Two years ago, I was sitting in a Starbucks and reading On the Road (aware, of course, of the irony of reading something with such an anti-consumerist ethos in such a sterile, corporate environment, drinking bad coffee and eating an overpriced and stale brownie), when the old man who was sitting across from me and reading from a newspaper leaned over and asked me whether I actually liked that book. When I told him I very much did and that this was actually the third time I was reading it, he seemed surprised. “I didn’t think anyone still read Kerouac anymore,” he said. He sounded at once nostalgic and melancholy.
The truth was, the old man was right: no one really read Kerouac anymore, or if they did, they did so sheepishly, maintaining a safe and ironic distance from his effusive prose and his madcap quest for authenticity and freedom, which today seems more naive than visionary. Additionally, the novel has (rightfully) been labeled problematic: not only is it vaguely sexist, with Kerouac’s main character Sal barely able to suppress his disdain for Dean’s girlfriend Marylou (one of the few named women to even appear in the novel), but it also indulges in implicit racial biases about the beauty and authenticity of non-white cultures (who Kerouac repeatedly refers to as the “fellahin,” a term for Egyptian peasants that he more loosely applies to all indigenous and “primitive” people)—after all, the novel’s climactic scene is set in Mexico, where Sal and Dean finally find the freedom and authenticity they’d been seeking for the last 300 pages:
Nothing stopped; the streets were alive all night. Beggars slept wrapped in advertising posters torn off fences. Whole families of them sat on the sidewalk, playing little flutes and chuckling in the night. Their bare feet stuck out, their dim candles burned, all Mexico was one vast Bohemian camp. On corners old women cut up the boiled heads of cows and wrapped morsels in tortillas and served them with hot sauces on newspaper napkins. This was the great and final wild uninhabited Fellahin-childlike city that we knew we would find at the end of the road. Dean walked through with his arms hanging zombie-like at his sides, his mouth open, his eyes gleaming, and conducted a ragged and holy tour that lasted till dawn in a field with a boy in a straw hat who laughed and chatted with us and wanted to play catch, for nothing ever ended.
And yet, every time I read this passage, I can’t help but be taken in by the writing. As I’ve noted before, for me beautiful, rhythmic sentences can do so much for a book, and On the Road is no exception. The prose in this passage is as alive as the streets that Kerouac describes: we can see with vivid clarity the beggars and the families and Dean and Sal stumbling with “eyes gleaming” through the crowds, while the phrase “the great and final wild uninhabited Fellahin-childlike city,” a pile of adjectives with no commas to break them apart, tumbles across the page with a delirious and uninhibited syntax. Like all good writing, the prose itself mirrors the ecstasy that the characters, the author, and the audience are all feeling.
But I think On the Road is important for more than just its prose. It’s vision of rebellion might seem dated and immature to many of us today—the idea that you can challenge the system by jumping in a car with your friends and driving around America seeking out hedonistic thrills that you imbue with a Whitmanesque mystical transcendence. But many of the oppressive systemic realities of American life that Kerouac was implicitly challenging, the conformity and materialism of the 1950s when he was writing (what Theodore Roszak would describe in his 1969 book The Making of a Counter Culture as the “technocracy”), aren’t all that different from what exists in our world today. We still have conformity and we still have materialism and we still have Roszak’s “technocracy”, only we call our version “neoliberalism” or “late capitalism.” But the underlying critique that On the Road offers still applies to us: our culture is also too suffused with materialistic and conformist desires, and perhaps as Kerouac argues the thing that will make us feel spiritually whole lies outside of these desires.
Ultimately, it helps to read On the Road as a historically specific work—that way, we can recognize its problematic elements but also take from it its essential rebellious core, just as we can appreciate a nineteenth century novel’s vision of universal humanity while at the same time acknowledging its problematic racial or class politics. A historical reading can also remind us that Sal and Dean’s quest for freedom and transcendence isn’t just the generic angsty rebellion of the young (although, let’s bear in mind that Kerouac was almost thirty when he wrote the novel—not nearly as young as his critics make him out to be) but instead a rebellion that was taking place against a particularly fraught era, when Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers ruled the country, when the Korean War was just ending and the CIA was launching coups across the third world, when white people were fleeing to the suburbs and segregation was still a reality, when the post-war economic boom had settled the country into a Don-Draper aesthetic of conformity, all while the threat of nuclear annihilation hung over everyone’s head. Read against this reality, Kerouac’s effusive prose and his quest for mystical transcendence starts to feel not just appropriate, but urgent and necessary.