Inside the Whale Again

...This is the way it has been for some of us, Kerouac is saying, and he passes il on lo you without the glossing over and tidying up that distinguishes the work of most writers anxious to please a public...

...It does not matter in the least, therefore, that it is not literature or that Kerouac, again like Miller, will probably never have anything else of any interest to tell us about the human condition...

...music, not enough night...

...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...

...Add a blind groping in the whale's belly for the mystical religious experience, the moment of ecstatic perception, and you have an accurate picture of Kerouac's own position...

...This attitude to life is essentially quixotic and certainly escapist, not to say childish...

...I mean, of course, the Henry Miller of the Tropic books and Black Spring, not the tiresome poseur of the later years...

...Sal comes to Dean's defense...

...He likened him to Jonah trapped comfortably inside the whale, in "a womb big enough for an adult with yards of blubber between yourself and reality the final unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility" in which you allow yourself to be swallowed, accept and record what you undergo...

...George Orwell seizes on a metaphor Miller himself applied to the writings of Anais Nin to describe Miller's own situation...

...Briefly, On the Road records the adventures and experiences of Kerouac's narrator, Sal Paradise, and some of his friends during a number of disorganized cross-country trips, taken mostly between 1947 and 1949, all over the U.S., with one wild, closing jaunt into Mexico...

...So it is natural that he would identify himself with the Negro, who in this country, north and south, still walks mainly outside organized society in an atmosphere of prejudice and potential violence...

...Mean is an authentic prole from the Denver slums, the son of a freight-hopping wino...

...he simply submits to life, lies down under the avalanche of experience and pours out his impressions in a wild torrent of vigorous, slangy language full of imagery (not always successful) that is both intellectually and esthetically irresponsible and, therefore, curiously refreshing...

...he's alive and I'll bet you want to know what he does next and that's because he's got the secret that we're all busting to find and it's splitting his head wide open and if he goes mad don't worry, it won't be your fault but the fault of God...

...Dean, in other words, is die typical hoodlum saint of our generation (the Holy Goof, Kerouac calls him), the underworld man who has discarded all accepted moralities and gods, all political and social solutions...

...And in that sense it is an important and significant book, one of the five or six published each year worth anyone's time and effort...

...because the only people for me arc the mad ones, the ones who arc mad to live, mad to talk...

...Sal not only envies Dean for having had such a hard life...

...The identification with the oppressed minority sounds at first hearing like an echo from the Thirties, but there is a huge difference: Ke-rouac does not wish to help or elevate or raise the standard of life of the lower classes...

...I know of no better way to discuss Jack Kerouac's novel than by comparing him at once to Henry Miller, the writer he most closely resembles —not so much in technique or subject matter, though here, too, Miller paved the way, as in philosophic outlook...

...But then they danced down the streets like dinglcdodies...

...In his essay on Miller...

...The young men (they are almost all in their twenties) travel back and forth on hardly any money in second-hand cars, cheap buses or the backs of trucks, sometimes by ferrying automobiles from one city to another, sometimes by hitchhiking...

...They talk a good deal, not very coherently, and seek out everything life has to offer in the way of immediate experience: "They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank...

...and I shambled after as I've been doing all m\ life after people who interest me...

...It is directly in line with the continuing breakdown of belief in such familiar traditional American concepts as liberal Christianity, social progress, faith in democratic institutions and so on...

...he wants to sink himself into their mire, to bury himself into the lowest stratum of society, where he hopes to find the freedom to feel, to see, to be human in the most essential primitive sense, to avoid the emotional blocks of a middle-class social structure still resting hypocritically for moral support on long-discredited premises and ideas...

...In between they settle for short, frantic periods in Greenwich Village, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco (their favorite oasis), almost always in bohemian surroundings, where they work briefly at menial jobs, pick up girls, live with them, even marry them, listen to jazz, attend parties incessantly, get drunk, take dope, steal from each other, betray those who trust them, and run away again when things become difficult or boring...

...all systems, all absolutes, and is seeking in the ecstasy of pure feeling and experience a new clue to the riddle of the Universe...

...Like Miller, Kerouac is "non-political, non-educational, non-progressive, non-cooperative, non-ethical, non-literary...

...His book may strike the civilized reader as naive, juvenile, inept, absurd, even criminal—it makes no difference...

...The structural similarities are important, especially in Kerouac's use of the intensely autobiographical first-person narrative and the freedom of language, but what he and Miller have most in common is an approach to life that, for want of a better phrase, could be defined as the doctrine of acceptance...

...mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center-light pop and everybody goes 'Awww!' " The central figure of all these revels, and the one Sal Paradise admires the most, is an energetic scarecrow named Dean Moriarty, the man who breaks all the rules, pulls down all the temples, stands laughing happily amidst the carnage he has wrought: "Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness—everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being...

...Kerouac wishes to accept life, yes, a real life, not the life of the living dead glued to their dull jobs, hobbies, newspapers and television screens...

...Though there is some poetic imagery and vigor in the writing, On the Road cannot really be evaluated on literary or sociological or any other grounds than that of the mood and movement of its time...

...He is most certainly not an artist, for that would imply a discipline and a unity of purpose which his writing does not reflect, but this book is important because it communicates directly and in a non-literary way (by which I mean an absence of artifice and subterfuge) an emotional experience of our time...

...There comes a scene in the novel when some of Dean's old buddies, speaking through the lips of a young matron who was once quite a cut-up herself, turn on him and denounce him for again abandoning his wife and child, using against him all the usually pious objections of respectable people with their flaming youth just behind them...

...he regrets the fact that he himself wasn't born a Negro or a member of some other underprivileged group: the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness...

...Parenthetically, it is also significant that whereas Sal and most of his friends are products of the middle class, college boys from nice families...