On the Road…Again
Nine days ago (March 12), Beat writer Jack Kerouac would have turned ninety-six had he not drunk himself into oblivion back in 1969. Every year on that date, Kerouac afictionados gather at the Flamingo Sports Bar in St. Petersburg, Florida, to celebrate or commiserate about his life and his writings while having a “shot and a wash” (whiskey and a plastic cup of beer). They also speak about the activities of Jack’s ghost, which does things like cause all the Kerouac novels lodging on a shelf at the Flamingo to taking a flying leap for the sky and end up on the floor.
The author of The New Yorker article that brings this all to light, Amanda Petrusich, admits to being embarrassed to liking Kerouac. On the Road, she notes, is “not a particularly enlightening book.” The women in it “are largely unrecognizable as human” and “to say that Kerouac was inelegant about matters of race is generous.” Still, Amanda reveals, she is “cowed by the rhythm and elegance of Jack’s prose, how he taps into the wild energy of adolescent wanting.” Then she offers this example:
…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, 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 centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”
Reading this reminded me of my way-back days teaching college composition classes. For one, I used an excerpt from On the Road to demonstrate onomatopoeia, a word no one will ever pronounce correctly without diligent practice. This term applies to words that phonetically imitate or suggest the sound they describe. Oink, for example, or meow or chirp. Kerouac managed to create onomatopoeian sentences and paragraphs. In one example, the one I used in class, he captured car wheels racing across a concrete highway. Of course, I can’t find the passage now, but I remember how the rhythm of the sentences read aloud, where the accents fell, sounded, if you ignored the meanings and just listened to the resonance, like the alternating hum and click of tires hitting expansion cracks as they rolled over twenty-foot sections of Portland cement.
Onomatopoeia exists, if you believe the BowWow Theory, because language originated in imitations of natural sounds such as those of birds, dogs, and thunder. One of the early subscribers to this concept was philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who also may have created the first romance novel in Julie, or the New Heloise, as you can tell from the opening line: “I must flee you, Mademoiselle, that I can see: I should not have waited nearly so long, or rather it were better never to have laid eyes on you.” Fellow philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called this book one of the four greatest novels of all time. I wonder if it had the same effect on its readers as Kerouac’s On the Road did on his.
Jack had a house in St. Petersburg. Petrusich describes how she leaves the “birthday” party at the Flamingo, gets a cheeseburger and onion rings, and then parks across the street from Kerouac’s former abode to eat them.
Is this weird? I thought, dragging an onion ring through ketchup. For whatever reason, it felt good to sit there, looking at the house. The books we read as teen-agers — the ones that get inside us and rearrange things — are sacred, even when they are plainly imperfect.
Weird? Perhaps. But it does illustrate how, to steal from a fairy-tale character in a much-overplayed TV commercial, “words have consequences.” I tried to remember what I read in my long-ago teenage years. Sadly, I can’t recall any book that got inside and rearranged things. Stranger in a Strange Land, which starts out like a fairy tale with “Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith,” might have been a candidate, but my memory of it is dim and reading it again would likely be disappointing, as are most attempts to recreate the past. On the plus side, though, this means I can still look forward to having my psyche prosefinitively reshuffled. Maybe it’s time to take another shot at plowing through Gravity’s Rainbow. Then again…maybe not.
