Allen Ginsburg once said that Jack Kerouac “gave” his novels to the world; he certainly gained little happiness from publishing them. Kerouac’s iconic 1957 On The Road is a strange book; yet for some still ungrasped reason, I return to it over and over, despite its apparent simplicity.
For the last two years, in fact, I’ve been listening to unabridged audio recordings. There are at least two recordings of the novel itself: One with Matt Dillon, and one with Will Patton. There is also a recording of the “original scroll” version of the novel, read by John Ventimiglia. I won’t evaluate these recordings here, but listening to them has carried me deeper into Kerouac.
One reason I return to On The Road is because it provokes me to think about life. One way it does that is with its mid-twentieth-century U.S. attitudes towards race and gender. I love Kerouac and his writing, but some of the attitudes bother me. Let’s examine a few.
I’ve always felt ambiguous about the trip to Mexico in Book Four. Listening to the scroll recording again recently, I actually felt embarrassed. This feeling has probably built up over the years.
There are certainly racial issues with On The Road. In Book Three, walking through the black section of Denver in 1949, Kerouac describes his disenchantment with being a white person; wishing he could exchange places with the “happy, true-hearted ecstatic Negroes” around him (curiously, this passage does not appear in the scroll version). These remarks were denounced by James Baldwin but defended by Eldridge Cleaver.
Earlier, in Book One, describing his involvement with a California Chicana and her migrant farm family, Kerouac claims that the Okies in the area thought he was Mexican – “and in a way, I am” (in the scroll version he says straight out “and I am.”). An odd statement, I thought, for a French Canadian (disguised as an Italian in the final version of the novel).
I guess I’ve accepted these remarks because at these points in the novel, the protagonist is down on his luck and confused. But in Part Four, he and his friends drive from Denver to Mexico City to get a quickie Mexican divorce for his friend Neal Cassidy/Dean Moriarty.
I’ve always suspected that these guys, as they drive onto foreign soil, have no idea that they are viewing, through their own distorted vision, something alien to their experience. They know that Mexico is a different culture than the United States; but they don’t know much about that culture. They make cultural assumptions without realizing it.
I admit that I don’t know much about that culture, either; so I can’t evaluate how correct or incorrect their impressions of Mexico are. But I know that I don’t know. Kerouac and Cassidy seem to believe that, through their direct impressions, they can look straight into the truth of Mexican culture. I distrust those impressions. I feel uneasy. Their confidence in their own observations disturbs me further. They talk about Mexican border police, Indians along the desert roads, Mexican brothels, Mexico City traffic, and the jungle. Kerouac rhapsodizes about poor rural Mexicans, barefoot and ragged—the Fellahin (a term he borrowed from Otto Spengler)—just as he rhapsodizes about life with the California migrant farm workers, or the blacks in Denver.
The Americans’ perception is that Mexicans don’t bother with hang-ups; they don’t play mind-games. They’re straightforward. “There’s no suspicion here.” The police are sweet; instead of hassling them at the brothel, they accept token bribes. “People here are sweet and kind and don’t put down any bull.” Isn’t this—and the scene in Denver, and the scene in the California cotton fields—the most blatant romanticizing of poverty?
Curiously, I recently read a piece by a Chicano, Joe Olvera, claiming that Kerouac was right to call himself Mexican back in California. It’s curious, considering Eldridge Cleaver’s defense of Kerouac’s remarks about the “true-hearted ecstatic Negroes.” Another curiosity: A controversy currently growing in San Antonio over the restoration of a historic marquee which shows a Mexican in a sombrero asleep against a wall, and another with a burro. Some Latinos are offended; the Latino mayor of San Antonio, Julian Castro, defends restoring the mural. Racial—and gender—stereotypes cut us deeply.
I thought about this while listening once more to the ending of Part Four of that original Kerouac scroll. Kerouac describes driving into Mexico from Laredo. “Fellows in straw hats and white pants were lounging by the dozen against battered pocky storefronts.” He describes poor barefoot Mexican children in rags and remote mountain Indian girls whose eyes light up at the sight of a wristwatch.
Race and gender come together in Kerouac’s description of the Mexican brothel. After a little dancing, Kerouac and his friends begin to discern the “varying personalities” of the women, ranging in age from fifteen to thirty. Kerouac feels uneasy about a sixteen year old black girl; she exhibits an “unimpeachable dignity” that prevents any of them from approaching her—“for she was the queen.” An eighteen year old Venezuelan, apparently “from a good family,” puzzles him as she drinks herself into oblivion. “What she was doing whoring around in Mexico, God knows.” Kerouac chooses the thirty-year-old (he was twenty-eight at the time); Cassidy chooses the Venezuelan. But the younger girls haunt him. It crosses his mind that he could simply give the sixteen-year-old some money (but he’d never been able to face her scorn); that he could simply take the Venezuelan in a back room and talk with her (but she’s relentlessly drinking).
In spite of the pensiveness this visit provokes, the men leave the brothel in a mood of triumph. The girls provide an apparently loving farewell, the village men have enjoyed watching from windows, and Kerouac and his friends feel they’ve provided a lot of money for the girls (they’ve previously mentioned their “wonderful Mexican money that went so far”).
But—why was that Venezuelan girl “whoring around in Mexico?” And what was the personal history of that sixteen year old black girl?
In spite of their feeling that they are cutting through the bull and getting to know Mexicans and Indians directly and personally, I can’t help suspecting that Kerouac and his friends simply misunderstand them completely. While mocking the typical “American” stereotypes, they blindly buy into a set of their own; sad in itself—but sadder since they haven’t the slightest suspicion of how lost they actually are.
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