Geographicals

It's confirmed: I am not a beatnik. If ever there was any doubt in my mind about that (there wasn't, really), then my personal response to On The Road by Jack Kerouac dispelled it. Indeed, you'll learn alot about yourself by reading this book.

On The Road, first published in 1957, was Kerouac's second novel and it became a holy text for the Beats, the young, creative American counterculture that predated the hippie movement by more than ten years. Some famous names came out of that movement: Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs, among others. And many of them are represented in On The Road, albeit anonymously. The novel is a thinly-veiled account of actual events that occurred in the late 1940s. What events are we talking about, here? Crazy madness, mostly, all framed within a series of road trips that Kerouac, portrayed here as Sal Paradise, took with wildman Dean Moriarty, a fictional representation of Kerouac's friend and fellow-writer, Neal Cassady. Sal, who lives with his aunt in New Jersey, idolizes Dean, who embodies a "free-spirited" approach to life that Sal, who is nominally more stable,  wishes to emulate. As a result, Sal and Dean, along with numerous other friends and acquaintances, regularly pick up stakes and hit the road for places like, Denver, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Mexico in order to experience life to its fullest. Along the way they find highs and lows in the form of drink and drugs, deep friendships and fleeting relationships, family ties and accidental children, arrests and narrow escapes, emotional bliss and emotional wreckage.

In short, the novel is a glorification of the bohemian lifestyle and, to its credit, it presents this lifestyle in a compelling way. Jack Kerouac was a gifted writer that had a way with language. His was a language of the street (circa 1948) mixed with the sensibilities of a poetic craftsman: "...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." Whatever your reaction might be to the events depicted in the story, it is hard not to be drawn in by the sheer beauty of the prose. It is not an accident that On The Road is shelved in the "Classics" sections of KCLS libraries.

I won't lie to you: my age (47) and life-history make it difficult for me to relate to the attitudes and choices of the main characters in this book, all of whom were very young at the time. Yet I'm glad that I read On The Road and will probably read more of Kerouac's work, especially The Dharma Bums. On The Road is a window into a significant American movement that produced some influential (and revered) American literature and spawned the counterculture of the 1960s which, in turn, has deeply affected today's mainstream culture.

So in a way we're all beatniks.