“Attraction” (South Bay Poly April Newsletter)

After thinking a bit more about attraction (which I mentioned last month), it occurred to me that attraction involves a series of events.  First, you feel attraction towards someone—this involves the qualities that personally attract you; then you decide how you will react to it.  Then you have their reaction to you, based on their own personal tastes and experience and background.

As this develops, societal conditions come into play.  People have their own personal feelings about how they should behave.  They are affected by their upbringing, their religion, their personality.

The stage is now set.  Now the people in question must communicate.  How do they actually begin interacting?  Are they interested in each other?  Are they interested in getting to know each other better?  What might they want or expect from each other?

And then, if they are interested in growing closer and becoming friends, how do they do that?

As they proceed, they run into all the issues that come with knowing someone well, and becoming affectionate and intimate with someone.  But this is how it starts.

“Kerouac on the Road: Giving, Misgiving, Forgiving” (3 of 3)

REFERENCES

For people interested in more black and Latino perspectives, here are the sources I refer to.  The first one doesn’t relate to Kerouac, just to stereotypes relating to Latinos.

The third link references the remarks by James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver.

There is much more to say about Kerouac.  The racial issues alone demand more examination.  On The Road mentions many racial, social, and ethnic groups, including Indians, Jews, Southerners, gangsters, gays, and Arabs.  Arabs in particular occupy a shadowy, mythic place in the novel.  One of the most startling references, for me, in listening to the audiobooks, is as Kerouac and Cassady are driving towards New York.  “He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.”   What would have prompted Cassady to say this in 1948?  The Arab-Israeli War was raging, but On The Road is notoriously apolitical.

Anyway, I recommend the book, the scroll, and the audio recordings.  And here are those references.

Ruben Navarrette,  “A Texas Mayor, a Mural, and a Mexican Stereotype,” http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/23/opinion/navarrette-mexican-mural/

Joe Olivera, “Jack Kerouac as a Mexican,” http://newspapertree.com/features/1045-jack-kerouac-as-a-mexican

Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac, http://books.google.com/books?id=bN0PJn6VCNIC&pg=PA143&lpg=PA143&dq=kerouac+negro+eldridge+cleaver&source=bl&ots=7MiyUvdke7&sig=kW34zn5Nmf80mQzFpY7zLRpLzXs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=AHF3T-_1H5LZiQLmrdGnDg&ved=0CFMQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=kerouac%20negro%20eldridge%20cleaver&f=false

“Kerouac on the Road: Giving, Misgiving, Forgiving” (2 of 3)

And yet…rereading what I’ve written a few days later, after another re-listening to the Mexican part of the book, I wonder if maybe I’m being too critical.  It’s true that Kerouac and Company drive into Mexico knowing only stories they’ve read about western outlaws who in olden days would slip back and forth across the border; with a vague awareness that, during the Mexican War, Americans “cut across here with cannon.”  They know something, certainly, about Mexicans and Indians; and they know Americans have been misled with stories (for example) of gringos and greasers.  

But one of the great things about Kerouac and Cassidy is that they largely experience life directly.  They may seem naïve and innocent, but is that so bad?  Better, perhaps, to be naïve and innocent than to blindly trust what others have told you.  Kerouac may have heard stories; he may have grown up with stereotypes; but he puts his real trust in what he actually sees.

When Kerouac talks about Mexicans he’s seen—some of them barefoot children in rags or teenage whores—he’s speaking from direct observation.  Some observations may appear stereotypical or unflattering; but they’re what he actually saw; and another aspect of Kerouac’s innocence is that he accepts people as they are—with a trust that they are generally well-intentioned and honest.  And that is not so bad.

On the Steve Allen Show, Kerouac defined “beat” as “sympathetic.”  Kerouac opened himself to the downtrodden.  He sympathized.  Perhaps that’s why his parish priest, Rev. “Spike” Morrissette, once called him a modern saint.

“Kerouac on the Road: Giving, Misgiving, Forgiving” (1 of 3)

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.