Jack Kerouac as Social Critic, Research Paper Example

The image of the writer as a social critic suggests a specific utilization of the literary genre. The author’s commitment is not only to the aesthetic properties of literature: the author applies the written word to advance a radical critique of society and a dominant form of ideology. The American writer Jack Kerouac may be considered as representative of this particularly modality of the author, insofar as Kerouac’s prose includes both a criticism of and a resistance to the dominant ideology within which his narratives take place. In this regard, the uniqueness of Kerouac can be located in his particular technique of social criticism: Kerouac proceeds by implanting his characters directly within such a dominant ideology, offering both a polemic and a way out. That is, Kerouac does not only present a critique, but also demonstrates a possible alternative to his object of criticism. To understand Kerouac’s fundamental gesture of social criticism, what is required is to grasp the precise ideology he opposes. Kerouac’s literature is carefully situated within the American ideology of his time period, an ideology that engenders a society that suppresses individuality while promoting conformity. As such, the main antagonist of Kerouac’s work can be understood as his particular conception of modernity. This modernity, for Kerouac, creates the feeling of alienation in his protagonists; this modernity emphasizes the notion of a goal-oriented culture. The crucial decision of his protagonists is to live a certain nomadic life within this very modernity, in the attempt to secure meaning in a world that is deemed meaningless. Kerouac’s various emphases on alternative lifestyles and the break from the mainstream suggests his critical desire to present the thesis that another life is possible, and moreover, that this other life is in fact necessary, to the extent that modernity has rendered life meaningless. Thus, Kerouac’s narratives present to the reader a criticism of the American social construct, while also offering the reader a potential escape. The following essay intends to analyze how Kerouac creates his specific form of social critique through a reading of two of his main novels: On the Road and The Dharma Bums. In the case of the first text, Kerouac takes the conventional American imagery of the road journey and turns it into something unconventional. The second text demonstrates Kerouac’s investigations of Eastern philosophy, and thus the attempt to oppose a modernity that stresses a goal-oriented culture. Both of these texts demonstrate that Kerouac’s singular form of social criticism stresses a simultaneous critique of modernity and the location of sites of resistance to this same modernity.

Insofar as the primary antagonist of Kerouac’s work may be said to be modernity, this antagonist is thus not an individual, but rather an ideology and a social construct. Whereas the term modernity is notoriously difficult to define according to its ubiquity, it is nevertheless possible to isolate Kerouac’s identification of what such modernity entails, his criticism of it, and his proposed resolution or way out. Accordingly, a crucial question in the reading of Kerouac as a social critic is the following: what does modernity mean for Kerouac? Kerouac, as an American writer of the mid-twentieth century, opposes a distinctly post-Second World War American vision of modernity. In the context of a discussion of Kerouac and other writers of the Beat Generation, Michael Gellert notes that these writers and artists understood modernity and the resistance to modernity as “the vehement rejection of middle-class life and values, the reverence for nature at the expense of sophisticated technological pursuits and the stress on enhancing one’s consciousness.” (129) Accordingly, modernity thus defined is an ideology of conformity, both on social and technological levels. The technological level displaces the role of the individual, as the increasing technologization of life results in the image of the individual as merely an appendage to the machine: technology suggests a process of dehumanization. Instead of the notion of technology as liberating force, for Kerouac and the Beat writers, technology becomes a tool of oppression, since individuality becomes sacrificed. On the social level, modernity’s emphasis on middle-class life and values suggests an ideological type of conformity that delineates the normativities of existence. In other words, what is considered to be normal is the assimilation to one particular lifestyle. It is the homogeneity of this lifestyle that represses the possibilities of individual expression, since American modernity only stresses one set of values as ideal: What is excluded is the very potential of another set of values. As Gellert notes, the emphasis on individual consciousness in Kerouac’s work is a deliberate movement against both of these levels of conformity: the individual is posited as the site of resistance to such conformity. To the extent that the social criticism of Kerouac is in its essence anti-modern, Kerouac thus opposes the anti-individualism of modernity, as expressed in the latter’s technological dehumanization and the ideological predilection towards a homogenized singular ideal form of life as given in middle class values. Through an emphasis on individuality, Kerouac therefore can both delineate what he is opposed to and how he intends to liberate himself from this oppression: the only solution to an anti-individualistic society that crushes individual consciousness is to emphatically assert one’s own consciousness and autonomy. As the creator of the term “beat”, Kerouac attempts to realize this dual aim of both criticism and resistance, as evidenced in the term beatnik itself: “The nomenclature beat was coined by Kerouac from beatific,” (Gellert 129) a term which means an “unbridled joy” or blessedness. In the assertion of an unbridled joy as the counterpoint to a modernity that is anti-individualistic, Kerouac thus maintains that such joy is not to be found in the dominant social construct. Rather, such joy can only be achieved through breaking from this same construct. The antagonism to the social system can also be viewed in the suffix –nik that is added to beatnik: this is a typical Slavonic suffix, and thus can be viewed as a deliberate provocation, as at the time of Kerouac’s writings, the USSR was involved in the Cold War with America. The beatnik of Kerouac is thus simultaneously an expression of joy within a social construct that prohibits joy, and a provocative resistance to a dominant ideology.

If such a basic antagonism influences Kerouac’s work, the precise form of Kerouac’s social criticism and his resistance to modernity is developed in accurate detail within Kerouac’s prose. From this perspective, Kerouac’s prose can be interpreted as the identification of both an enemy and a proposed strategy as to how one can break from the enemy’s hegemony. What is arguably Kerouac’s seminal work, On the Road, contains a literary and aesthetic representation of both social criticism and resistance. The thematic of the novel is a series of four cross-country road trips that Kerouac undertakes, as he recounts the various adventures that occur during such voyages. What is immediately pertinent about the novel’s theme is that it operates within a certain American literary convention: the road trip as the underlying backdrop of the story proclaims Kerouac’s continuity to a particular tradition of American genre literature. Accordingly, this repetition of convention would seem to intimate an endorsement of the very normativity Kerouac is at odds with. For example, Tim Hunt suggests that On the Road is an “echoing of earlier American texts.” (3) This “echoing” effect would place Kerouac firmly within a literary American tradition, and thus efface the image of his novels as a resistance to conformity. At the same time, however, Kerouac’s choice to partake in a particular tradition can be understood as the utilization of a conventional genre motif in order to subvert it from within: this gesture of subversion is arguably crucial to Kerouac’s particular form of social criticism. Accordingly, in Kerouac’s work, a road trip across an expansive American landscape becomes a transformation of convention with the intent of creating another potentiality for America, an America that is not necessarily overburdened by modernity. In the usage of a conventional plot tool, Kerouac thus subverts a genre from within, showing its suppressed possibilities. The utilization of standards becomes a tool of criticism, through simultaneously showing the convention and demonstrating an alternative to this same convention. This use of genre style as a form of social criticism essentially functions as a deconstruction of a standard social norm and construct, which is then re-arranged in radical new ways. This process of the deconstruction of convention asserts the possibility of an individual and subjective consciousness even in the midst of the ubiquity of such conventions.

If Kerouac thus begins from a basic literary convention only in order to deconstruct and re-arrange it, the precise form and content of On the Road completes the simultaneous desire for a break with conformity and an assertion of autonomy. In regards to form, the legends that have grown around Kerouac’s work are heavily related to his techniques of composition. As Howard Cunnell recounts the writing of On the Road: “Kerouac was high on Benzedrine…and he wrote it all in three weeks on a long roll of Teletype paper, no punctuation.” (1) Kerouac thus sought to avert convention even in the very composition of his novel. The utilization of drugs suggests Kerouac’s attempt to achieve a different level of consciousness when producing the work, one that would secure the individuality of the work itself. Furthermore, the frenzied pace of composition implies the desire to subvert the image of the author as a meticulous producer of literature. The speed of Kerouac’s writing emphasizes an inclination to “live in the moment” and record this spontaneous life in text. The avoidance of punctuation repeats Kerouac’s desire for novelty, insofar as it indicates a decision to subvert the literary form from within, according to a resistance to convention. Moreover, in a further tactic against modernity, Kerouac frees himself from the notion that technology renders the individual an appendage to the machine– Kerouac uses the Teletype in a radical manner, which makes the machine subject to his own demands, as he scoffs at the machine’s conventional utilization. The form of On the Road itself can thus be viewed as a form of social criticism. Kerouac’s revolutionary compositional techniques suggest that he thought that a new style of composition needed to be created, since traditional styles would only be repetitions and products of the very social order he wished to break from. Kerouac is therefore uncompromising in his commitment to a wholly individualistic expression of his artistic work, all the way down the details of how a literary text is composed.

The content of On the Road supports this same idea of Kerouac as a social critic. Throughout the work, Kerouac explores the excluded elements of society, which are thus the excluded elements of modernity. Kerouac’s journey in On the Road can be read as an attempt to spontaneously discover sites and people that are heterogeneous to society and modernity. The documentation of these sites and people shows that there is an alternative to the ideological hegemony of modernity and the loss of individuality: individual expressions are still possible within an ideological and social climate that seems to discourage such individuality. But this individuality can only be realized through a furious and spontaneous action, similar to Kerouac’s composition of On The Road: such individuality must be affirmed, if it is not to be lost. The journey that constitutes On the Road is in itself already such an affirmation. As Omar Shwartz writes, “When Kerouac writes that he is going ‘on the road,’ he does not mean that he is driving to St. Louis. Destinations are not important. Rather, the “road” represents an odyssey; it itself is a drama.” (106) The lack of destination means the expression of a radical individualism. The point of travel in Kerouac is not the destination as conceived in terms of some goal. The notion of a goal, which evokes utilitarianism, only repeats the very technological and social aspects of modernity that Kerouac resists. The notion of a goal or purpose mimics the functioning of the machine with its preprogrammed task and function; a goal repeats the middle class values of an ideal life in the suburbs. By not asserting a goal in his travels, Kerouac moves against the notion of a pre-planned existence. He is directly opposed to anything that will infringe on his autonomy. Through his portrayal of the journey of On the Road as a journey without destination, Kerouac thus criticizes the societal order of modernity that maintains goals are necessary to existence. The most critical gesture one can make in this regard is thus to lead a goalless existence. The journey of On the Road does not have a destination, but is rather only a point of departure: this point of departure is a departure from the society Kerouac wishes to leave behind. Accordingly, what is crucial is to remain on the road, which for Kerouac means the continued affirmation of autonomy. Moreover, it is important to affirm one’s solidarity with those who also are outsiders, showing the possibility of a greater resistance. As Kerouac writes: “In Oakland I had a beer among the bums of a saloon with a wagon wheel in front of it, and I was on the road again.” (“On the Road” 189) Kerouac drinks with those who have already been excluded from society, and in their company asserts his feelings of alienation and exclusion. What is prescient for Kerouac is to document these zones of exclusion, to map one’s position within them. In this passage, Kerouac’s social criticism thus takes the form of a certain fidelity to the rejects of society. By documenting his encounters with them, Kerouac asserts his fealty to a life that is different from the social norm, while also sharing in a common feeling of alienation. In this regard, alcohol is a means by which to remove oneself from convention, to seek out a different type of consciousness that is not determined by societal norms: alcohol becomes a criticism of social meaning through the rejection of the social meanings that inform standard roles of consciousness.

If such a general rejection of societal normativities becomes clear in On the Road, a novel such as The Dharma Bums can be seen as an attempt to crystallize what individual consciousness and autonomy means for Kerouac. The title of The Dharma Bums clearly references Buddhist culture: accordingly, Kerouac seems to endorse the view that meaning can be found in tradition and in conventions. However, such a tradition must be a tradition that is anti-modern: it cannot be a tradition that evokes the perpetuation of technology and social values. It cannot be a tradition that emphasizes the notion of a goal. The proper tradition for Kerouac is one that would correspond to his endorsement of a radical individuality and the autonomy of subjective consciousness. Accordingly, the Buddhist engagement in Kerouac’s texts is the realization of such existential decisions, insofar as Buddhism is a religion that is precisely concerned with individual consciousness. One of the key Buddhist motifs referenced in Kerouac’s novel is that of nirvana, which corresponds to enlightenment and heaven. Yet Kerouac’s nirvana is precisely not a goal. Kerouac writes: “I went in the kitchen and got a banana and came out and said, “Well, I’ll tell you what nirvana is.” “What?” I ate the banana and threw the peel away and said nothing. “That’s the banana sermon.” (“Dharma Bums” 51) While at first glance the Buddhist notion of nirvana may suggest a goal to be obtained, for Kerouac, it is rather the absence of any goal whatsoever. In this regard, nirvana can be seen as liberating oneself from the very need for a goal: this is the crucial moment in the assertion of one’s individual autonomy. Such a definition of nirvana expresses both Kerouac’s criticism of American modernity and a way out of this modernity: Kerouac implies that it is the very presupposition that an individual needs some goal in life which leads to modernity. That is to say, modernity develops normativities such as technology and middle class values because it believes that human beings need a goal in their lives, instead of realizing that life is already its own goal. Kerouac’s references to Buddhism in The Dharma Bums can thus be viewed as an attempt to criticize the very goal oriented nature of American society and modernity.

Accordingly, the exploration of Buddhism and consciousness in The Dharma Bums is an exploration without goal, much like Kerouac’s journey without a destination in On the Road. It is the exploration or journey that is the point, which means that Kerouac places a value on existence itself, without any construction of artificial goals. This idea is present in a passage from The Dharma Bums about haiku poetry, as told by the narrator’s companion Japhy: “A real haiku’s gotta be as simple as porridge and yet make you see the real thing, like the greatest haiku of them all probably is the one that goes ‘the sparrow hops along the veranda, with wet feet.’ By Shiki. You see the wet footprints like a vision in your mind and yet in those few words you also see all the rain that’s been falling that day and almost smell the wet pine needles.” (47) The importance of the haiku corresponds to the non-goal oriented exploration of consciousness, as a scene involving a bird becomes the goal of the haiku itself. The haiku therefore does not contain any exterior message or point: rather, what is crucial to the poem is precisely the scene itself and its various components. The haiku emphasizes that the lived experience of existence in itself is what of true significance. Accordingly, Kerouac once again critiques modernity in terms of the latter’s rejection of existence as already meaningful in itself. The modernity that Kerouac opposes would classify the bird and the pine needles according to their species and their genus; modernity would make a weather projection as to when the next rainfall will occur. The value Kerouac sees in Asian thought is that it confers a crucial importance to the moment itself. This is thus consistent with the individuality that Kerouac emphasizes, as moments of individual experience, subjectivity and life, become the goal that is not a goal. The focus on seemingly mundane moments of life turns into a radical affirmation of individual consciousness and existence. It is precisely such a focus that is excluded from the modernity Kerouac opposes.

Kerouac’s particular form of social criticism is thus based on the antagonism between a dominant ideology that is incompatible with what he values in life. By presenting alternatives to modernity, such as Buddhism or the road trip without destination, Kerouac asserts his dissatisfaction with the normativities of existence that are viewed as pertinent to the American culture of his time period, while also presenting a means to overcome such a social construct. A modernity that is constituted by technology, goals and the assertion of values immediately alienates those who do not conform to this same vision of existence. Kerouac deliberately departs from this life of modernity: this is his gesture of radical criticism, as merely going “on the road” already signifies a break with the dominant paradigm of modernity. Kerouac attempts to chronicle the sites of resistance to such modernity through the documentation of alternatives to modernity. These sites of resistance are places, people and concepts that are of no use to modernity, from the pointlessness of alcoholism to the exploration of Eastern cultures that bear an entirely different system of values. Hence, while Kerouac is an explorer of everything that lays at the margins of his own American culture, this exploration is itself the goal of the process: every experience is viewed as an assertion of the fundamental commitment to an individual consciousness and a rejection of the social realm that inhibits this same consciousness. Kerouac is not a social critic in the style of merely listing the negativities of society: what is crucial to Kerouac’s social criticism is to always demonstrate an alternative to the very society one may oppose.

Works Cited

Cunnell, Howard. Fast This Time: Jack Kerouac and the Writing of On the Road. On the Road: The Original Scroll. London: Penguin, 2007. pp. 1-35. Print.

Gellert, Michael. The Fate of America: An Inquiry into National Character. Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 2002. Print.

Hunt, Tim. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: The Development of a Fiction. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press, 2010. Print.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1997. Print.

Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Print.

Swartz, Omar. The View from On the Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press, 2010. Print.