Misreading "On the Road" - New English Review

by Terry Dunford (June 2012)

piano accompaniment of liberal Steve Allen and interviewed by conservative William Buckley, Jr. Finally, On the Road earned Jack Kerouac a spot on the mural in the Greenwich Village’s Waverly Inn, A Portrait of Greenwich Village Bohemians, typing the famous On the Road scroll despite the fact that Greenwich Village never appears in the book.¹ The axis of On the Road, in fact, goes through Times Square (Damon Runyon territory).

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Sal Paradise and friends watch a baseball game on TV and listen to two other ballgames on the radio simultaneously.

We will leave it to baseball trivia masters to figure out what day in April 1950 those three baseball games were played.

Part Five

For example:

The Naked City (1948)

Dissent. Ginsberg’s poems and Mailer’s polemic reflect the Beat Generation’s animus towards America that academic critics wistfully assign to On the Road.

For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation . . . .

One is Hip or one is Square (the alternative which each new generation coming into American life is beginning to feel) one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.

Norman Mailer co-founded the Village Voice in 1955 and is the voice of the Greenwich Village beat generation more than anything that can be found in On the Road.

Accordingly Sal invokes American history to remind us that once the eastern part of America had a wilderness to match the West and its own heroic pioneers:

Ben Franklin plodded in the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wildbuck Indian-fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find the Gap, when Bradford built his road and men whooped her up in log cabins. There were not great Arizona spaces for the little man, just the bushy wilderness of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy (p. 97).

http://theautry.org/. Working as a security guard, Sal walks “along a silvery, dusty road beneath inky trees of California – a road like in The Mark of Zorro [1940] and a road like all the roads you see in Western B movies. I used to take out my gun and play cowboys in the dark” admits Sal (p. 58). Throughout On the Road Sal approvingly invokes Hollywood figures such as W.C. Fields (pp. 36, 57, 112, 133, 258), Charlie Chaplin (p.58), Jerry Colonna (p. 80), Groucho Marx (p. 111 and 191), and Gary Cooper (p.245).

How about the past several decades of literary scholarship in American higher education?

[1] Edward Sorel, The Mural at the Waverly Inn: A Portrait of Greenwich Village Bohemians (NY: Pantheon Books, 2008).

[4] John Tytell, Naked Angels (Chicago, 1976), p.12 and p. 10.

http://www.thirteen.org/uncertainindustry/2009/03/19/nyc-manufacturing-in-decline/

[9] Jeffrey Hart recounts as a youth in the 1940s in New York horse-drawn wagons selling vegetables and ice in From This Moment On: America in 1940 (1987) p.91.

, p. 31.

Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters 1940 — 1956, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1999), p. 107.

[16] Michael Hrebeniak, Action Writings, pp. 25-31.

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