Why frat boys love Kerouac's On the Road

Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road hasn't aged well, and now resembles the old hippie uncle you run into at family reunions. He still spouts revolutionary slogans and wears his few remaining hairs in a long ponytail. But instead of feeling cutting edge, his dress and manner come across as a sad attempt to reclaim a misplaced youth. The truth is aging hipsters--and the aging books once aimed at the hip--are rarely ever that.

This doesn't mean On the Road wasn't influential. Without it there would be no American road trip genre in either literature or film (think Easy Rider and Thelma and Louise). But the book's racism and inane plot--go forth and rebel through drinks and drugs and prostitutes, and by going south to Mexico to do such things--makes reading the book painful. Add in how the prose which so shocked 1950's sensibilities is now laughable to read, and you have a book which fails to measure up to most of its fellow literary classics.

I understand my view is likely the minority among readers and critics. Still, I decided to blog about this after receiving an email the other day from a friend.

My friend, a writer who teaches at a respected university, was at a small party and casually mentioned his love of On the Road. As if on cue, a drunken frat boy chimed and said, "That's my favorite novel." Several of his drunk friends nodded. "Last time we went to Cancun, it was like we lived the book."

My friend said it felt like his world collapsed. As if he'd been suddenly confronted with absolute proof that someone had desecrated the shrine of his literary god. He babbled how he was pretty sure On the Road wasn't set in Cancun, at which point the frat boys wandered off in search of more drunken Kerouac-esque adventures.

I'm sure if Jack Kerouac was still alive, he'd need some serious drinks and drugs and sex to deal with the readers who are now so in love with his book.

Comments

[J, Kupetz]

Your review criticizes the novel on some interesting grounds: I'm not sure that the "plot" of the novel--granting that novels must have plots, which I am not sure we should grant--is as you describe ("go forth and rebel through drinks and drugs and prostitutes"). Throughout the text, in fact, characters continue to ask them "What are you doing?" and "What is the point?" To Sal Paradise, who claims that their only noble function is "to move," his own answers become increasingly unsatisfactory: he is not trying to rebel, but he is trying to find meaning; the novel captures the de-centered search, the near-impossibility of finding meaning in a post-war age, and it ends with a marriage, a move toward conventional stability, a gesture that contrasts Sal and Dean.

Any sloganeering for rebellion is imposed on Kerouac; it does not originate with him. Skim his letters and interviews for about 10 minutes and this will become obvious, even if a careful reading of OtR doesn't reveal it.

Funny, as we haul Kerouac into the academy we often try to reframe him, forgetting that his constituency was the academy and the reader outside it; moreover, we often "forget" how, for those of us who read OtR when we were young, our initial love of the book has changed, that we no longer see the primacy of our first reading when we return to the text.

Thus, your friend's "frat boys": Sal and Dean describe Mexico as a dreamland (problematically, absolutely), a place where they could live without worry from the cops, a place where they smoke the biggest "bomber" joints they've ever seen, and where they slept with women whom they considered to be the most beautiful. From the perspective of most college students, I'd grant, sounds like a pretty good spring break.

I wonder how Kerouac would feel, precisely, to know a university professor was bummed out because a couple of American kids "misread" his book in the eyes of the university? Mixed, at best. Yes, he wanted to be accepted and recognized by both, but he had a grave distrust of the university. Now that his fans walk many of those halls, his work has entered interesting times.

Part of the problem with this review, in my opinion, is the inaccurate cultural legacy, a myth-making that this very review participates in, one that prestructures a reader's encounter with the text. In fact, OtR is a book most people think they "know," even if they've not read--kind of like Darwin's Origin: we all "know" the theory of evolution, but how many of us bother to read what Darwin actually wrote?

If more people read Road without thinking they already knew what it was "about," they would be greatly surprised, I suspect: they wouldn't criticize it for not finding what is not really in it, and they might discover something they never knew was there.

[Jason Sanford]

Very interesting comment. While I don't agree with everything you say, you are correct about OtR being a book most people think they know when they really don't. And of course no one should take my opinion as any type of final word on the subject. People should read the book and decide for themselves.

[Michele Emrath]

I think we could all find a "lesser" brain who thinks they understand our favorite book or genre. This doesn't make it any less relevant or important, but it does take away some of the gleam.

Very interesting post.

Michele
SouthernCityMysteries