Six Myths of On the Road, and Where These Might Lead Us

Abstract

Jack Kerouac and On the Road (1957) are invested in so many layers of sensationalized myth that it has become difficult to grasp anything about them not shaped by this celebrity. The novel, just like Kerouac’s life, has assumed an iconic status, defined by a reputation which derives from a reading that is partial: both incomplete and one-sided. It is a reading that centres upon the book’s reputation as an autobiographical text typed out in a spontaneous rush on a continuous scroll of paper, depicting a new life-style, centred upon cars, driving, sexual promiscuity, and the celebration of wild (jazz) music. What more, one might ask, might any reader ask for, in the decades following World War Two, as increasing car ownership, a rise in casual sex and new forms of fast music all insinuated themselves increasingly insistently into the weft and weave of the world’s western cultures? This essay wants to explore how this canonical reading feeds on the related myths its themes address, rather than on how the novel carefully deconstructs and interrogates these cultural changes and how it represents performatively post-war identities in change but not transformed. Whilst On the Road certainly deals with the sort of post-war speediness that was to lead to Paul Virilio formulating his theory of the ride, the journey, the drive, it is worth recalling the Interstate Highway Act was not passed until 1956 (Virilio, 1986). Things are just not as simple as the dominant, mythologized, speed-based, Wild We stern-infused reading of the text suggests.