Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Professor Amy Hungerford: All right.
I've put two quotations on the board for your consideration.
The first is from Norman Mailer. This is from Advertisements
for Myself. He says,
"Jack Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence,
honesty, and a sense of the novel."
Of course, some people might apply those adjectives to Mailer
himself, but that's what Mailer said.
"On the Road"--this is from a
critic named George Dardess; this is from a 1974 article
about On the Road--"is a love story,
not a travelogue and certainly not a call to revolution."
So, I put these up here to sort of sit in the background of what
I'm going to talk to you about today about the ultimate payoff
for Kerouac's effort and the Beats' effort,
more generally, to imagine a language that is
the adequate analog to experience,
a language that is itself a kind of experience,
and further, that is an ecstatic,
mystical kind of experience. Last time,
in addition to introducing that idea of language to you,
I conducted a reading of the first part of the novel where I
suggested that Kerouac tells a story that is not so much about
the escape from an American consumer culture of the postwar
period as it is a story about the absolute immersion in a
culture of consumption. So, what Sal Paradise consumes
on the road extends from pie, as I demonstrated to you by the
multiple references, the simple food that the body
needs and wants; to girls, all the women that he
tries to sleep with and that Dean tries to sleep with over
the course of the novel; to money and the consumer goods
that come with it in order to build a middle-class American
life with his aunt in New York--remember he buys the
icebox, the first electric icebox of
their family, the first refrigerator of their
family, when he comes back from his
first road trip--to a kind of mystical access to America,
a history of jazz. There's a whole set of mystical
cultural artifacts that Sal Paradise and his friends consume
over the course of this novel. So, I want to begin just by
pointing to you, on page 297,
a somewhat more complex example of what this looks like toward
the end of the novel.
This is at the bottom of that page.
They're driving out of Mexico, Sal and Dean,
and they meet indigenous people along the road.
As we climbed the air grew cooler and the Indian girls
on the road wore shawls over their heads and shoulders.
They hailed us desperately. We stopped to see.
They wanted to sell us little pieces of rock crystal.
Their great brown, innocent eyes looked into ours
with such soulful intensity that not one of us had the slightest
*** thought about them. Moreover, they were very young,
some of them eleven and looking almost thirty.
"Look at those eyes," breathed Dean.
They were like the eyes of the *** Mother when she was a
child. We saw in them the tender and
forgiving gaze of Jesus and they stared unflinching into ours.
We rubbed our nervous blue eyes and looked again.
Still they penetrated us with sorrowful and hypnotic gleam.
When they talked they suddenly became frantic and almost silly.
In their silence they were themselves.
"They"ve only recently learned to sell these crystals since the
highway was built about ten years back.
Up until that time this entire nation must have been silent."
That's Dean. In this fantasy about the
indigenous girls, what you see is a commitment to
language and the activity of selling,
buying and selling, entirely entwined with one
another. So, the fantasy here is that
it's selling and buying that produces in them a language that
looks very much like the language that's frequently
attributed to Dean: frantic and silly,
almost silly. Remember, as the novel goes on
and Dean gets more and more hyper, sort of "wigged out,"
his language becomes more and more frantic,
and more and more actually silly.
So this is here attributed to them.
There are other fantasies at work here, obviously.
One is that they are reading a kind of Christian essentialism
into these people, into their eyes.
They see the *** Mary, and they see Jesus.
There is a whole mystical objectification of these people
that's going on, that's allied to the religious
strains of this novel, which I'm going to pick up
again a little bit later on in my lecture today.
So, this is a more complex and, sort of,
dense example of how that consumer,
that push to consume, that consumer sense drives and
motivates the novel and plays out in what they see when they
are on the road.
In that passage that I read to you when they're in the
mountains in Colorado drunk, yelling, they call themselves
"mad, drunken Americans." Well, what does America mean in
this novel? And what does it mean to be an
American in this novel? So, that's the question I'd
like to take up today first. Coming from Lolita,
the vision of America in On the Road looks quite
different. In Lolita the vision of
America is minute; it's detailed;
it's concrete. Remember, for example,
the Komfee Kabins that Nabokov gives us as Lolita and Humbert
tour around: the painful, luminous, tiny detail of all
that they see on the road. Think to yourself.
Do you see any of that kind of detail in this book?
I see shaking heads. No.
We really don't. What do we see instead?
What America do we see? I'm going to look back to a
passage I talked about in a different vein last time,
on 26 and 27, just for one quick example.
This is, remember, when he's hitched a ride in
this truck, and it's a truck bed full of men who have hitched
rides. And he's talking with
Mississippi Gene. This is at the bottom of 26:
There is something so indubitably reminiscent of Big
Slim Hazard in Mississippi Gene's demeanor that I said,
"Do you happen to have met a fellow called Big Slim Hazard
somewhere?" And he said,
"You mean that tall fellow with the big laugh?"
"Well, that sounds like him. He came from Ruston, Louisiana."
"That's right. Louisiana Slim he's sometimes
called. Yes, Sir.
I sure have met Big Slim. And he used to work in the east
Texas oil fields?" "East Texas is right and now
he's punching cows," and that was exactly right,
and still I couldn't believe Gene could really have known
Slim whom I have been looking for more or less for
years. In this scene Big Slim Hazard
is an American type, just as Mississippi Gene is
himself. Their names tell you that
they're almost cartoonishly American types.
The fact that Mississippi Gene knows this vague person,
Big Slim Hazard, gives you the feeling that
America is a tiny community in which these types loom large,
that anyone from anywhere--if he's the right kind of
American--will know the other members of that American tribe
of types. So, Mississippi Gene knows the
America that Sal knows, and it's America populated by
these larger-than-life figures. The very vagueness of the
description: "You mean the tall fellow with the big laugh?"
How many people can we imagine who might fit that description?
It's like telling your horoscope;
if you're general enough, you're going to make a match.
So, Sal is convinced--he wants to be convinced;
he desperately wants to be convinced--that Mississippi Gene
knows Big Slim Hazard. Let's look at another example
on page 59.
This is something else Sal wants.
I wanted to see Denver ten years ago when they were all
children--[That's Chad and Dean and the other Denver natives
they have among them in their gang]
and in the sunny cherry blossom morning of springtime in the
Rockies rolling their hoops up the joyous alleys full of
promise, the whole gang,
and Dean ragged and dirty, prowling by himself in his
preoccupied frenzy. There is a nostalgia here,
not for the past of the old West.
It's important that Denver is in the West.
The nostalgia here is not for the old West,
but for the young West. The West in On the Road
is an area of youth. It's always,
in American lore, been an area of adventure and
imagination, but this is well after the end of Manifest
Destiny. There is no border in the West.
So Sal has to reinvent one, and in some sense it's a border
of time. It's a spring of youth that's
inaccessible, somehow, to Sal,
that these men he's with who are so exciting to him as their
own kind of western American type,
that they blossomed and grew in this particular place,
and he wants to have been there with them.
So, in a way, by longing to be where they
were when they were children, by longing to inhabit that
time, as well, he wants to become them.
So, this is just one of the ways that Sal longs to
assimilate them to himself. The other big way,
of course, is through Dean's language, but this is another
way. It's a vision of the West as a
place of, generally, male youth.
When he's back in New York--this is on page 125--his
New York friends meet his road friends, and are delighted by
them. This is one of his friends:
"'Sal, where did you find these absolutely wonderful people?
I've never seen anyone like them.'
'I found them in the West.'"So,
there is that sense of the West as a source, and what he's going
to do is take them back East. So, the West is a fountain of
youthful energy that Sal continually draws back to the
East, to New York. Sal is never really going to be
gone from New York that long. He never really wants to leave,
and one sign of it is that icebox, but the other sign of it
is that he continually returns and takes these people with him.
And part of the pleasure for him is to do that transaction,
to enliven the old East with the young West.
These are all stereotypes of America, but Sal really believes
them and really inhabits them. Now look on 172.
This is Sal in one of his major moments of vision.
He's in New Orleans, and he's on Market Street.
Oh, sorry. He's in San Francisco,
and he's on Market Street. This is the middle of 172.
I looked down Market Street.
I didn't know whether it was that or Canal Street in New
Orleans. It led to water,
ambiguous, universal water, just as 42^(nd) Street in New
York leads to water and you never know where you are.
I thought of Ed Dunkel's ghost on Times Square.
I was delirious. I wanted to go back and leer at
my strange Dickensian mother in the hash joint.
I tingled all over from head to foot.
It seemed I had a whole host of memories going back to 1750 in
England and that I was in San Francisco now only in another
life and in another body. "No," that woman seemed to say
with that terrified glance. "Don't come back and play your
honest, hardworking mother. You are no longer like a son to
me and like your father, my first husband,
'ere this kindly Greek took pity on me."
The proprietor was a Greek with hairy arms.
"You are no good, inclined to drunkenness and
routs and final disgraceful robbery of the fruits of my
'umble labors in the haberdashery.
Oh, Son. Did you not ever go on your
knees and pray for deliverance from all your sins and
scoundrel's acts? Lost boy, depart.
Do not haunt my soul. I have done well forgetting you.
Reopen no old wounds. Be as if you had never returned
and looked in to me to see my laboring humilities,
my few scrubbed pennies, hungry to grab,
quick to deprive, sullen, unloved,
mean-minded son of my flesh. Son!
Son!" It made me want to think of the
big Pop Vision in Graetna with Old Bull.
And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy
that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step
across chronological time into timeless shadows and wonderment
in the bleakness of the mortal realm and the sensation of death
kicking at my heels to move on with a phantom *** its own
heels and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove
off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness,
the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright
mind essence, innumerable lotuslands falling
open in the magic mothswarm of heaven.
That language at the end there is pure Allen Ginsberg.
So, that's that incantatory Beat mysticism.
It's a mysticism of emptiness, in the end, but what fills that
emptiness as we lead up to that moment is this fantasy of
trans-historical existence, that he can somehow embody a
whole human story across time. Where's that story coming from?
Well, this is a Dickensian mother.
It's Dickens in part, that stereotype of old London,
of the urban working class, but it's not just Dickens.
Moby *** is here too. If you look at that litany of
streets that lead down to the water, any of you who have read
Moby *** will recall that Ishmael talks at the
beginning, before he gets on the Pequod,
he talks about how streets that lead to water draw you
inevitably, and he talks about all the
streets in New York that end in water.
And he has this long meditation on that aspect of city
geography. Well, here is Sal having that
meditation, too. So, what you see in this
passage is not only a sort of mystical trans-historical
fantasy, but a literary one. He's getting his mythology not
just from the cupboard of stereotypes that are proper to
American self-conception. He's looking back to literary
stories, too, that he can assimilate into his
experience and read through, experience through,
so that every little thing he experiences, like this moment of
abandonment. Dean has gone off with Camille;
Marylou is off somewhere else; he's starved;
he doesn't have any place to go. But it becomes a moment of
vision, and it can be a moment of vision because he has these
ways of layering over that experience with mythic and
literary significance.
Finally, on 147, we have another example of
this, and it shows us something even a little different,
or it pushes the point further. This is in New Orleans:
There was a mythic wraith of fog--[this is the middle of
that big paragraph] over the brown waters that
night together with dark driftwoods and across the way
New Orleans glowed orange bright with a few dark ships at her
hem, ghostly, fog-bound Cereno ships
with Spanish balconies and ornamental poops,
'til you got up close and saw they were just old freighters
from Sweden and Panama. The ferry fires glowed in the
night. The same Negroes plied the
shovel and sang. Old Big Slim Hazard had once
worked on the Algiers ferry as a deck hand.
This made me think of Mississippi Gene too and as the
river poured down from mid America by starlight I knew,
I knew like mad, that everything I had ever
known and would ever know was One.
Strange to say, too, that night we crossed the
ferry with Bull Lee a girl committed suicide off the deck
either just before or just after us.
We saw it in the paper the next day.
Here you get a dream, not just of trans-historical
time, the old Spanish ships that turn out just to be freighters
from Sweden and Panama; you get another nod to
Melville, Cereno ships (Benito Cereno is one of
Melville's famous novels). "That everything I would ever
know was One." The oneness that he is looking
for is partly that oneness of mystical emptiness that we saw
in the last passage. But here we get the sense of
the racial oneness that comes out in some of the other parts
of the novel: the Negroes plying the shovel
and singing, another American type.
But this is a type with which Sal longs to merge.
And this is how--on 179 and 180--this is how he images a way
out of himself.
So this is on 179. So, I'm moving from the
question of "What does America look like;
what's the mythic vocabulary that Sal is using?"
to, "How does he find his identity as an American?"
So, first he makes America mythic, rather than specific (if
we compare him back to Nabokov), and then he enters into that
mythology through acts of identification.
And here is one of the most important.
At dusk I walked. I felt like a speck on the
surface of the sad, red earth.
I passed the Windsor Hotel where Dean Moriarty had lived
with his father in the Depression '30s.
As of yore, I looked everywhere for the sad and fabled tinsmith
of my mind. Either you find someone who
looks like your father in places like Montana or you look for a
friend's father where he is no more.
At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching along the
lights of 27^(th) and Welton in the Denver colored section
wishing I were a ***, feeling that the best the white
world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me,
not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness,
music, not enough night.
He goes on in this vein for that whole paragraph if you just
skim down. I was only myself,
Sal Paradise, sad, strolling in this violet
dark, this unbearably sweet night wishing I could exchange
worlds with the happy, true-hearted,
ecstatic Negroes of America.
Well, this is hugely stereotypical,
hugely appropriative. Sal wants to take the entire
life experience of a group of people and suck it into himself.
Now, you want to ask yourself: What is the sadness that
motivates this appropriation; why does he want to become the
***? He says in another moment,
"I was Mexican." He's always trying to be more
exotic than himself, than simple Sal Paradise.
Well, Baldwin had something to say about this.
James Baldwin characterized this passage as "absolute
nonsense, and offensive nonsense, at that.
And yet, there is real pain in it, and real loss,
however thin. And it is thin,
thin because it It does not refer to reality,
but to a dream." That's what it is:
"It does not refer to reality, but to a dream."
And he says of his own writing, "I had tried to convey
something of what it felt like to be a ***,
and no one had been able to listen.
They wanted their romance." Well, I think that's a
pretty clear-eyed view, and a clear indictment,
of what Kerouac is doing through the character of Sal.
Sal in this moment becomes so naïve, naïve of
history, of actual lived history of his own country.
But, as you've seen, the mythic quality of America
has pushed all of that aside. So, it's not just the Komfee
Kabins that we don't see; it's the whole history of
slavery. And when he goes picking in the
cotton fields, he imagines that he could be a
slave. And then he makes some comments
about how, well, he could never pick cotton fast
enough; he's just not able to do it as
black men are. So, it's motivated by a huge
blindness about the racial history of the United States in
any of its detail. That sense of the oneness,
I think, points to why and how he makes that illusion,
the oneness. He felt that it was all one.
The oneness is elevated from this sense of appropriation,
to a mystical level. So that oneness looks something
like the Buddhism that Kerouac studied for a time;
it looks like something more than the effort for Sal just to
be something exotic. It looks like,
by entering into that oneness, by adopting all these different
identities, that Sal participates into some larger
mystical body. But, what is that larger
mystical body? We have been given one
candidate: that it's America, that it's somehow America.
And I want you to keep this in mind and make a note to
yourself. Think about this vision of an
American mystical oneness when you go to read Crying of Lot
49 'cause you're going to see something quite similar
there. There's actually a wonderful
episode in On the Road that is nearly a carbon copy
of what you'll see later in Crying of Lot 49,
where Dean looks down on Salt Lake City at night,
and he looks at the pattern of the lights down below him.
Oedipa Maas in Crying of Lot 49 will sit up on a bluff
overlooking San Narciso, and she'll look down at the
pattern of light. And it's an important moment in
that novel, a moment of religious revelation,
but what's being revealed remains in Pynchon quite
difficult to pin down. Here, it's equally vague.
So, on 5, back to that question. What can motivate this kind of
effort? On page 181 he says:
There was excitement and the air was filled with the
vibration of really joyous life that knows nothing of
disappointment and white sorrows and all that.
The old *** man had a can of beer in his coat pocket which he
proceeded to open and the old white man enviously eyed the can
and groped in his pocket to see if he could buy a can too.
How I died. I walked away from there.
[And then this wonderful transition]
I went to see a rich girl I knew.
In the morning she pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of her
silk stocking and said, "You've been talking of a trip
to Frisco. That being the case,
take this and go have your fun."
So all of my problems were solved.
Sal needs the rich girl to keep his vision fueled,
but the white sorrows are part of what it pays for.
The rich girl provides him with---in a way--with these
white sorrows; she funds them.
You can have white sorrows, whatever those really are.
You can have white sorrows if you have the hundred-dollar bill
to send you off on one of these odysseys.
You're not pinned down to a place working for a living.
I'm not going to talk about jazz, and the way it figures,
but I hope that you will have a chance to talk about that in
section because that brings together several elements of
what's important in the novel. I want to focus now on the
sadness. I don't know if you noticed how
often that adjective appears in the novel.
Did any of you notice that? "Sadness…
sadness…sad night." One of the saddest things,
after Dean and Sal get into their only fight,
really, is the uneaten food on Dean's plate,
the sadness of the uneaten food.
What's sad in this novel, I think, is the way the
specificity of persons pushed back against that general
collapse into mystical communing with one another.
What's sad: Dean's wife, Camille, and their baby.
It's sad. He abandons them,
and she is left with them. All the women in Dean's life
call him to the carpet and tell him of all his sins.
That's a sad moment in the novel, a moment of difficulty,
a moment of specificity also. What else is sad?
It's sad when Dean leaves Sal feverish in Mexico.
He's off. He has his girls to chase,
his wife to go back to, to divorce, whichever one is
which. He has all of these
machinations to attend to. The friendship between the two,
in the end, doesn't seem to mean very much,
or, at least in that moment it doesn't seem to mean very much.
If George Dardess is right that this is a love story,
it's the love story between Sal and Dean.
And I hope, as you are reading, you notice that chapter opening
where once again Dean appears at the door when Sal shows up,
and he's totally naked. I hope you noticed that.
It's the third time that we see that so there is an eroticism
between them. And there is this heartbreaking
love that Sal has for Dean, and, if you track that through,
the major turning points in the second two thirds of the novel
are moments when Sal makes it clear to Dean that he actually
cares about him. And I can point you to some of
these pages. This is on 189.
I'm not going to do them all, 'cause there is something else
I want to show you today.
This is after Dean has been, sort of, called to the carpet,
and he says: The -[This is on 188]
the thumb became the symbol of Dean's final development.
He no longer cared about anything as before but now he
also cared about everything in principle.
That's such a great encapsulation of not caring
about any specific thing, but still being incredibly
invested. But this is mirrored by Sal's
very specific investment in Dean, and this is on the bottom
of the facing page, on 189:
Resolutely and firmly I repeated what I said.
"Come to New York with me. I've got the money."
I looked at him. My eyes were watering with
embarrassment and tears. Still he stared at me.
Now his eyes were blank and looking through me.
It was probably the pivotal point of our friendship when he
realized I had actually spent some hours thinking about him
and his troubles and he was trying to place that in his
tremendously involved and tormented mental
categories. So, he finally realizes that
Sal actually has a specific love for him, not caring about him
somehow in principle, which is the way of course that
Dean cares. So, this is the sadness of the
novel. It's this unrequited love;
Dean is never capable of loving Sal in the same way that Sal
loves Dean. And, at the very end,
when Sal has to leave Dean on the street, I actually love how
this works. He's in the back of a Cadillac.
His friend, Remi, is taking him in a limousine to
a concert, a Duke Ellington concert.
Remi won't have Dean in the car, so the car drives on.
Sal is with a new girlfriend, Laura, about--to whom he's told
all about Dean. "Dean,
ragged in a moth-eaten overcoat he bought specially for the
freezing temperatures of the East,
walked off alone and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner
of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead and
bent to it again. Poor little Laura,
my baby, to whom I had told everything about Dean,
began almost to cry. "Oh, we shouldn't let him go
like this. What'll we do?"
Old Dean's gone I thought and out loud I said,
"He'll be all right," and off he went to the sa--and off we
went to the sad and disinclined concert for which I had no
stomach whatever and all the time I was thinking of Dean and
how he got back on the train and rode over 3,000 miles over that
awful land and never knew why he had come anyway except to see
me. In that moment Sal supplies the
answer for why Dean came, "never knew why he had come
anyway," and then Sal supplies "except
to see me," and his own pain and tears are routed through Laura.
It's Laura who cries at Dean's abandonment, while he maintains
this composure, this masculine composure:
"he'll be all right." But, the sadness here is surely
Sal's.
By the end, the language of
experience--this is on 304--the language of experience that Dean
represents is completely exhausted.
This is how Dean talks at the very end:
He couldn't talk anymore. He hopped and laughed.
He stuttered and fluttered his hands and said,
"Ah, ah, you must listen to, hear."
We listened all ears, but he forgot what he wanted to
say. "Really, listen.
Ahem. Look.
Dear Sal, sweet Laura. I've come, I've gone,
but wait, ah, yes," and he stared with rocky
sorrow into his hands. "Can't talk no more.
You understand that it is, or might be,
but listen." We all listened.
He was listening to sounds in the night.
"Yes," he whispered with awe. "But you see,
no need to talk anymore and further."
Dean's language has gone from this sort of quasi-academic
gibberish of the beginning of the novel,
to this completely fragmented, broken version of the "yes"s
and "ah"s and "wow"s of those early,
ecstatic days. So, Sal's language,
by the end, has absorbed some of this, and yet gone on to
honor a kind of coherence that Dean cannot inhabit anymore,
or maybe that Dean never inhabited.
So, the last sentence of the book, which I want to read
to you--I think I have time--just because this is the
language that Sal comes out of it with,
or that Kerouac comes out with as, the payoff for opening
language, in the ways that Dean's language of immediacy
represents. So this is one sentence,
page 307, the last paragraph. So in America when the
sun goes down and I sit on the old, broken-down river pier
watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and
sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable,
huge bulge over the West Coast and all that road going,
all the people dreaming and the immensity of it,
and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the
land where they let the children cry and tonight the stars will
be out and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear?
The evening star must be drooping and shedding her
sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming
of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers,
cups the peaks, and folds the final shore in
and nobody, nobody knows what is going to happen to anybody
besides the forlorn rags of growing old,
I think of Dean Moriarty. I even think of old Dean
Moriarty, the father we never found.
I think of Dean Moriarty.
So, he's blasted open the syntax of that sentence,
piled clause upon clause upon clause,
phrase on phrase, to include that whole road in
the one sentence. So, if the dream of Kerouac's
language is to pour experience into language and make language
immediate, this sentence is a very fine
example of the payoff.
There is a kind of goofiness at the center of it,
"God is Pooh Bear." What does that mean?
God is just a toy? God is a children's story?
But then there is that lyrical, elegiac, always sad sense of
longing, and the excess of the end: "Dean Moriarty…Dean
Moriarty's father…Dean Moriarty."
You can't just say it once. You have to try to fill that
void by saying it two times and by invoking his father a third
time. So the excess and the longing
are there, each trying to drive or satisfy the other.
Now, if we have any doubts that On the Road is
mythic in itself, I just want to show you quickly
two things. In 2007, On the Road had
its fiftieth anniversary of publication.
It was written in 1951 and it was published in 1957 by Viking.
So last year we were treated to these two books.
One thing that fascinates me about them is that they are
examples of how publishing houses rely on known names for
making money. So, Viking has On the Road
in their backlist, so they can make new copies.
The pagination of this is exactly the same.
All they did was bind; they made a retro cover,
and they bound the original book review from the New York
Times into the front. They just printed that in,
and then they just reproduced the text again,
so it becomes a sort of keepsake book.
I'm not sure that a lot of people are going to read this
book, but a lot of people might buy it as a keepsake.
This is the original scroll version.
This is like the sop to scholars.
This is for the scholarly buyer. This is for people like me (or
not like me). This is the original typescript
put into pages, but, as I think I mentioned in
my first lecture, Kerouac wrote the manuscript
for On the Road on one long, 120-foot roll of paper.
He just stuck it in the typewriter.
No paragraphs, no nothing; he just went.
So, this book reproduces that, just breaking it as the pages
demand (instead of actually giving us a scroll,
which would be pretty cool). But what else they do,
is they lard it with scholarly articles.
There are--let's see--three scholarly articles,
and then there is a note on the editing of the text and there
are suggestions for further reading.
It makes it into a real literary object,
sort of like a modernist text. And what I love here is that,
apparently, at the very beginning of the scroll,
Kerouac made a typo, and the editor says,
"I read it. I let the typo stand."
Here it is, the editor, Howard Cunnell:
"Because it so beautifully suggests the sound of a car
misfiring before starting up for a long journey,
I have left uncorrected the manuscript's opening line,
which is 'I met met Neal not long before my father died.'"
There is the fantasy that the writing approximates the actual
car trip, "met met." Oh, "it sounds like a car
starting. I'm going to leave that in
there." So, the editors just
buy--completely buy--the text's own mythology and produce all
this apparatus around it to help us believe it,
too. Now, the last thing I want
to show you is on a less skeptical note.
If you ever doubt that the legend and the dream of On
the Road is alive and is powerful in art,
literary art and visual art, today, all you need to do is
look at a very recent work of digital art.
This is Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, which is a
collaboration of an American man and a Korean woman who create
online digital artworks. And this is one of them from
2002 called Dakota, and I think you will see
immediately how and why it is related to On the Road.
It's also related to Ezra Pound's Cantos,
but I'm not going to burden you with that right now.
What I want you to do is just think about this.
It runs about six minutes, so I'm going to let that go
now. All right.
Okay. So, if you ever doubted that
the dream of an immediate language that is somehow the
correlate to jazz and experience, that's your dream
living on. Okay.