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By Root 1747 0

the search for the authentic is thus part of the dualism that marks his life and writing, a dualism between two distinct but nevertheless intertwined imperatives—domesticity and “kicks,” tradition and progressiveness, nostalgia and possibility—an ambivalence on both a personal as well as a broader sociocultural level of significance. Kerouac’s nostalgia was for an American past he romanticized and mythologized, the prewar America of the Depression, the westward expansion, and the Old West, which he imbued with “glee,” “honesty,” “spitelessness,” and “wild selfbelieving individuality.” This desire to reconnect with “old American whoopee” was at the same time intimately linked to his idyllic yet haunted youth in Lowell, Massachusetts. By locating the imperatives of individuality and innocence both in his own and America’s past, the authenticity Kerouac sought pointed him outside the social and cultural mainstream, as well as indicating a displacement from his own historical time.

In the different versions of Kerouac’s road narrative we see this sense of authenticity as something that is a presence only in its conspicuous absence, as something presupposed, and which only exists in its potentiality; as long as the ideal of authenticity remained intact, so too did the possibility of its realization. The quality of life which, for Kerouac, existed outside objective boundaries is incumbent in the socioculturally transgressive pursuit of authenticity, the search for the beckoning “pearl” handed to the traveler on the road, the promised “paradise” at the end of the journey: “the pearl was there, the pearl was there,” as “Jack Kerouac”/Sal Paradise states, but always just out of reach. The attainability is all built on Jack/Sal’s faith, and his movement driven by it, rather than any knowledge of its imminent realization. With the pursuit of the imponderable “IT” the only way to go is in a decentralized fashion, to go “every direction” and never be “hung up.” However, we see that Jack/Sal is indeed hung up. “Neal Cassady”/Dean Moriarty’s refrain of “We know time” is a call to spontaneity, to living totally subjectively in and for the moment. In so doing, he suspends the authority of Time over the individual: “Now is that time [emphasis added],” Neal/Dean echoes the Charlie Parker classic. This rupture of regimented time, however, is also a means through which Kerouac, via his narrational counterpart, expresses his desire to rupture the ephemerality of history—that of his own personal life and that of America’s legendary past as it existed in his imagination.

Kerouac mediates the search for authenticity through his changing representations of Neal Cassady. Through him, he expresses the instability and restlessness of his own life, the ambivalences and dualism he struggled with. Neal/Dean always moves, oscillating between “worklife plans,” marriage and family, on the one hand, and going “mad” and pursuing “IT” on the other. Jack/Sal, however, is less irreverent and uncompromising in such movements between these two dynamics, often finding this liminality a psychological and emotional impasse. His view along such an authenticating road is—like Kerouac’s own view of postwar America and of Cassady himself—always Janus-like.

We see Kerouac’s image of Cassady progress along an arc. Beginning in myth, legend, and ideal, Cassady becomes a reality through Kerouac’s personal experience of him. However, as their relationship begins to break down, Kerouac retreats into myth and legend in his representation of Cassady. In this progression there is a simultaneous forward movement informed by a retrospective gaze, a recapping of losses and impossibilities. This dualism is exemplified in a section of the scroll manuscript where Jack is “staggering back east in search of [his] stone” in the wake of his disillusionment with his idealized West and with Neal—a section of the journey that is missing in the published novel but corresponds with Kerouac’s “Rain and Rivers” journal as published in Windblown World (2005). Kerouac explains in the scroll the