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
sexual 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
Virgin 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 Virgin 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 dogging 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 Dick is here too.
If you look at that litany of
streets that lead down to the
water, any of you who have read
Moby Dick 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 Negro,
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
Negro?
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 Negro,
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 Negro 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.
