World Lit I Patrick SramekCritical Reading Assignment 06/28/2015

The beat movement was known for its breakaway from the conformity of 1950’s American culture. Beatniks, as the movement’s activists were termed, were writers and poets who were largely driven by an enthusiasm for a new kind of primitivist cultural anthropology. The prominent beat writer Jack Kerouac traveled extensively across the U.S., as well as into Mexico and other foreign countries in search for an authenticity that he felt had been lost in American mainstream society. Kerouac typed the draft for his novel On the Road in three weeks, in a frenzy fueled by coffee and (probably) speed. It is valuable to contrast the characteristics that give On the Road anthropological value to their parallel in professional ethnography. The latter approach is unsurprisingly more rigid and professional than that used by Kerouac and his fellow activists. In addition, Kerouac uses literature to report his findings. In contrast, ethnography relies on data speaking for itself and keeps the “biography of the authorial anthropologist as hidden background” (Campbell 214). This makes the reader feel, be aware of, the author’s presence, as opposed to letting the data speak for itself. Kerouac’s rambling, prose writing results in a much bigger footprint on the novel. Ultimately, the reader learns more about Kerouac than of the others he speaks for. This reflexive property is brought to the forefront by the author’s search for authenticity in relationships, music and travel.

One way that Kerouac’s character, Sal, in On the Road searches for authenticity is in his relationship with Terry. Terry is a Mexican migrant worker whom Sal meets on a bus during his travels. When he first sees her he remarks “I wished I was on her bus. A pain stabbed my heart” (81). They begin holding hands without “coming to any particular agreement” (82) and she tells him that she loves love. He thinks to himself, “this was my girl and my kind of girlsoul” (83) and he tells her that. Lurie notes Kerouac’s “near-crippling shyness and… very emotional openness” (40). It becomes more clear that their relationship is authentic when they fight and then make up. Both of them have expressed a wide range of emotion; shyness, closeness, suspicion, joy, jealousy, unfounded anger, apology and forgiveness, and love. Sal steps right into her life and assimilates to her culture: “they thought I was a Mexican. And in a way I am” (63). He even remarks of her brother “I loved that wild Rickey” (64). Within days of their meeting Sal has made a home with Terry. The eagerness with which Kerouac does this is due to his “emotional openness” and “despondency and sense of alienation” (Lurie, 40). Sal’s assimilation was also an exploit of primitivism one he repeats later in the story when he travels to Mexico City to be among the underclass. “In Kerouac’s Spenglerian vision, Mexicans were primal, earth people,” says Campbell, and “ ‘they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it’ “ (213). Kerouac’s descriptions of the foreigners he encountered are not very informative of their customs and cultural development. But they do reveal his emotional and social longing to find a place where he belongs, a “true home,” and people that he belongs with. These two things are his original expression of himself, just like the jazz player’s melody.

Sal’s relationship with Terry is important for him because he did it by himself, without his pal Dean that he was always following around. Sal certainly admires Dean and thinks of him as “the holy goof” (121). But their friendship’s authenticity is questionable in the moment that Dean leaves him when he is sick with dysentery in Mexico.

Sal also seeks authenticity through music, specifically, the bop of the 50’s that was played mainly by blacks. Sal’s embrace of bop is another example of his cultural adoption. The social and spiritual connection he is looking for is shown in this excerpt from the passage about the Negro tenorman: “his mouth quivered, he looked at us, Dean and me, with an expression that seemed to say, Hey now, what’s this thing we’re all doing in this sad brown world?” (199). While we don’t know much more about their culture after reading his accounts of digging black jazz musicians, Jack’s love for bop reveals his passion for art as original and spontaneous creation. This is enlightening in regard to the style of his writing, which reads like “a jazz musician wailing on his horn during an onstage improvisation” (Lurie). Beat scholar Ann Charters is cited in Lurie’s article as categorizing Kerouac’s books as “confessional picaresque memoirs” (39). Through his writing, Kerouac wanted to capture the energy of the musicians and their music, make its sounds and engage the reader. He opposed the editing process because it detracted from the authenticity of the experience (once the horn player blows his notes he cannot get them back). Lurie notes that to Kerouac, “revision was tantamount to lying in the confessional “ (40) and detracts from the emotional truth of the novel. He concludes, “it is the spontaneity and the emotional truth of (Kerouac’s) books, more than anything else, that continue to speak to readers” (40).

What was Jack’s purpose in going back and forth across the country like a maniac? Why did he bounce from one place to the other, hardly stopping in between? How does he hope to find authenticity by traveling? It is a part of the beatnik lifestyle; only thinking about “getting his kicks,” uncorrupted by “hang-ups”, things that influence the people in mainstream America, what they worry about, and the reason they don’t have emotional truth anymore. An important example of his love of the road is

The purpose of anthropology is to learn of the development of other cultures and their customs. The reflexive property present in “On the Road” caused by Kerouac’s footprint does not make the novel a failure, however. Largely because On the Road is “far more successful than the average ethnography at grabbing the reader’s attention,” Campbell cites the influence of Writing Culture in convincing anthropologists that “ethnographic representation is a textual, literary activity” (224). Indeed, the title itself conveys the merger of literature and anthropology. He suggests that Kerouac’s accomplishment of engaging the reader is a welcome feature in “hyper-professionalized and often dull” American anthropology today (224). “In that sense, Kerouac’s writings about Mexico are perhaps more important for what they say about United States culture than about Mexico” (Campbell 214). Kerouac’s motive was to spread the word about the Beat movement. He would have

been glad to know that the Beat movement was recognized for something more than its dissidence.

Works CitedLurie, Robert Dean. “The conservative Kerouac: Beat novelist, Catholic,

Republican—do you know Jack?” The American Conservative 11.9(2012): 38+. Academic OneFile. Web. 27 June 2015.

Campbell, Howard. “Beat Mexico.” Critique of Anthropology June 2003 vol. 23 no. 2 209-230. Sage Journal. Web. 27 June 2015.