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September 01, 2007

Kerouac spent most of his life living at home with his mother....

In fact, it is the extreme banality of On the Road, combined with a glamorous aura of anarchy (in the midst of a society in which there is always enough gasoline for the anarchists to resume their journey, of course), which has made it perennially attractive to youth--an age of man always tempted by bad taste--ever since its publication. If Dean’s utterances are profound and worthy of record, then anything that any of us says is likewise profound and worthy of record; if Dean is a philosopher, we are all philosophers. In this respect, the book is like a soap opera that reassures untold millions that the day-to-day flux of their existence is not without significance, or else why would something so closely resembling it be on television?

I mentioned the banality of the book to a young man who told me that he had thought it wonderful when he had read it a few years previously. I devised a test. He would open it and point to a passage at random, and I would read the passage out loud. He would then tell me whether he thought it was banal. Here is the passage:

The drizzle increased and Eddie got cold; he had very little clothing. I fished a wool plaid shirt from my canvas bag and he put it on. I had a cold. I bought cough drops in a rickety Indian store of some kind. I went to the little two-by-four Post office and wrote my aunt a penny postcard. We went back to the gray road. There she was in front of us, Shelton, written on the watertank. The Rock Island balled by. We saw the faces of Pullman passengers go by in a blur. The train howled off across the plains in the direction of our desires. It started to rain harder.

A passage such as this, appearing in an alleged literary classic, must encourage and delude many an adolescent keeper of a diary that his entries will one day find the appreciative audience that their immanent genius deserves. The popularity of On the Road is a manifestation of the propensity in a demotic age of mediocrity to worship itself. But the young man who had so appreciated the book only a few years previously was honest enough to accept that my point was made.

Of course, it might be said that my test was an unfair one. It is possible, after all, for an artistic whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. I do not think, however, that this can really be said in the case of Kerouac’s book, and this for a very good reason: neither Sal nor Dean are very interested in anything at all apart from themselves, and even in themselves only in the shallowest, most inconsequential possible way. They travel across America four times, but they express only the most cursory interest in the people they meet, and often no interest in them at all if they cannot use them in some dishonest way or other; the history of the country does not arouse their curiosity or enthusiasm; neither do questions of politics or economics; nature, in the form of landscape, flora, and fauna, entirely escapes their notice. If On the Road is a Bildungsroman, it is one that is very short on the Bildung.
. . .
He led a tormented life, and I cannot help but feel sadness for a would-be rebel who spent most of his life, as did Kerouac, living at home with his mother. He also drank himself to a horrible death. But while it is true that most great writers were tormented souls, it does not follow that most tormented souls were great writers. To call Kerouac’s writing mediocre is to do it too much honor: its significance is sociological rather than literary. The fact that his work is now being subjected to near-biblical levels of reverential scholarship is a sign of very debased literary and academic standards.

I have seen some of the most mediocre minds of my generation destroyed by too great an interest in the Beats.

"Another side of Paradise," by Anthony Daniels, The New Criterion, September 2007

Posted at September 1, 2007 02:37 PM | Categories: Nihilism

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