filled with the bones of old Indians and Original Americans,” as he writes in The Subterraneans. Tim Hunt argues that Kerouac’s immigrant history “left him suspended between categories—neither a person of color nor a white middle-class American—and unable to resolve either the dissonance between the period’s rhetorics of ethnicity and class (by which, because he was white, he was in the cultural and social mainstream) or his sense of marginality—his sense that he was finally alien and an outsider.” Those who identify first and foremost as American possess a sense of entitlement that is uniquely theirs. It is something only immigrants and first-generation Americans, perhaps, can ever truly understand, because it is a sense of proprietorship they will never fully have. Writers do not dedicate a book to a nation that is unproblematically theirs, much less include a clause that admits an inability to define it (“whatever that is”).
The discordant elements of Kerouac’s identity turn the anthropological lens of On the Road to the margins of daily American life in the 1950s. Ann Douglas writes that reading the book for the first time taught her and her friends “that we were part of a continent rather than a country,” and, furthermore, that “the continent had been strangely emptied out of the people usually caught on camera, yet it was filled with other people, people in motion, of various races and ethnicities, speaking many tongues, migrating from one place to another as seasonal laborers, wandering around as hobos and hitchhikers, meeting each other in brief but somehow lasting encounters.” Although being a white man, no matter how compromised by other, less privileged categories of identification, still guarantees one greater advantage in On the Road, Kerouac also provides those considered undesirable in that era—homeless men riding the backs of trucks or penniless saxophone players, for example—some form of agency, if only because they share the stage as subjects of the road experience. Howard Zinn argues that the telling of America in terms of heroes and their victims, which entails “the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress,” functions as “only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders.” If On the Road is about defining America, it is also about staging an intervention into Official definitions of history and nationhood.
Kerouac revisited ethnicity and class in sampling and crafting what he saw as real Americans, but he also challenged the confines of gender and sexuality. In the postwar period, fear of infiltration by a foreign enemy spread to include anyone who did not fit white, heteronormative standards. As Wini Breines argues in Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties, “The changes that accompanied the