Jack Kerouac (1922–1969)

You know that one person that everybody seems to know, who has a partner who is utter scum - a complete loser - and yet they follow them around like a lost dog, and seems to believe every word from their mouth to be some profound revelation.

And that same person also has a propensity for telling stories about their colleagues, who you've never met and couldn't give a s**t about. And the 'anecdotes' are rambling and tedious, they lack a punchline or a conclusion - they are a self-indulgence show more of the speaker rather than a 'gift' or act of sharing with the conversational partner. And then' is a constant conjunction, eliminating full stops or commas. They are filled with an endless cycle of inane drama; drunken nights, drugs, cheating, illegitimate children, general antisocial c***ery - all told with a breathless self-contentment, as if to be whipped up in such events is evidence of this friend's edgy importance.

And you listen to this person drone on, your contempt for them growing every moment, along with your resentment that they are imposing on your time, your thoughts, your emotional energy.

Yeah, you know that kind of person? Well, it'd be interesting to see how the thread spools out from the 'moment of cultural revolution' that On The Road supposedly represents, to the normalisation of that kind of person, that kind of way of being, that kind of way of communicating and sharing.

Ginsberg said the Beats were about gaining access to the free things that society had restricted; bodies and ideas. But if these are the bodies and ideas left to be accessed... Or at least, if this is the way those bodies and ideas are to be engaged with... That's a truly tragic thing.

I should be clear: this criticism is not a condemnation of the morality of the acts presented in On The Road, or the idea of living outside of the narrow confines of the societally acceptable. The acts themselves are neither inherently profound, meaningful or moral, nor otherwise. Instead, it's the superficial, self-indulgent, unconsidered manner in which the characters engage with them, but perhaps even more the superficial, self-indulgent, unconsidered way in which the author writes them. Kerouac was supposedly pursuing deliberate form emulating impressionism and guided by the tenants of the 'Essentials of Spontaneous Prose', but in reality what emerged is indistinguishable from mindless, vacuous see-it-say-it-reporting. Capote was right, except that in saying it's just typing would indicate it was somehow innocuous, whereas this is genuinely anger-inducing and contemptuous. show less

Where to begin with this.... There are numerous novels idling on bookshelves around the world which are indelibly written into the literary history books as 'classics'. We begin them with an impatient expectation that the writing in these books will blow every other book we've ever read out of the water, that the characters will be taken into our hearts forever, and that by the end of the book we'll have a newfound wisdom of places and things we've never encountered before.

For me, this is show more how On the Road should have been - a wild journey of youth that would take me with it to pockets of America I'd never heard of before, where I'd feel the dirt in my pores and the heartache in my belly. Instead, it was endless of pages of nothingness - car rides between towns and cities that were rarely described in any detail (save for the Mexico portion in the last 50 pages), wild nights out that never amounted to anything of any interest, a multitude of passing characters that were never formed beyond a few cursory sentences.

I understand that this 'wild' portrayal of youth would have been quite shocking in the 1950s, and so the stir it caused when it was first published is wholly understandable. The literary side of my brain also gets what Kerouac wanted to achieve with his prose - to create a rush and franticness that echoed the frenzied energy of the young generation coming of age and looking for kicks. But this book took me nowhere. Perhaps for my generation the novel is no longer radical. Perhaps some books 'date' in the way that favourite records sometimes sound tired in future decades.

For me, much of the book was like listening to a drunk teenager babble on endlessly about the epic night out they've just had. My eyes were glazing over - I had that 'I guess you had to be there...' feeling.

If I was beamed down from Mars knowing nothing of it's classic status in American literature (and hence not feeling obliged to revere it with plaudits which demonstrate that I'm clever enough to enjoy it), I'd have one word for it - dull.

So, at the risk of putting myself out there as a literary Neanderthal, for me that's exactly what On the Road was - endlessly dull. show less

Everyone tells you On the Road is about freedom. About breaking free from the suffocating conformity of 1950s America, about finding yourself on the open highway, about the ecstatic possibility of movement and experience. Jack Kerouac typed it in three weeks on a continuous scroll of paper in 1951, fueled by benzedrine and jazz rhythms, and when it was finally published in 1957, it became the bible of the Beat Generation.

People still clutch it like a sacred text, still talk about how it show more changed their lives, still plan cross-country trips because Dean Moriarty made reckless driving look like spiritual enlightenment. But read it now, actually read it, and something else emerges: a chronicle of emotional vampirism disguised as adventure, a celebration of selfishness mistaken for liberation, and a narrator so enchanted by his own immaturity that he mistakes chaos for profundity.

Sal Paradise worships Dean Moriarty from the first page, and that worship blinds him to what Dean actually is, a con artist with good cheekbones and the ability to talk fast enough that people don't notice he's stealing from them. Dean abandons pregnant wives, ditches friends when they're sick, steals cars, bounces checks, leaves destruction in his wake, and Sal treats all of it like performance art.

The novel wants you to see Dean as a holy fool, a madman-saint who's too pure for conventional morality. But strip away Sal's breathless narration and what you're looking at is a narcissist who uses people until they're empty and then moves on to the next source of food and money and admiration. The freedom everyone celebrates is just the freedom of someone who refuses to be responsible for anything, including the human wreckage he creates.

The women in this novel don't exist as people. They're ports of call, bodies to sleep with, sources of money or shelter or maternal comfort. Sal and Dean blow through girlfriends and wives like they're going through tanks of gas.
When Dean abandons his second wife Camille, who's just given birth to his child to go joyriding with Sal, Kerouac writes it like a scene of liberation. The baby crying in the background is just ambient noise, not a human being Dean's abandoning. Marylou gets passed between the men like shared property. The Mexican prostitutes are exotic scenery.

Every woman exists only in relation to what she can provide the men, and the moment she wants something back: commitment, honesty, basic decency, she becomes a drag on the adventure, a reminder of obligations that must be escaped.

The prose style gets praised as spontaneous and jazz-like, but spontaneity isn't the same as good writing. Kerouac's run-on sentences pile up observations without discrimination, everything matters equally, which means nothing actually matters. He describes crossing Nebraska with the same breathless intensity he describes having intimacy or listening to bebop or eating apple pie.

The lack of editing isn't authentic, it's lazy. It's a writer refusing to make choices about what's important, hiding behind the claim that the unfiltered consciousness is more real than crafted art. The result reads like someone who won't shut up at a party, who thinks every thought that passes through their head is worth sharing at length.

If you read against Sal's adoration, the book reveals how boring and repetitive this lifestyle is. They drive across the country. They run out of money. Someone's aunt or girlfriend wires them cash. They drive back. They get jobs they quit within weeks. They talk about everything being "IT" the ineffable experience that jazz and speed and movement are supposedly reaching toward, but they never define what IT is because IT is nothing.

It's the emptiness at the center of all this motion. Dean keeps moving because stopping would mean facing what he is, and what he is turns out to be a hollow man who's convinced himself and everyone around him that the hollowness is actually enlightenment.

The racial politics are even worse than the gender politics. Sal and Dean fetishize Black culture: jazz musicians, poverty, what they imagine as authentic suffering. They want to be Black because they think Black Americans have access to some raw, real experience that suburban white kids lack.

"I wished I were a Negro," Sal says at one point, in one of the novel's most cringe-inducing passages. He wants the culture without the oppression, the music without the systematic racism that created it. The entire Beat fascination with "primitivism" is just colonialism in bohemian clothing, white guys slumming it in Black neighborhoods, treating real people's lives as material for their spiritual tourism, then going back to being white whenever it's convenient.

The book's treated as a rebellion against conformity, but what's it actually rebelling toward? Dean and Sal aren't building anything, aren't fighting for anything, aren't creating any alternative to the suburban nightmare they're fleeing. They're just consuming: experiences, people, places, drugs, intimacy, without producing anything except more need for the next consumption. It's not a revolution. It's arrested development. These are men in their late twenties acting like teenagers and calling it enlightenment because they've read some Spengler and can name-drop Proust while stealing cars.

The ending tries for tragedy. Dean, aging and broken, abandoned by everyone he abandoned first, showing up sick and needing help, and Sal finally seeing him clearly. Except Sal still doesn't quite see it. He's still romanticizing, still finding profundity in Dean's degradation.

The novel can't fully commit to recognizing that this whole glorious adventure was actually just waste, wasted time, wasted relationships, wasted potential. Kerouac keeps trying to find meaning in meaninglessness, to make the refusal to grow up look like spiritual seeking.

Here's what On the Road actually offers: permission. Permission to be selfish and call it freedom. Permission to hurt people and call it honesty. Permission to refuse responsibility and call it rebellion. Permission to treat life like a resource to be extracted rather than something to be built or shared or given to.

For young people, particularly young men, who feel trapped by expectations, who want to believe they're special enough that normal rules don't apply, this is intoxicating. It tells them their self-absorption is actually self-discovery, their cruelty is actually courage.

The tragedy is that there's a real critique buried in here somewhere. 1950s conformity was suffocating. Suburban life was often soul-deadening. The pressure to marry young and get a company job and buy a house and never question anything was genuinely oppressive. But Kerouac's answer: reject all of it, keep moving, refuse to commit to anything or anyone, isn't liberation. It's just the opposite trap. You can waste your life in a gray flannel suit or you can waste it driving in circles across America, but either way you end up at the same destination: old, alone, and wondering what it was all for.

On the Road celebrates the second kind of waste and calls it freedom, and generations of readers have believed the marketing. But scratch the surface of all that ecstatic movement and what you find isn't enlightenment. It's just someone running from themselves and calling it a journey. (anonymous FB post) show less

Valamikor a múlt század második felében a Múzsának bohókás ötlete támadt. Odahajolt pár fiatal, drogprevenciós célokra aligha alkalmazható írópalánta füléhez, és azt súgta: "Jack, az irodalom annyi, hogy leírod, ami az eszedbe jut. Csak leülsz, és leírod. Jó lesz, meglátod." És lőn, megszületett a spontán írás. (Érdekes belegondolni, mi lett volna, ha ez a Múzsa mondjuk a bútorasztalosságra akarta volna inspirálni hőseinket. Nyilván most Amerika tele show more lenne diszfunkcionális hintaszékekkel és éjjeliszekrényekkel.) No most nekem a spontán írásról nincs nagy véleményem, vallom, hogy amennyiben a lendületből papírra vetett szövegeket figyelmesen átolvassuk és kijavítjuk, húzunk belőlük és (ritkábban) írunk hozzájuk, attól többnyire jobbak lesznek. (És ebben bizonyosan egyetért velem a kiadói lektorok klánja*.) Meggyőződésem, hogy ha akad is húszból egy ember, aki képes a legjobbat kihozni a módszerből, a többiek között felülreprezentáltak lesznek a kutyaütők, akik annyira el vannak ájulva saját írói késztetésüktől (nem képességeiktől, csupán a puszta késztetéstől!), hogy attól máris Irodalom Istenanya felkent grállovagjainak tekintik magukat, és a világ a hülye, ha ennek az ellenkezőjét érzékeli**.


(Beszóltál a könyvemre, kishurka? - érdeklődik Kerouac kedvesen.)

No most mindennek fényében az a fura, hogy ez a spontán írás dolog esetenként mégis működik. Kerouac-ék egyik orbitális szerencséje az volt, hogy ez a gondolat akkor eredetinek hatott, ráadásul képes volt olyan friss erővel megragadni az átélt élmények nyers valóságát, ami valóban új színt vitt az irodalomba. Új életformát illusztráltak ezek a srácok, újszerű nyelvvel kísérleteztek, és ez minimum érdekes eredményeket szült - ha pedig a módszer művelője mintegy mellesleg még jó író is volt (mert a nemszeretem módszerek művelői is lehetnek jó írók), akkor a költői erő vagy a humor akár el is vihette a hátán az egész szövegkását.

No most ifjúkori emlékeim szerint ez időnként Kerouacnak is sikerült. De nem ebben a kötetben. Vannak persze felvillanások, lenyűgöző szóképek, az őszinteség bizsergető bugyborékolásai. De egyik sem képes sokáig feledtetni, hogy valójában ez egy zűrös pacák által összedobott katyvasz, aminek születését semmi más nem indokolta, mint hogy elhagyta őt a nője, és ezt ki kellett írnia magából. Elismerem persze, hogy bizonyos korlátok közt szerethető katyvasz ez, de azért csak katyvasz. Fárasztott.

* És - akármennyire is fájna neki bevallani - titkon egyetértene velem Kerouac is, aki a rendelkezésre álló bizonyítékok alapján maga is rendszeresen átírta szövegeit. Szóval szép dolog a buddhista légzéstechnikára támaszkodó improvizáció, de az elemző újraolvasás ebben az esetben is elkerülhetetlen.
** Kerouac írói hitvallásának párlata A modern próza eszméje és módszere című lista. Ebben olyan (amúgy izgalmas) javaslatok vannak, mint hogy "Légy szerelmes a saját életedbe" (4. pont), vagy "Amit érzel, megtalálja önmaga formáját" (5. pont). Ugyanakkor ott van az is, ami nézetem szerint írók százainak vágta gajra az önelemző készségét, az a fránya 29. pont: "Minden körülmények között zseni vagy". Pedig hát nem. show less