California State University, Northridge Jack Kerouac's
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CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE JACK KEROUAC'S )\ INNOCENT VISION A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English by Daniel l\1ark ---Scott June, 19'78 The thesis of Daniel Mark Scott is approved: California State University~ No:cthridge June~ 1978 · 1 In a significant number of his novels, Jack Kerouac searches for the simplicity, freedom, and idealism of a. truly innocent life. Robert A. Hipkiss in Jack Kerouac, Prophet Of The New Romanticism refers to Kerouac's work (the novels about Lowell, Massachusetts in particular): "They celebrate a child's vision of innocence that cannot come again but which Kerouac desperately holds onto as the only true vision of purity and goodness in a corrupt 1 world." That statement not only desc-ribes the Lowell novels but serves to illuminate and explain almost every no,jel that Kerouac wrote. Kerouac' s novels chart the voyage of the child/innocent as he searches for spiritual inspiration and transcendence in America. As Kerouac says in The Dharma. Burris: 11 To the children and the innocent it's 2 all the same." Jack Kerouac treasured simplicity and exhibited a lasting innocent vision of the world. In Visions Of Cody, Jack Duluoz states: "I'm writing this book because we're all going to die--In the loneliness of my life, my father dead, my brother dead, my mother faraway, my sister and my wife faraway, nothing here but my own tragic hands that once were guarded by a world, a sweet attention, that now are left to guide and disappear their own way into the common dark of all our death, sleeping in me ra'"' bed, alone and stupid: with just this one pride and consolation: my heart broke in the general despair, and opened up inwards to the Lord, I made a supplication in this dream" (yyc, 36 s > . 2 In this passage, Kerouac expresses his vulnerability and anguish, but beyond that, there lies a prevailing hope, a belief in some eternal principle that will see him through. Since the majority of Kerouac's work is autobiographical, a large number of actual people reappear throughout his novels under different names. They include Allen Ginsberg, t<Villiam Burroughs, Gary Snyder, his dear friend, Neal Cassady, along with members of his family and other major figures in his life. Kerouac's ever present hope is his reaction to his vision of being a child forced to deal with an uncaring and incomprehensible world. Kerouac sought to prolong a belief in goodness and innocence beyond childhood. There was a coherence to his youth that he would never recover and always sought. The break came when his family left his home town of Lowetl, Massachusetts, and moved to New Haven and Ozone Park. He later expressed his feelings of dislocation in Dr. Sax: "I judged I was being torn from my mother's womb with each step -from Home Lowell into the Unknown . a serious lostness that has never replaced itself ... " (DS,lll}. In a dream he recorded, Kerouac noted that he had lost his way and had taken the wrong path during the war. Similarly, John Clellon Holmes-referred to the lack of their gener~ ation's connection to the immediate present as a "broken circuit." 3 Holmes speaks specifically of Kerouac's lost ness: "I never fully understood the hunger gnavling in him 3 then, and didn't realize the extent to which the breakup of his Lowell-home, the chaos of the war years and the death of his father, had left him disrupted, anchorless; a deeply traditional nature thrown out of kilter, and thus enormously sensitive to anything uprooted, bereft, helpless or 4 persevering." Kerouac's geological and psychological displacement as a youth prompted his later travels on the road. For all the virtues of a community (love, a feeling of involvement, purpose, and meaning) Kerouac had to turn to his friends or himself. Hence, he was forced to create his own world in his mind, a world of child-like innocence. In Dr. Sax, his fantasies surrounded his nostalgia for his boyhood in Lowell and progressed to the mythic struggle between good and evil in the end of the novel.· Dr. Sax, Jack's friend and pro tector, explains adult life to him and concludes: "You'll never be as happy as you are in your quiltish innocent book-devouring boyhood immortal night" {DS,203). As a result, the adult world will never match the innocent, blissful vision of childhood. Dr. Sax refers-to evil as only an illusion; he believes that the snake will turn out to be a husk of seminal gray doves. vfuen his potions fail to kill the snake, Sax tells. Jack that nothing works in the end, that the universe does not care what happens to man, and that there is nothing that anyone can do about it. But at tbat moment, a huge, 4 black bird swoops down and takes the snake away and Jack concludes that the universe counteracts its own evil (DS,240-5). Consequently, Jack is ecstatic and exclaims that there is still hope. The hope expressed in Dr. Sax was one that Kerouac carefully guarded his entire life. Dr. Sax romanticizes Kerouac's past; the novel is a charm ing hymn to childhood. Although Sax's struggle with evil strips the mystery. away from him, Jack still believes in the everlasting triumph of good over evil. Kerouac sought to respond to life freely and instinctively as a child would and therefore very early retreated to memories of childhood, the source of man's hopes and fears. In On The Road, Sal Paradise says that the one thing man yearns for "is the sweet remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be replaced though we hate to admit it in. death" (OTR,l24). From birth one is alone in the universe; the child faces the anguish of solitude which terminates in death. In order to deal with the solitude of his life, Kerouac turned to his mother to avoid facing the loneliness that surrounded him. He would always return to her for a home, security, and peace. As a result, Kerouac could preserve his innocent vision only by refusing to enter his father's world. He identified his father with the wage earning struggle that left Leo Kerouac unemployed and spiritually crushed in the thirties. When his father died, 5 Kerouac felt betrayed and terribly alone. George Martin in The Town And The City closely resembles Leo Kerouac. George suffers the inevitable disillusionment of the American Dream. He began life thinking that the whole world was waiting for him, promising endless opportunities. As he reached middle age, he became aware that the American Dream was only a dream that one could possess in youth. The brutal reality of the world inevitably intrudes after childhood. ·In addition, the reality of war disrupts the family and a sense of meaning- lessness overwhelms each of the sons. Peter, Francis, Joe, and George Martin are all deeply disturbed and changed by the war. There was always a difference between what they were expecting and what life was providing for them. Peter co:mments on this disparity: "And yet that children and fathers should have a notion in their souls that there must be a way, an authority, a great knowledge, a vision, a view of life, a proper manner, an order in all the disorder and sadness of the world--that alone must be God in men •.• " (TAC,424). Kerouac believed that the "should be" in men's souls could prevail. That is what Kerouac sought all his life: a way, a knowledge, a purpose, an order, a meaning in the universe. There is a strong emotional intensity in The Town And The City. The interaction between the family members, whether it is brother and brother or father and son, 6 represent the sense of community and familial ties that Kerouac longed for. When Peter and Francis return home for Christmas, they have a conversation that illuminates some of Peter's (Kerouac's) feelings. Peter refuses to agree with Francis about the hopelessness of life. However, Francis tells Peter that God is dead, that man is incapable of expressing love, and that evil will eventually overcome mankind. He rejects the effectiveness of action because .o good can come of life. Moreover, he views existence as a nightmare with the enemy as consciousness. But Peter prizes the consciousness that allows him to fully enjoy and appreciate life. He sees the world as crazy and comic, but he always has faith that things will improve. Accordingly, he feels that life is sweet and that God will take care of him in the end (TAC,l53-8). Peter finally realizes that despite loss, confusion,and grief, existence holds out love, work, and true hope. Kerouac's sympathy for anyone "uprooted, bereft, help less, or persevering" revealed itself in his idealized treatment of children, Negroes, Mexicans, Indians, hoboes, and dope addicts-. He celebrated the simplicity and spontaneous freedom that he believed these people possessed. As Sal Paradise says in On The_ Road: "The best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night . I wished I \vere a Denver J'.1exica.n, or even a poor overworked 7 l Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a "white man disillusioned .. (OTR,l48). It is an essential life force that attracts him, a "hepness, .