English Society hits the road ...

Sebastian Kobler writes: The first meeting of the rebooted English Society will be today at 12:45 in E1. We will be discussing On The Road, Jack Kerouac’s seminal 1957 novel based on his own travels around the United States.

We follow Sal Paradise and his friend Dean Moriarty as they hit the road, travelling across late 1940s America, indulging in the jazz-influenced underground culture. The novel is considered a classic of the Beat literary movement, which was closely intertwined with the cultural revolution of post-war America and influenced, among others, The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Come along this lunchtime to find out more about On The Road and discuss a few passages.

If you'd like to know a little more about Kerouac and his novel, here's a piece by Mr O'Keeffe reflecting on the significance of cars and journeys in On The Road, and in twentieth-century American literature in general.

There is a certain romanticism about American cars.  The car is central to American life – a symbol of material success, but also a means of voyage and discovery.  Popular music and film have invested the idea of driving on the American highways with a glamour which similar experiences on British roads tend to lack; there are more songs about Cadillacs and Route Sixty-Six than there are about the M25 and the Ford Fiesta.  A string of songs by artists such as the Beach Boys, Chuck Berry and Bruce Springsteen and an abundance of road movies as diverse as Smokey and the Bandit and Thelma and Louise have guaranteed that the car is part of American mythology in a way which the British automobile is not; whether it is used to search or escape, to cruise or to conquer, whether it is a symbol of material success or a vehicle of pleasure or escape, the car lies at the heart of twentieth-century American culture.

Cars are also at the centre of three key American twentieth-century texts – F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1926), Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) and Jack Kerouac’s On The Road (1957).  In each work, the central characters are ‘on the road’, but each in a different way; how these characters drive, together with what they drive for, reflects their values and the values of the worlds they move in.  Jay Gatsby, Willy Loman and Dean Moriarty, all ‘driven’ by particular visions, discover, in their American journeys, truths about themselves, their country, and the ‘American Dream’.   

On The Road is, as the title suggests, a novel about travelling.  Published in 1957, it is Jack Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical novel about a group of friends journeying around America in search of experience and illumination.  Whereas Gatsby is driven by his dream of wealth, of Daisy, and of something possibly greater than both, and whereas Willy Loman is misguidedly driven by his desire to be ‘the number one man’, the characters in On The Road are driven by something less tangible and certainly less conventional.  If The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman present successful and failed exponents of the American Dream of wealth, happiness and success, then On The Road presents the Dream’s flipside – an alternative America and an alternative quest.

In On The Road, the narrator, Sal Paradise, recounts his ‘whole road experience’ with his group of friends as they hitch, borrow and beg rides across the continent.  At the centre of the group of friends, and its guiding spirit, is Dean Moriarty.  Dean is never far away from a car, and never far from the road.  In his tearaway youth he ‘set a Denver record for stealing cars and went to the reformatory’.  Characters speak of Dean’s ‘car habit’ quite casually – ‘Oh we ran around the bars and then Dean stole a car and we drove back down the mountain curves ninety miles an hour.’ Dean himself says, ‘I was a young punk, asserting myself – stealing cars a psychological expression of my position.’

Dean is mad and impulsive, especially with cars (‘He saw a ’49 Hudson for sale and rushed to the bank for his entire roll.  He bought the car on the spot’).  His driving too, is wildly majestic: ‘sometimes he had no hands on the wheel and yet the car went as straight as an arrow, not for once deviating from the white line in the middle of the road that unwound, kissing our left front tyre.’  On one ride a passenger in the back asks him to stop – ‘we can’t let him drive any more, he’s absolutely crazy, they must have let him out of an asylum.’  For Sal and Dean, ‘the road is life’, and Dean lives his life in exactly the way he drives his cars – crazily.  Yet despite his recklessness, we are encouraged to approve of him.

Dean’s soul is described by Sal as wrapped up in a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road.  His mixture of hedonism and spiritual quest (‘Beat – the soul of Beatific’) characterises the ‘Beat Generation’ and its successors, particularly the 1960s hippies.  Sal and Dean turn their back on conventional white middle class America, seeking out the ‘happy truehearted ecstatic Negroes of America’ feeling that ‘the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.’  This leads them to the bums and the hoboes, the jazz clubs and the seedy bars and ghettoes of urban America.  It is significant that Sal is nearly jailed for putting the American flag ‘upside down on a government pole’ – in a sense it represents the inverted set of values he is embracing.

Sal begins his ‘whole road experience’, knowing ‘there’d be girls, visions, everything’.  Enjoying the sexual, narcotic and jazz thrills of a life on the road, he and Dean are constantly searching, ‘performing our one and noble function of the time, move’.  It is not always clear exactly what they are searching for, but it soon becomes clear that their quest may be circular rather than linear: ‘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.’  On occasions Sal would like more certainty and stability (‘This can’t go on all the time – all this franticness and jumping around’) but Dean seems to believe that what he is searching for can only be found on the road an in a car, in a state of turbulent motion.  When Dean and Sal pick up a Cadillac from a rides bureau, Dean observes: ‘You and I Sal we’d dig the whole world with a car like this because, man, the road must eventually lead to the whole world.  Ain’t nowhere else it can go – right?’

Sometimes illumination comes – whether it is Dean Moriarty enthusing about jazz musicians who in their improvisation, find IT (when ‘time stops’), whether it is the momentary thrills of sexual liaisons or drug-induced highs, whether it is some strange mysticism of Dean or Carlo Marx or whether it is a moment of apparent illumination on the road itself: ‘As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say  “Pass here and go on, you’re on the road to heaven”.’

In a spontaneous prose style which captures an amphetamine rush of often garbled thought (Kerouac completed the novel in three weeks, typing on to a continuous roll of paper), Sal tries to capture the nature of their road thrills: ‘the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.’ Sal never seems clear about the value or the achievement of the quest but Dean feels he finds something special in his trip to Mexico: ‘we had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic.’  All Mexico proves to be ‘one vast Bohemian camp’, but again Dean’s feelings about the place are best defined in driving terms: ‘This is traffic I’ve always dreamed of! Everybody goes!’

Dean is obsessed with the road – he doesn’t quite know where it’s leading, but he values the trip.  Described by Sal as one of ‘the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining’, he speaks as he drives – with great, dangerous speed (‘What’s your road man? – holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road.  It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.’)

Gatsby, Loman and Moriarty all travel on their own particular road in their own chosen vehicles.  Each is driven by a particular vision of himself and of his country and each becomes in many ways a representative of his generation’s quest for liberty and pursuit of happiness.  Although Moriarty might seems to have seen through what Sal describes as ‘the mad dream-grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying’, he is no more a hero than Gatsby or Loman.  All three characters, driving and driven, waver between the status of hero and conman.  Deciding whether their road is a good one or their destination worth reaching, we might echo Carlo Marx’s question in On The Road: ‘I mean man whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?’ Or we might echo Springsteen’s observation in ‘Born to Run’ that the highway is littered with broken heroes.