Beat Generation. On the Road Jack Kerouac - Research Paper Example

?Introduction The beat generation has been described as “the most influential cultural and political countermovement of the 20th century America” (Wagner, 5). The possibilities of living outside the ‘normal’ life provided the beat generation writers with their ultimate exotica (Wagner, 10). This ‘other’ life was personified through physical and spiritual expressions like drugs, madness, holiness, music, culture and sexuality. To put the ethos and aesthetics of the beat generation in a single sentence, they “sought knowledge through experience, especially experience from the underside of life” (Wagner, 12). The works of these authors had an “unstructured style and unconventional language, (meant) to convey their opposition to the cultural and aesthetic standards of previous generations” (Wagner, 14). Their writing style has been found as being influenced by the “popular jazz and bebop music of the times” (Wagner, 38). The key emotion which is associated with this group could be termed as ““beatness” or “weariness” with the world” (Wagner, 36). This paper envisages finding out how the elements of beat generation that Kerouac used in his novel, On the Road, influenced the culture, reader/audience, and ‘story’ in the period in which the novel was published and how it continues to affect present literature. It is hypothesized that this novel, through its beat elements, gave a new perspective about culture, influenced the reader/audience by imbibing in them a yearning to be free from social conventions and experiment with new ways of living, and affected the ‘story’ in such a way that matters thought hitherto unspeakable in literature were accepted as themes and topics. It is by analyzing and comparing existing literature on the topic that this paper seeks to carry out this exercise. Review of Literature Culture Weinreich has reminded that once beat became popular, the beat generation was not limited to poetry or literature but to everything else as well (263). The “beatniks” had become “cultural icons” (Weinreich, 264). Tamony has observed that the word ‘beat’ began to be used in “musical circles” in the same year when the ‘Bible of beat generation’, “On the Road”, was published (276). Even the legendary name, Beatles, had emerged from the concept of “beat” (Weinreich, 264). There was even “a recipe for majoun, a marijuana jam which the Beats used to high literary purpose in their Tangier outpost” (Weinreich, 265). In this manner, the authors and critics (Tamony; Weinreich) who studied the beat generation and the book, “On the Road”, have found that beat inflicted all walks of life, thereby getting absorbed into the culture and even when the movement subsided, some remnants of beat remained in the culture. Reader/Audience “On the Road” depicts types of behaviors objectionable in the view of mainstream society, like, “stealing, heavy drinking, drug use, and sexual promiscuity” as adventures that do not necessarily demand any judgment (Wagner, 43). The book was criticized as embodiment of the “moral demise of a generation” but was also overwhelmingly received by America as a literary turning point (Wagner, 41). This novel was an outcome of a cross-country trip that Jack Kerouac made along with his friend, Neal Cassady (Wagner, 39). The protagonists in the novel are seen indulging in all the objectionable behaviors mentioned above and also live a care free life drenched in music and ecstasy imparted by drug and alcohol use (Kerouac). Jack Kerouac also had his own battles to fight to cope with the problem of alcoholism (Wagner, 43). In Kerouac’ own words, the impact on the reader/audience of this beat lifestyle presented in literature and music was that: Postwar youth emerged cool and beat, had picked up the gestures and the style; soon it was everywhere, the new look.. . the bop visions became common property of the commercial, popular cultural world .... The ingestion of drugs became official (tranquilizers and the rest); and even the clothes style of the beat hipsters carried over to the new rock 'n' roll youth... and the Beat Generation, though dead, was resurrected and justified (qtd. In Wagner, 48). A whole generation experienced alienation from the culture to which they were born to as is described by Kerouac in “On the Road”: I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was- I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, (…) I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost (17). This was the very same feeling that made the beat generation go exploring how one should live. This same feeling was what made them experiment with drugs, madness, holiness, music, culture and sexuality so that they can feel real instead of being an ethereal being in a world haunted by violence, exercise of power and inequalities that threaten human freedom. The protagonist in the book proclaims, “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 that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn” (Kerouac, 5). This spite for commonplace has been the driving force for the beat generation and it is also the theme of the book as well. The madness referred to here is the decision to break the conventional life ethos and move beyond it into the realm where the conscious meet the subconscious. The search for the final destination, the ultimate bliss starts from the very first page of the book when Sal, the narrator, talks about feeling “everything was dead” (Kerouac, 1) and continues until the end of the book, when he says: 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 to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it (402). In the post-war America, the people, especially the youth could very well relate to the emotions reflected by beat. The historical context was conducive to this: With America's dropping the atomic bomb on Japan to bring World War II to an end, and the political ramifications of the ensuing Cold War and wave of anti-communist hysteria that followed in the United States in the late 1940s and the 1950s (Wagner, 43). Certain kind and genre of music had become the permanent background score for the beat ideology and this becomes evident when Kerouac writes: And as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop has come to represent for all of us, I thought of my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing-about (87). The “tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America” was representative of a new culture that the beat generation stood for and what was being defied was the sham involved in living a civilized life (Kerouac). This is why it is sarcastically stated by the author, “Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken” (Kerouac). The readers and audiences were prone to this kind of panicking but they were also infested by the movement’s burning desire for change. The secret world inside a person that cherishes many secret desires is usually mellowed down by what is called culture and civilization, but the challenge that the beat generation puts forth was to start a countercultural movement that does not deny those wishes and instincts. Madness and music thus became the voice of that counter-culture and sex and drugs turned it into a totally inhibition-free territory. The music was always to accompany whatever was an expression of beat and sometimes it rose to such levels that it is no more music, but everything opposite to music. For example, in a “sawdust saloon with a small bandstand”, the reader finds Sal and Dean and their friends enjoying music the weirdest sort: The behatted tenor man was blowing at the peak of a wonderfully satisfactory free idea, a rising and falling riff that went from “EE-yah!” to a crazier “EE-de-lee-yah!” and blasted along to the rolling crash of butt-scarred drums hammered by a big brutal Negro with a bull-neck who didn’t give a damn about anything but punishing his busted tubs, crash, rattle-ti-boom, crash (Kerouac, 29). In this manner, the influence on the reader/audience of beat was both positive and negative- positive in the sense that it questioned social norms that inhibit freedom and propagate inequality, negative in the sense that it undermined to certain extent, the moral integrity of the society through drugs, anti-social behavior and sexual promiscuity. The ‘Story’ The moralizing social norms that create the chains that bind human freedom were out rightly negated in this novel. For example, there is a mention to sex as “the one and only holy and important thing in life” (Kerouac, 2). There is also the view being expressed that “love is a duel” that could be won at any moment by succumbing to it or by just walking away, both being same in terms of ethics and practice (Kerouac). The protagonist also is found talking about “the gun (…) (he and his friend) were trying to steal” (Kerouac, 216). Friends of the protagonist like Bill are Marijuana addicts and they are presented as normal in this behavior of drug addiction (Kerouac, 202). Sal is describing his best friend Dean and other friends as “mad” many times in the narrative (Kerouac, 1, 58, 74). Marriage, family and similar social institutions are presented as opposed to the real pursuit in life, that is, “going “mad” and pursuing “IT”” (Kerouac, 74). In this manner, the elements that usually get no entry into the ‘story’ gets entry into “On the Road”; these are the elements, sexual promiscuity, drug use/abuse, madness, anti-social behavior (Kerouac). And once these elements got an entry into the ‘story’, there was no stopping them. There came a rush of similar literature and art (Wagner). The meaning of the term, beat, is again and again explained explicitly and implicitly in “On the Road” (Kerouac). Dean, the man who indulges in all kinds of anti-social behavior described above, is presented as the personification of whatever things beat stood for (Kerouac). It is remarked about Dean that, ”he was BEAT- the root, the soul of Beatific” (Kerouac). In this way, it was proven that in a ‘story’, the quest for freedom and salvation need not necessarily be characterized by virtues alone but can be by the vices as well. The dualism of truth was accepted as a tool of literary expression. To speak the unspeakable, to do the undoable, was the challenge before the beat generation. Out of enormous tiredness, thus rose an energy that was sprouting from the inner, dark recesses of a human existence. Sal tries to travel fast so that he can gather as much experiences as possible but Dean is a master of his time (Kerouac). But to both, there is a sense of urgency that quietly tells them that they need to rush (Kerouac). This is so because life was full of extreme possibilities of experimentation and they could live them all if they travelled fast. Through these experiences, they were trying to attain “a new kind of American saint (hood)” that could undo the sins of modern life. “On the Road” is a story having been drawn entirely from the street. It is the street subculture that it personifies and when looked back from the contemporary era, the beat generation itself was the first attempt by American mainstream to have a peep into the subcultures that always existed being parallel to the mainstream. The lasting influence of beat generation on the ‘story’ has been that, “In the tradition of Dadaism and Surrealism, the Beat Generation cultivated extreme forms of artistic expression, employed radically experimental techniques, and broke the fetters of established taste, literary decorum, and legal censorship” Stephenson, 7). The “literature of the Beats” has also been observed to have a tendency to “record(…) a descent into the darkness and the depths of the psyche” (Stephenson, 8). The influence of beat generation has been summed up by Stephenson in the following words: The rejection of commercial values and of career and status; the interest in vision-inducing drugs as a mode of personal and spiritual exploration and the corresponding interest in Oriental and primitive religions; the centrality of rhythmic music and Dionysian ecstasy; the pacifist-anarchist political orientation (…); the concern with ecology (…); the emphasis on natural and primitive models of community and the idea of tribalism (…); and of course, the prevalent antirational, antitechnological, visionary, and spiritual disposition of the freaks (14). The influence on the ‘story’ was manifested as, “A new American literary idiom (…) (characterized by) aesthetic of unguarded, untrammeled expression; (…) emphasis on the personal-universal; (…) insistence on feeling and emotion; and (…) resolutely antiformalist antielitist stance” (Stephenson, 14-15). To conclude, the beat generation has imparted a new perspective about culture through its counter-cultural discourses, influenced the reader/audience by imbibing in them a yearning to be free from social conventions and to experiment with new ways of living, and affected the ‘story’ in such a way that matters thought hitherto unspeakable in literature were accepted as themes and topics and there was a radical change in style and content. Works Cited Kerouac, Jack. On the Road: The Original Scroll. London: Penguin Books Limited: 2011. Print. Tamony, Peter. “Beat Generation: Beat: Beatniks.” Western Folklore, Vol.28, No.4, pp. 274-277, October 1969. Print. Wagner, Tilman Otto. The Beat Generation in a Scholastic Analysis: Literary Hipsters and Subversive Visionaries, San Francisco: GRIN Verlag, 2011. Print. Stephenson, Gregory. The Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation, Illinois: SIU Press, 2009. Print. Weinreich, Regina, “The Beat Generation is Now about Everything.” College Literature, Vol.27, No.1, pp.263-268, Winter 2000. Print. Read More