The View from "On the Road": The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (review)

Book Reviews 501 to reducing fertility rates, but as ends unto themselves. Today, the international women's health movement continues to try to "disconnect reproductive rights and health services from the population apparatus" by disentangling itself from demographic -centered approaches to population dynamics (217-28). For Greene this represents a significant challenge to neoliberal Malthusianism, but risks "reinscribing the colonial figure of Third World women needing to be saved" (229). As several billion more people are added worldwide over the next few decades, the United States will probably continue to direct the global approach to population . In Malthusian Worlds, one gets the keen sense that U.S. foreign aid through Planned Parenthood, the United Nations, and the USAID is a complex beast, offering sensible reproductive choices for some people, and enormous control by local authoritarian administrative elites for others. Amos Tevelow University of Pittsburgh The View from "On the Road": The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac. By Omar Swartz. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999; pp. xi + 130. $34.95. In the preface to his new book The View from "On the Road," Omar Swartz writes that Jack Kerouac's On the Road, "is a rhetorical document with persuasive significance in helping people to restructure their lives." Therefore, "the study of Kerouac is the study of rhetorical transformations" (xi). A brief chapter summary helps outline the mainstays of his argument. In Chapter 1, "Rhetorical Transformations," Swartz does an excellent job of defining "rhetoric" and of explicating the nature and function of a "rhetorical vision." Swartz locates On the Road as a representative anecdote for the Beat Generation. The author goes to some length to give an untutored reader necessary social and cultural background as a context for interpreting this movement. For example, Swartz explains that Kerouac coined the term "beat" to express a simultaneously raucous combination of the rhythm of experimental jazz, a feeling of marginalization , as in "beaten down," and a surprising touch of the Roman Catholic spirit of the beatitudes, which enables one to truly celebrate one's "blessings." Swartz's discussion of the roots of the term "beat" provides interesting socio-cultural reading. In Chapter 2, "Kerouac in Context," Swartz provides useful background on Kerouac, who was influenced by other Beat Generation compatriots, including such notables as William Burroughs, Allan Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others. Swartz provides an overview of the cultural milieu of the Beat Generation. He finds its ideological roots to be most conspicuous in On the Road. The book was premised on "the cult of high experience," which Swartz defines as "an attitude that 502 Rhetoric & Public Affairs fermented in the Beat Generation... involving the belief that experience rather than conformity was the natural condition of the healthy human being" ( 18). In sacralizing the body and the primacy of personal experience, representatives of this new idealism sought to combine modes of self-expression and independence as modalities for experiencing freedom. Life is transformed into a never-ending quest for "IT!"-— a term that can be loosely translated as a Buddhist-inspired state of ecstatic triumph "signifying] the indescribable moment of perfect understanding when the sensating individual and the sting of time blend indistinguishably" into an "existential moment," where devotees experience the "oneness and unity of creation" (20). In Chapter 3, "Kerouac's Rhetorical Situation," Swartz outlines Kerouac's contribution to the culture of the 1960s. Swartz then turns to a critique of Norman Podhoretz and George Will to mine 30 years of cultural warfare attached to Kerouac's writings. Swartz describes an article by Podhoretz on Kerouac that appeared in 1958 as "absurd" and "sensationalist." Podhoretz labels Kerouac "dangerous" because of his untraditional views that subvert authority. Some 30 years later, George Will dismisses Kerouac in a broadside decrying the attempt to honor Kerouac by dedicating a park in his name in Lowell, Massachusetts. Will chides the proponents of such action as an example of America's penchant for mounting useless campaigns in support of "recycled radicalisms." In describing Kerouac's marginalized "rhetorical situation," then, Swartz is concerned with the place of art as ideological warfare. As Swartz suggests , "art, in principle, is never innocuous" (41). The comparisons in this chapter...