Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"The Once and Future Canon: Narrative Viewpoint in the Works of Kerouac and Xenophon"
Betsy Bowden
Dept. of English
Rutgers University
Whether on the road or not, any autobiographer to some extent creates a literary character as narrator. Have authorial techniques for doing so changed significantly during the 2360 years between the earliest travelogue extant in any world culture, the Anabasis by Socrates' student Xenophon, and the work that lately has redefined travel writing and indeed our lifestyle, Jack Kerouac's On the Road? This paper will compare and contrast narrative technique in these two milestones, paying particular attention to issues of canonicity. As recently as MLA 1998, swelling murmurs of discomfort are developing into direct challenges to the knee-jerk rejection of a literary work solely because the previous profesorial generation praised it. Swelling murmurs at last are bursting out as the cry, "Aesthetics ! Aesthetics!"
Just so, in 400 B.C.E., did Xenophon hear with relief ten thousand bedraggled soldiers shout back through the ranks, "The sea! the sea!" As any educated European knew well, until these past few decades, this Greek mercenary army had been employed by a Persian who was defeated near Baghdad, such that the soldiers had to escape and then fend for themselves. After a year and a half of travails, including encouters with Kurds who were fighting the Persians then as now, survivors made their way north to the Black Sea and thence westward, homeward. Every educated European knew the story because Xenophon the author (as distinguished from Xenophon the third-person narrator) wrote clear, simple Greek prose, the equivalent to Caesar's Gallic Wars. Until recently, therefore, all students in the humanities learned one of the two classical languages via Xenophon. With language acquisition came awareness of this author's narrative technique: he relates incidents and speeches such that Xenophon-the-narrator remains humble while showing himself firmly in charge. He provides character sketches of the men around him, especially those with leadership abilities to be emulated; but he preserves for himself the role not just of protagonist, but of hero.
Could the same be said about Sal Paradise? Like Xenophon, Kerouac does character sketches of men who to varying degrees provide his narrator with role models for leadership -- most explosively Dean Moriarty, of course, in search of his own father -- yet Sal himself gradually takes charge of his own search for that ulitmate "IT." Sal's initial motivation for travel is the polar opposite of Xenophon's: to leave home behind, rather than to return. Both narrators, though, conclude their travels back at a home that itself has changed on account of each protagonist's, each hero's, self-defining and society-defining education on the road.
Betsy Bowden
Dept. of English
Rutgers University
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Updated May 23, 1999