Romanticism and Modernism as Strange Bedfellows: A Fresh Look at Jack Kerouac's On the Road
Romanticism and Modernism as Strange Bedfellows: A Fresh Look of Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven! O time
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law and statute, took at once
The attraction of a Country in Romance! The Prelude—William Wordsworth
(Come in under the shadow of this rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening striding to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. The Waste Land—T. S. Eliot On 2 April 1951, in a loft in New York City, Jack Kerouac fed 120 feet of Japanese drawing paper into his typewriter, and for the next 20 days or so, began typing up his “road” notes from a series of notebooks that documented his travels across the United States and Mexico. These notes were compiled and fictionalized into a bildungsroman tale of two young men who were searching the back roads, tiny hamlets and big cities of post-World War II America. This became the critically acclaimed novel, On the Road. At the center are two young men, Sal Paradise (Kerouac), a college student, and an unpublished writer from New Jersey, and Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), a philosophizing, womanizer-car-thief from Colorado who wants to become a writer under the tutelage of Paradise. Kerouac’s novel has been described as his love letter to America. Critics have hailed it as the definitive work of the Beat Generation earning it the distinction as one of the 100 best English-speaking novels of the 20th century according to the Modern Library. Through the process of writing the novel, from notebook to scroll, to the ultimate published version, Kerouac found his voice in a new way he had never experienced before.1 Though Kerouac’s novel germinates from a romantic seed, it also has a definite modernistic counterpart dwelling within it. A number of critics at the
On the Road Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven! O time
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law and statute, took at once
The attraction of a Country in Romance! The Prelude—William Wordsworth
(Come in under the shadow of this rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening striding to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. The Waste Land—T. S. Eliot On 2 April 1951, in a loft in New York City, Jack Kerouac fed 120 feet of Japanese drawing paper into his typewriter, and for the next 20 days or so, began typing up his “road” notes from a series of notebooks that documented his travels across the United States and Mexico. These notes were compiled and fictionalized into a bildungsroman tale of two young men who were searching the back roads, tiny hamlets and big cities of post-World War II America. This became the critically acclaimed novel, On the Road. At the center are two young men, Sal Paradise (Kerouac), a college student, and an unpublished writer from New Jersey, and Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), a philosophizing, womanizer-car-thief from Colorado who wants to become a writer under the tutelage of Paradise. Kerouac’s novel has been described as his love letter to America. Critics have hailed it as the definitive work of the Beat Generation earning it the distinction as one of the 100 best English-speaking novels of the 20th century according to the Modern Library. Through the process of writing the novel, from notebook to scroll, to the ultimate published version, Kerouac found his voice in a new way he had never experienced before.1 Though Kerouac’s novel germinates from a romantic seed, it also has a definite modernistic counterpart dwelling within it. A number of critics at the
Cited: Charters, Ann, ed. The Portable Jack Kerouac. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. Print. Charters, Ann. Ed. Jack Kerouac Selected Letters 1957-1969. New York: Penguin Books. 1999. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. Print. Hrebeniak, Michael. Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois Press, 2006 Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin Books. 1991. Print. Road. Eds. Hilary Holladay and Robert Holton. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009 Leland, John. Why Kerouac Matters. The Lessons of On the Road. (They’re Not What You Think.) New York: Viking, 2007 Kerouac’s On the Road. Eds. Hilary Holladay and Robert Holton. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009 Maher Jr., Paul, ed. Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005 Chelsea House. 2004. Print. Roth, John K Writers Who Define the American Experience. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1995. Print. Chelsea House, 2004. Print. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. Print. Wordsworth, William. William Wordsworth’s Collected Poems. Ed. Stephen Gill London: Penguin Books, 2004