On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [45]
Traces of the circle of despair appear throughout the scroll manuscript and On the Road. The protagonists’ travels dominate much of the narrative of the scroll manuscript, and their attempt to find purpose in their perpetual movements and thwarted plans illustrates the circle of despair as a design element in the plot. Despite their frustrations, Kerouac and Cassady continue to encounter “IT,” an ill-defined state of awareness that gives purpose to their divergent experiences. Before he experiences IT, Kerouac asks Cassady for a definition. Cassady replies, “‘Now you’re asking me im-pon-de-rables.’” Indefinable, IT exists paradoxically as a state of being inconceivable through thought or language, but knowable through experience.
The circle of despair also operates in seemingly marginal scenes in the scroll manuscript, its prevalence suggesting a pattern or “grammar” by which the contingent plot might be understood. When Kerouac plans his first trip west, he decides to hitchhike across the United States on Route 6, “one long red line…that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely Nevada and there dipped down to Los Angeles.” Drenched below an ominous Bear Mountain, a stranded Kerouac encounters a driver who tells him “there’s no traffic passes through” Route 6 and suggests an alternate route. Kerouac reflects on this, narrating, “I knew he was right. It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.” Kerouac’s existential goal or unknown center, the eventual “pearl,” remains the same, but he learns that his passage will be marked by divergences and that he will be frustrated in his efforts.
Kerouac’s narratological advances in technique and plot combine to create texts that function as focal points for many of the problems that contemporary theory addresses. In addition to demonstrating Kerouac’s (the author’s) discontinuous, nonlinear plot, Kerouac’s (the narrator’s) moments of frustration at Bear Mountain can be read as a metaphor of the changes in late-twentieth century American literary theory. Just as New Criticism’s clearly defined method of excavating meaning was displaced by structuralist and poststructuralist investigations into readers and reading and the disputation of “common sense” knowledge, among other questions, Kerouac’s dilemma involves his shifting expectations of the road. One must remember the “stupid hearthside idea” that strands Kerouac comes from his straightforward interpretation of texts. In the scroll manuscript, Kerouac claims he has “been poring over maps of the U.S. in Ozone Park for months, even reading books about the pioneers and savouring names like Platte and Cimarron and so on,” prior to choosing his route west. Kerouac is drawn to the linearity represented by Route 6 on the map and is seduced by the “wonderful” prospect of a direct passage to his destination. He expects these maps and dimestore novels to provide their meanings for him, so he bases his route on his superficial readings of them.
Kerouac’s reading strategies fail him almost immediately, as do the conventional reader’s. Kerouac is forced to discover a new, discursive mode of interpretation in order to move forward. As “thunderclaps…put the fear of God” in him below the storm-shrouded peaks, Kerouac represents the failure inherent in anticipating linearity and unity; the straight line of Route 6 threatens to “lead him only to death.” Eager to proceed but deflected from his goal, Kerouac comes to understand that the method of his passage must be contingent, that progress is achievable only by “trying various roads and routes” instead of proceeding with predetermined expectations. Kerouac’s readers find themselves equally stranded if they approach his mountain of unbroken text anticipating that it will offer an inherent meaning,