The Road Narrative in Contemporary American
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THIS IS NOT AN EXIT: THE ROAD NARRATIVE IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE AND FILM by JILL LYNN TALBOT, B.S.Ed., M.A. A DISSERTATION IN ENGLISH Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved Accepted Dean (C(f the Graduate School May, 1999 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation director, Dr. Bryce Conrad, for agreeing to work with me on this project and for encouraging me to remain cognizant of its scope and its overall significance, both now and in the future. Thanks also to committee member Dr. Patrick Shaw, who not only introduced me to an American fiction that I could appreciate and devote myself to in both my personal and professional life, but who has guided me from my first analysis of On the Road, which led to this project. Thanks also to committee member Dr. Bill Wenthe, for his friendship and his decision to be a part of this process. I would also like to thank those individuals who have been supportive and enthusiastic about this project, but mostly patient enough to listen to all my ideas, frustrations, and lengthy ruminations on the aesthetics of the road narrative during this past year. Last, I need to thank my true companion, who shares my love not only for roads, but certain road songs, along with all the images promised by the "road away from Here." 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT v CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. THE REALITY OF THE ROAD: THE NON-FICTION ROAD NARRATIVE 2 6 John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley: In Search of America 27 William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways: A Journey into America 35 John A. Williams's This is My Country^ Too . 45 III. THE END OF THE ROAD: THE ROAD NARRATIVE PROTOTYPE IN THE NOVEL AND FILM 54 Jack Kerouac's On the Road 54 Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider 66 IV. MISLEADING SIGNS: THE WESTERN TRADITION 87 Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing 8 9 David Seals's The Powwow Highway 104 Sidney Pollack's The Electric Horseman . .118 Kevin Reynold's Fandango 122 Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise 12 6 V. SIDE ROADS: ON THE WAY TO POSTMODERNISM . .132 Cathryn Alpert's Rocket City 133 Herbert Ross's Boys on the Side 145 VI. OFF THE ROAD: DECONSTRUCTING THE ROAD NARRATIVE 14 9 Don DeLillo's Americana 14 9 I I I 111 Stephen Wright's Going Native 162 Abbe Wool's Roadside Prophets 177 Albert Brooks's Lost in America 179 VII. CONCLUSION 132 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY I97 IV ABSTRACT Jack Kerouac's On the Road serves as the prototype for the road narrative and as a pivotal novel in the transition from modernism to postmodernism. Kerouac's novel is recognized as the road narrative that brought formal recognition of the cultural ritual and established the genre's distinctive features. In the four decades that followed On the load's publication in 1957, authors including Cormac McCarthy, David Seals, Don DeLillo, Cathryn Alpert, and Stephen Wright repeated and varied Kerouac's road pattern through modification and innovation. The non-fiction road narratives offer a tri-cultural presentation of national identity with works by John Steinbeck, William Least Heat- Moon (Native American), and John A. Williams (African American). In addition, Steinbeck's work serves as the foundation for the theory of internal reality, a paradigm for examining the individual's perception of the journey in all of the road narratives. Together, these road narratives, both fictional and non-fiction, offer various perspectives on national and cultural identity, and through a postmodern progression, the novels eventually deconstruct the quintessential road narrative. On the Road. As a coda to the study of the prose road narrative, the study also examines film's installments to the road narrative, focusing on Dennis V Hopper's Easy Rider as the prototype for the contemporary cinematic road film which emphasizes marginalized cultures. Subsequent films examined in the study establish Easy Rider's influence as the film that continues to serve as the model for cinematic road narratives through allusion and intertextuality. VI CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Writing about the road narratives of Jack Kerouac in 1964, Howard W. Webb, Jr. declared, "Life on the American highways and city streets seems to have lost its charm" (133). Thirty-five years later, the plethora of American road narratives since Kerouac's 1957 publication of On the Road stands as a literary testimony to Webb's misconception and to American fiction's continuing fascination with life on the road. Since Kerouac's portrayal of the Beat generation across the roads of America, authors have continued to explore those same roads with imitation and modification. On the Road, Kerouac's most recognized road narrative, has been deemed the novel that "brought formal recognition of the cultural ritual" and established the genre's distinctive features (Cook, Primeau 8). In the four decades that followed On the Road's publication, authors of different generations, genders and cultures have repeated and varied the road pattern Kerouac made popular or have tried to "get out from under his influence" (Primeau 8). By placing their characters on the highways and city streets of American fiction, novelists have borrowed, altered, and deconstructed the conventions of Kerouac's prototype to make an amalgamation consisting of postmodernist marginalization and 1 diversity, thereby recontextualizing the manuscript of the American landscape. Regardless of the continued production of and experimentation with American road narratives, there remains a lack of academic study and scholarly criticism devoted to them. Andrew Ross has argued that the "most 'elite' criticism has treated the road with benign neglect," and Ronald Primeau notes that "the road narrative straddles popularity and official recognition by literary critics" (231, 13). This study serves not only to provide a comprehensive investigation of the road narrative and identify its traditions and innovations within the postmodern context of the contemporary American novel, it also hopes to move beyond a mere outlining of the genre's features to offer a paradigm for studying the road narrative, a conceptual center which will be identified later in this chapter. An exploration of the road narrative requires recognition of the previous studies which have focused on the road in American fiction in order to identify where this study departs from its predecessors; in addition, a delineation of the characteristics required for inclusion in this study of the road narrative must also be established. In Romance of the Road; The Literature of the American Highway, Ronald Primeau defines the road narrative as "fiction and nonfiction books by Americans who travel by car throughout the country either on a quest or simply to get away" (1). Primeau notes the genre's debt to various literary traditions, including the Bildungsroman, the quest, the picaresque, and travel literature. In his study, Primeau privileges prose (over poetry, song, and film) for its "unique perspective and for the special artistic vision created by a dialogue for authors, readers,and texts" (ix). Primeau's text presents an overview of the genre, building from 19th century Emersonian self-reliance and Whitmanesque self-celebration and expanding to the physical circulation and inward exploration instigated by the introduction of the automobile into American culture. Primeau's chapters-- divided into discussions of the "road trip as protest," the search for national identity, and self-discovery--also acknowledge the cultural diversity of the road narrative created by multi-cultural additions to the genre. With plot synopses and focused observations of each novel he treats, Primeau admits that he leaves room for further discussion. This study will take advantage of territory left unexplored by Primeau by narrowing his definition and extending it to film. In this study, cinematic representations of road narratives will serve as ancillary installments to my consideration of the road genre. In The Road Movie Book, Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark observe: Despite the obvious popularity and significance of the road movie throughout the history of American cinema, there has not yet been much sustained inquiry into what precisely qualifies a film as a road movie [and] how the genre relates to the social and cultural history of the United States. (2) In addition, Timothy Corrigan argues in A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam, "As a film genre, road movies are frequently bypassed by some of the best studies of the genre" (143). While critics have offered their insights to the study of the genre, and Cohan and Hark's book contains various essays to trace the history of the road film, definitions of the road film, as Cohan and Hark note, are often vague and unexplored, or the critics limit their analyses to a thematic study of the road film. For example, Timothy Corrigan's explication of the road film focuses on its existential nature, citing six disparate characteristics of the genre: (1) it provides a response to the breakdown of the family unit, emphasizing male subjectivity and disempowerment; (2) events act upon characters; (3) the quest become mechanized, including the displacement of the protagonist's identity upon the vehicle); (4) the vehicle, specifically its windows, becomes the camera; (5) characters are self-reflective and/or excessively self-conscious, and (6) the road/country may be known, but something has made it foreign. Corrigan offers insight to pervasive elements of the road film which inform the conflicts of plot and character, and some of his defining characteristics will be examined within the context of specific road films included in this study.