Peasant Dreams: Reading On the Road

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

--Allen Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California"

No revelation ever made Jack a whit less selfish.

--Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe

"We can learn something about the naive artist," Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy, "through the analogy of dream. We can imagine the dreamer as he calls out to himself, still caught in the illusion of his dream and without disturbing it, 'This is a dream, and I want to go on dreaming,' and we can infer, on the one hand, that he takes deep delight in the contemplation of his dream, and, on the other, that he must have forgotten the day, with its horrible importunity, so to enjoy his dream" (32). Its Dionysian ecstasies notwithstanding, Jack Kerouac's On the Road belongs to the tradition of Apollonian art that Nietzsche conceives of here: an art of willful illusion sustained against the encroachments (as Nietzsche later puts it) of "a whole world of torment" (33). Kerouac's is the work of forgetting, though the residues of memory, the shafts of daylight that trouble this dreamer's sleep, are precisely what intrigue me.

I am interested in whether or not On the Road finally believes, and in what sense believes, in the mythology of America on which it depends. At times Kerouac seems directly to question the faith his narrator Sal Paradise has in all Dean Moriarty comes to represent: a peculiarly intense and charismatic masculinity, a vital relation to the body, cultural and spiritual authenticity, the promise of America itself. On the Road achieves, at times, a certain distance from its own enabling myths, quite as if it were holding them up for scrutiny even as it plays them out. This has the effect of putting us and the novel itself in a strangely abstract relation to its ideological basis, which is why the problem of faith is crucial. On the Road constantly tests the limits of its own creed but refuses, often poignantly, to abandon it. Kerouac's road novel outruns its own horizon and at the same time always fails to achieve escape velocity. Its dawning, at times anxious, awareness of this fact makes On the Road an Emersonian fiction, an affiliation that provides a clue about the origins of another characteristic of the book: its exuberant, frustrated optimism. On the Road is a book that simply refuses to be jaded, no matter how canny, ironic, and self-aware it becomes.

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On the Road involves a familiar American idea about belief: the act of believing in Dean actually brings Dean about--makes him, renews him, creates him. We do not believe in Dean; we believe Dean in, to adapt a phrase Robert Frost once used about God and the future. Dean Moriarty cannot exist apart from our fictions of him, which is why even Neal Cassady, upon whom the character is based, is not essentially real. He had a legendary kind of existence as the "cocksman and Adonis of Denver," as Allen Ginsberg put it. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Cassady himself were always inventing and reinventing "Neal Cassady," who, as Ginsberg writes in the dedication to Howl and Other Poems, had published several books in heaven. Neal is simply too fine a creation for this world; his genius can never be adequately embodied. And the same goes for America, with which Dean Moriarty is mythically identified. (When Carlo Marx addresses America in the person of Dean, he only makes explicit what Kerouac always implies: "Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?")

On the Road tells a Young Goodman Brown sort of story...