#19 - On The Road

Oldfield Option #2! After breezing through the previous two books in as many days, I got to On The Road, the pinnacle of Beat literature. The Beat Generation was a counter-culture movement that preceded the Hippies of the 60s. They were disillusioned after World War II, and the core group of writers - Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs - roamed America in search of revelation, hitchhiking and partying everywhere on the way. They were the literary equivalent of the more experimental jazz of the era, bringing in less structured styles and more personal work than seen before in writing. The Big Three of Beat literature are Ginsberg's Howl, Burroughs' Naked Lunch, and finally, On The Road by Jack Kerouac. My edition of On The Road was the 50th anniversary "Original Scroll" released by Viking Press, and so many people who have read the book before might have different names or different memories of some scenes. The Original Scroll was the first draft of the book, which was written in a three-week burst of energy on 6 long pieces of printer paper, resulting in a typed scroll that was hundreds of feet long. This version has more of the sexuality, more of the memoirs, and a rougher feel than the finished product that was released 6 years after the first draft was created. While I loved having the actual names of the people that Jack was referring to, I could definitely tell that there was work left to be done on some sections. Comparing sections like the "mad to live" passage show just how much tweaking went into Kerouac's "natural flow".

The Beats are also considered as the first hipsters - although they usually used the term to refer to white middle-class people who tried to emulate the lifestyles of the black jazz musicians they adored. Because of this, many of the literary critics who focus on the Beats today are, in fact, painfully hipster, this time in the contemporary sense. In the beginning of my edition of On The Road there were a series of essays written by Beat Generation scholars. They discussed the history of the writing, Kerouac's feelings towards minorities, his relationship with Neal Cassady, and the structure of the text in the broader scope of literary history. These essays were unneccessarily jargon-filled, smacked of sentimentality and generally made me angry at this entire portion of academia. An excerpt: "Critics have rightly problematized the primitivist racial sentimentality expressed in this passage, which romanticizes the suffering of people of color during this period and risks obfuscating their actual lived experiences." I'm sorry, but "problematized"? This entire sentence could be rewritten with 40% fewer words, 60% more clarity and 85% less douchinositizing. "Interiority" and "Sensorial" were both used, and the aforementionablizored "problematize" was used by three of the "scholars" that were chosen by the publisher to help readers to understand the work. If this is understanding, I want more gibberish.

On The Road was written entirely in stream-of-consciousness, a style I am enjoying more and more as I read more. The final version contained paragraph and chapter breaks in it to help the reader understand, but in the scroll, the entire work was in one continuous paragraph, where Kerouac continues spouting out whatever comes to mind. The result is storytelling in its purest form. Instead of following constructs and patterns of conversation, Kerouac just writes down whatever he feels is important to tell about it right then - flashbacks happen without being announced, sudden distractions are described in detail. The effect grows on you the longer you read in one sitting. The longer you read a stream-of-consciousness work, the more involved you get with the author's story, and the stronger the connection you have with the text. I finished the last 100 pages or so in one sitting, and just like with Ulysses' Penelope chapter, I sat afterwards and simply felt my head buzz. The ending of the scroll edition was a lot more abrupt than the polished copy - after spending pages on each trip to Denver, I expected more than the last 15 or so to be dedicated to the whole of the Mexico expedition. But regardless, the work as a whole managed to draw me in entirely, and make me almost want to go out and start hitchhiking - not to go somewhere, but just to go see what I can find. Luckily, I'm too lazy, and people don't pick up hitchhikers anymore. But I can now understand just why so many people become fanatical about the Beat Generation - whatever they did, they were doing it damn well. That's why On The Road will become my third:

10/10