On the Road: Kerouac's Ragged American Journey by Robert Holton (review)

520 letters in canada 1999 middle-class prejudices and intolerant attitudes towards someone who looked (gasp!) like a beer-drinking `proletarian' were in retrospect all too evident. Furthermore, Christy adds, none of the countercultural commentators who have documented the period `seem to even consider the possibility that Kerouac did not find [the hippies] interesting.' In Christy's view, Kerouac had long ago left them behind, stumbling along his own `classic pilgrimage,' the end of which comes early, not as a result of alcoholism (the `official' story), he contends, but rather from internal bleeding caused by a vicious beating Kerouac took in a black bar. Stubbornly contradictory and combative, The Long Slow Death of Jack Kerouac will force both friend and foe of Jack Kerouac to re-examine and re-evaluate both the man and his work, and the relationship between the two. (JOHN WALKER) Robert Holton. On the Road: Kerouac's Ragged American Journey Twayne. xvi, 142. US $29.00 It is very interesting indeed that, in an academic critical milieu that has so often bandied about words like `transgression' over the last couple of decades, the mere mention of Jack Kerouac's name is still enough to inspire something bordering on revulsion B or whatever passes for that in academe: an ironically arched eyebrow, perhaps? B among its more seemingly open-minded members. Perhaps now, with a Twayne's Masterwork Studies edition devoted to Kerouac's most famed literary endeavour, On the Road, this state of affairs is about to change. Robert Holton's study surely is the most perceptive writing on Kerouac in ages, and perhaps ever, making a strong case for the infamous `Beat' author's importance B and even his philosophical prescience B among those who would still count as his more famous and well-respected literary contemporaries . As Holton points out early on in his study, the notion of Kerouac as important literary visionary has been one shunned in academic circles virtually since On the Road was published. Of that book's critical reception, he writes that `Graduate students were advised against working on it and in some cases, the strictures against studying Kerouac's work were sufficient to relegate critics who embarked on it to a marginality of their own.' So what, in Holton's view, is responsible for this seemingly irrational distaste for Kerouac in `official' literary circles? The answer lies in the word `ragged,' he says, which is `one of the most frequently repeated words in the novel,' and whose manifestation in Kerouac's prose `leaves the novel filled with unresolved tensions, blatant contradictions, and distressing perplexities rather than the orderly and well-polished surfaces humanities 521 of High Art.' It seems, then, that if the lower-class realities that Kerouac dealt in are to be portrayed to an audience of middle- to upper-class readers, they must first be stylistically stripped of the elements of chaos and disorganization that writers like Bruce Benderson have recently noted as being central to the experience of the those actually living `the Life.' The flat prose of `dirty realist' Raymond Carver, then, is allowed into the canon; the works of Hubert Selby and Jack Kerouac, whose lines actually pulse with the chaotic rhythms of lower-class existence, are not. While Holton seems a bit defensive himself at times regarding Kerouac (`If we go to [On the Road] looking for clean and ideal solutions to the social problems of the 1990s, we will be appalled,' he writes), he nevertheless goes on to provide a first-class reading of the book that should help to reposition it as an important text worthy of serious study in the new millennium. Key among the notions Holton discusses is Kerouac's prescient idea of the repressive `cop-soul' overtaking America as it became increasingly corporatized (a development which has only gathered momentum since On the Road was written), this `anticipating Michel Foucault's analysis of the surveillance mentality that is a central feature of modern society.' In opposition to this, Kerouac (or `Sal Paradise,' Kerouac's autobiographical protagonist) embraces the libidinal, chaotic, and finally liberating energies of the lower classes via the novel's `heroic' figure, street urchin Dean Moriarty...