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Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Speedily Traveling the Rhizome: Kerouac's On The Road as an Aesthetic Mapping of the American Political Landscape"


Marco Abel
Pennsylvania State University
mxa174@email.psu.edu

In this paper on Jack Kerouac's quintessential American road book, On The Road, I argue that Kerouac deploys the trope of the road as a means to create a politics of what Deleuze and Guattari have later come to term the "rhizome": a politics emphasizing America as a geographical landscape that is about flat surfaces and not depths, a landscape operating as a "plane of immanence" (Deleuze and Guattari) where everything is connected with each other. In contrast to the many critics of Kerouac who read the novel as essentially a-political and aesthetically unappealing, I suggest to re-encounter the text as a mapping out of a new America. In performing the mapping, Kerouac aesthetically produces a major statement about cultural and political difference in 1950s American society--a statement that thus far has been underappreciated by both popular and academic critics.

I not only argue against a long tradition of Kerouac critics influenced by the New York intellectuals' scathing assessment of the book in the 1950s, but my argument also intersects with contemporary cultural studies critiques that reexamine cultural artifacts for their political significance. In reading On The Road based on the rhizomatic thought experiment of Deleuze and Guattari, I illustrate how the novel mobilizes a new aesthetics of writing to create a new cultural politics. Rather than dismissing Kerouac's style as "typing" (Truman Capote), I want to affirm typing as new style that plays different speeds against each other, just as the characters in the novel travel at varying speeds on their four trips across the country. By permanently altering their pace, the characters are able to experience the country in a new manner. Neither concerned with ideologies of the new frontier nor with religious desires of the quest (teleological politics of representation and lack), Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty non-teleologically engage in a rhizomatic performance that leads them to a multiplicity of encounters with the landscape and its inhabitants. Both the structure and style of Kerouac's text are based on repetition and varying rhythmic speeds, thus creating a travel narrative that ultimately shows no concern for either a beginning or an end. Instead, what matters most for the characters and Kerouac is the space in between. Sal, Dean, and, by implication, Kerouac subscribe to a politics of connections, which creates mobile communities that find each other in the process of moving, in performing a map that "is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exists" (Deleuze and Guattari). In that, On The Road presented a political challenge to both the right and left in the 1950s and subsequent decades.

Because the novel does not adhere to any clear-cut ideological statements that would render it ready for appropriation by traditional politics, the text has thus far largely been ignored by American academia, especially considering its popular status as one of the most widely read American books of the post-war area. My paper, then, attempts to situate the novel in its socio-historical context, reveals how Kerouac's aesthetics performs a specific politics, and calls for a critical re-assessment of On The Road in an age that questions many of the critical tenets that have cast the novel as an academic outcast.


Marco Abel
Department of English
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park
mxa174@email.psu.edu

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Updated May 23, 1999