On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [38]
All I wanted and all Neal wanted and all anybody wanted was some kind of penetration into the heart of things where, like in a womb, we could curl up and sleep the ecstatic sleep that Burroughs was experiencing with a good big mainline shot of M. and advertising executives were experiencing with twelve Scotch & Sodas in Stouffers before they made the drunkard’s train to Westchester—but without hangovers. And I had many a romantic fancy then, and sighed at my star. The truth of the matter is, you die, all you do is die, and yet you live, yes you live, and that’s no Harvard lie.
Here Kerouac acknowledges authenticity’s unattainability and the loss of the ideal form it may take or upon which it is projected, while at the same time underscoring the inevitability, if not the necessity, of dealing with such a realization.
Kerouac first establishes Neal/Dean as the embodiment of the potentiality for authenticity when he locates him on the social and cultural margins through his criminality, as a “young jailkid shrouded in mystery.” His impulsiveness and excitability, his openness and unselfconsciousness pointed to new possibilities of experience, not so much due to who Neal/Dean was as by what he symbolized—the yet to be known, the West yet to be reached by Jack/Sal.
The journey from New York to San Francisco in the hope of finding “IT” through the pursuit of “kicks” is the significant event in the relationship between Kerouac and Cassady’s narrational counterparts. Highlighting the importance of the movement and fluidity of the search itself, aptly, they listen to Dexter Gordon’s “The Hunt” before setting off: “We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.” This trip, both in the scroll and published versions, is the point where Kerouac’s vision of Cassady begins to unravel, when Neal/Dean—as the embodiment of and vehicle for a potential authenticity—is doubted: “I lost faith in Neal that year [emphasis added],” Jack/Sal states upon being immediately abandoned in San Francisco. Writing in his “Rain and Rivers” journal, Kerouac describes his disillusioning departure from San Francisco not in terms of rejection or failure but as catharsis, as having “escaped from the compulsiveness of Neal’s mystique and hashisch”—a realization that the “real” Cassady and the significance Kerouac projects onto him are two distinct entities. Kerouac makes this imminent separation explicit in the scroll manuscript right at the advent of this pivotal journey: “You always expect some kind of magic at the end of the road. Strangely enough Neal and I were going to find it, alone, before we finished with it [emphasis added].”
Only after he is doubted does Neal/Dean become “great”—a greatness that separates him from the absolute zenith of physicality and vitality he represented as the commanding, rhapsodizing, mad mystic behind the wheel. It is when Neal/Dean is seen as human that Jack/ Sal’s ideals shift. The more he is reminded that Neal/Dean is not impervious to time, age, and mortality, the higher, distant, and less humanly accessible the representative image. By the third section of the narrative, Kerouac compares Neal/Dean with Rabelais’ larger than life “Gargantua,” burning across the land. At this juncture Neal/ Dean becomes the “Holy Goof,” a consequence of the romantic vision’s unraveling—destitute, with bandaged thumb, never more part of the corporeal world, yet never more distinct from it in a humbled saintliness. By the end of the novel, a burned-out Neal/Dean “couldn’t talk any more,” fading away around the corner and slinking back across the country. It is here that Kerouac’s vision of Cassady in the Road novels begins to take on a more complex, deeper form.
The presentation of Dean Moriarty as well as Kerouac’s treatment of events in On the Road is a mythic, idealized retelling—the legend—but one which can only occur after the “facts” are distinguished from the romantic vision of