The Big Green House

Thursday, September 18, 2003

 

Off the road and into the ditch

OK, I think I�m over that little speed bump I was stuck on for the last couple of days. I was very definitely not in a frame of mind conducive to writing, but it seems to be passing. In celebration, let�s rip the shit out of a beloved American classic, shall we?

Jack Kerouac�s On The Road has been one of the templates for Hipster America since its publication back in 1957. Ever since I was a wee lad I�ve been told what a great book it is.

I�ve been picking it up, off and on, for something like twenty-five years now. Usually what happens is I read a few chapters in and throw it across the room in contempt. I made myself stick with it this time, finishing the last chapter before work today. My opinion: pretty much an unmitigated turd of a book. It�s a virtually plotless travelogue detailing the cross-country wanderings of some of the most selfish, self-centered parasites ever. I have no idea what Neal Cassidy was like in real life; his alter ego Dean Moriarty, the focus of the book, is a borderline-psychopathic prick with all the attention span and sense of responsibility of a jackrabbit. A real shitheel, in other words. Kerouac�s character, Sal Paradise, comes off a little better, if only because he doesn�t knock-up and abandon women on both coasts, as Moriarty does � he just follows Moriarty around and moons over him.

As Science Girl pointed out the other day, the book takes place in an adolescent fantasy world.(I�m paraphrasing, unfortunately, since neither of us could recall precisely what she�d said. Rest assured that it was full of her usual deadly accuracy.) Actions have no repercussions, and the hedonistic pursuit of �kicks� is everything. Need food? Steal it from the mom & pop grocer too busy having dinner to hear you sneaking into the store. Need money? Sponge it off your aunt. Girlfriend nags you about living in rags without enough food? Smack her, dump her and leave town. The Mexican whore you just paid a dollar for turns out to be fifteen years old? Bonus!

Women in this brave new hipster world exist only to fuck or to cook. If they�re not occupied with either of those activities, they�re expected to sit quietly and wait until they�re needed. All Negroes, aka �colored people�, are noble savages, bopping through their blues and exuding untouchable coolness at all times. Which is a step up from their non-existence (or worse) in most fiction of the time, I suppose, but such Romantic crap is still incredibly condescending. They�re still being treated as non-human. African Americans are just as capable of being uptight and clueless as anyone else.

Mexicans get similar treatment. The scene in which Moriarty, Paradise, et al, pull into a small Mexican town, effortlessly befriend a local hustler, and score copious weed and cheap teenaged whores made me wonder how many hipster pendejos read that and went off in search of similar experiences, only to be ripped off. If they were lucky.

Asians, on the other hand, are exotic and inscrutable; the measure of wildness of one party described early on is that there was even a �Chinese girl� in attendance. Gosh! Imagine that!

All that is sorta beside the point, though. You can�t really separate the writer from the time in which he wrote. Kerouac was writing during a time of button-down conformity, when anything out of the Caucasian norm was automatically sick, pitiful, and/or wrong. (Not unlike today, in some ways.) He�s not much more racist or sexist than most other Beats I�ve read. And, to his credit, Kerouac was remarkably tolerant of homosexuals, given those times.

So, what about the writing itself? Well, I�m gonna have to side with Truman Capote on this one: it didn�t strike me as writing so much as it did typing. There�s not much plot to speak of. A multitude of characters float in and out of the narrative, most of which never develop beyond a stereotype. Those who do are generally creeps and jerks. Metaphors and similes are very much of a hit or miss nature, and far too many of them missed for my taste. (I haven�t read any of Kerouac�s other pieces, so I don�t really have anything to compare to his work here. Maybe he was just trying too hard.)

A lot of people have gotten a lot out of On The Road over the years, some of whom I respect a great deal, so it may well be that I�m way off base on this. I dunno. Maybe it�s too much of its time for me to tune into at this late date. Or maybe I�m just too old to be reading it now. I�ve gotta say, though, I�ve had the same problems with it since I first picked it up in my twenties.

So it could boil down to my being just too stupid to get it. That�s as may be, but my gut says that if this was indeed one of the blueprints for Hipster America, it�s no wonder so many hipsters are such assholes.

bmarkey 9/18/2003 10:33:00 PM