On the Road
Lee, R. (1940, March). [Highway from automobile in Bexar County, Texas] [Photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/item/2017741972/.
In 1957, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was published, announcing both the arrival and the death of the beatnik subculture. “The Beat movement in literature was primarily a protest against [everything] the writers felt to be self-defeating and hypocritical in the American dream. In their view, success beat down the best of human energies and values in the pursuit of power and material gain” (Primeau). Rather than work a regular nine-to-five job and settle down with a family in the suburbs, Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac opted to find their version of America, full of jazz, sex, and alcohol, on the road. Citing this urge to ‘get their kicks,’ Primeau draws a connection between the Beat rejection of mainstream, materialistic society, the search for a higher spiritual truth, and the interpersonal connections afforded by authentic interaction on the road. “For Kerouac, social protest is a collective experience; the road brings people together in a sacred space, uniting everybody in the country” (Primeau). Kerouac’s novel and the freewheeling beliefs he espoused would go on to change the fate of the nation, with its impact still reverberating in American culture decades after its publication.
Written in a distinctive stream-of-consciousness style, Kerouac describes how “the world was suddenly rich with possibility” when he left to hitchhike across the country, and how “every bump, rise, and stretch in [the American landscape] mystified [his] longing” (Kerouac). He gave a captivating look into an alternative way of living, outside of the mainstream consumer culture of the post-war years, declaring that there was “nowhere to go but everywhere” (Kerouac). For many teenagers and young adults coming of age in the late ‘50s, On the Road was scripture. Aspiring to be like Dean Moriarty, they set out to find the wild kicks of the American night. However, what they didn’t realize was that Kerouac’s famed quest across the continent took place nearly a decade earlier in the late ‘40s. His experience wasn’t recorded until 1951 when he wrote it on a continuous scroll of paper in the course of three weeks. The nation that Kerouac described was vanishing by the time his novel was published. The kids who wanted to be a part of the Beat Generation were too late, and faced a similar restlessness and frustration with mainstream culture that their idols did.
The road was not always golden for the Beat Generation, though. Trying to go against the dominant hegemony of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, beatniks lived an isolated, marginalized existence. Kerouac recalls being at the “dividing line between the East of [his] youth and the West of [his] future,” and feeling like a stranger to himself. “I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost” (Kerouac). Without a true ‘home’ to return to, traveling Beats used landscape vernacular to mark their journeys back and forth across the country. However, the monotony and repetitiveness of certain landscape vernacular features like gas stations, motels, and diners blended together to emphasize the sameness of the ever-pervasive capitalist dream. Finding their isolation stressed by the cold, inhuman corporate businesses that spread with the new highways, neon signs and other landscape vernacular served as reminders of loneliness, alienation, and materialistic waste for the Beats. Kerouac states how he “could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon.” He continues, “I never felt sadder in my life” (Kerouac). If the Beat movement’s disillusionment with the changing American landscape following the end of World War II was not recognized by the readers who set out on the road themselves, the environment they found themselves in, altered by the Interstate System, would demonstrate that the American Dream was more intangible than small town drive-in restaurants, classic cars, and Norman Rockwell paintings.
Regan, K. (1975, November 2). [Bob Dylan (right), Allen Ginsberg (left) and Sam Shepard (not pictured) filmed a scene of ‘Renaldo and Clara’ while visiting the Lowell, Mass. Grave of Jack Kerouac] [Photograph]. Retrieved from https://www.pulitzer.org/article/movie-you-havent-dreamt-yet-bob-dylan-and-allen-ginsberg-conversation.
Though he was not a member of the beat generation, Bob Dylan found inspiration in their poetry, anti-consumer ideals, and spontaneous lifestyle. Equally inspired by folk heroes like Woody Guthrie, Dylan served as a bridge between the beatniks of the ‘40s & ‘50s, and the coming hippie counter-culture of the 1960s. Dylan would hang out with Allen Ginsberg, a friend of Kerouac’s, in New York City, exchanging ideas and stories. Ginsberg’s influence would be apparent on Dylan’s 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited, as it featured what would become the anthem of a generation for disaffected kids rejecting mainstream American culture and hitting the road like their Beat heroes. His song, “Like a Rolling Stone” aptly surmised the feelings of loneliness and alienation felt by the lost generation of writers who had set out in search of the real America behind the materialistic consumer systems and McCarthy-istic politics of their times, as well as the generation of kids that were now rejecting their parents’ moral values and idea of success.
“How does it feel; how does it feel? /
To be on your own, with no direction home /
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone”
Much like Jack Kerouac’s depiction of the bohemian America found on the road, the alternative portrait of the United States that “Like a Rolling Stone” paints exemplifies the landscape vernacular that, once commonly found along two-lane highways, was already victim to the 1956 Federal Interstate Highway System by the time anybody had read Kerouac’s novel, much less heard Dylan’s song. As Jens Hilke points out in a study of the Interstate’s impact conducted by the University of Vermont, “the coming of the Interstate Highway dramatically affected older, general-access roads with similar alignments. Long distance travelers abandoned those former routes, leaving once-vibrant towns fading into obscurity and busy roadside stores and restaurants struggling to make ends meet” (Hilke). The road from conformity to liberation had been marred by the dominance of the military-industrial complex and the construction of the new highways. Disillusionment would be a common feeling for travelers to experience in the coming decades. Still, some hailed the domineering highway infrastructure as a sign of progress.