Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Kerouac's Pursuit of Possibility: The Logistics of Secular Pilgrimage in 'On the Road.'"
Michael Garabedian
garabedm@alpha.whittier.edu
Critics have always used what can be called "a grammar of pilgrimage" to discuss the road trips in Jack Kerouac's On the Road. In an essay from 1973, William Blackburn describes the trips as part of a distinct American tradition of "leav[ing] everything behind in [a] search for a new life . . . a Promised Land." Writing ten years earlier, Frederick Feied argues that the journeys are something more akin to Transcendental wandering, "a search for values or for inner light and understanding, a serach for the road, the way to spiritual truth, in short, a search for God." More recently, Marxist and New Historical critics have read "On the Road" from arguably less affective perspectives, but one still finds a surfeit of such elevated, quasireligious diction.
Surprisingly, despite the omnipresence of general connections in Kerouac criticism, very few in-depth comparisons between the journeys in On the Road and conventional religious pilgrimages exist. However, even a cursory examination of these two modes of travel reveals an interesting and potentially illuminating way to read On the Road. Examining "On the Road" in the light of Victor Turner's seminal pilgrimage study The Center Out There: Pilgrim's Goal obviates a key structural correspondence, where the liminal conditions of religious pilgrimage and subsequent relationships formed between pilgrims stripped of their social status (a state Turner calls "communitas") become commensurate with the experiences of Sal Paradise and his fellow travelers in On the Road. Instead of using a grammar of pilgrimage to read On the Road, then, we instead read On the Road as secular pilgrimage.
Of course, by using the term "secular" we are modifying Turner's conventional form; however, the nuances which characterize Kerouac's wholly secular pilgrimage actually lead us to a greater understanding of the motivations of the Beat wanderers and the work itself. Turner's pilgrims ritualistically travel to a sacred site in search of meaning. Conversely, Kerouac's secular pilgrims have no destination and, as Caroline Vopat writes, "travel to escape life rather than find it." Since a physical pilgrimage site does not exist in On the Road, this holy destination becomes entirely symbolic, and perhaps more significantly, can therefore never be reached. Thus Kerouac's somewhat existential search is finally about extending and living in liminality as much as possible. As Turner suggests, the limnality of pilgrimage "suggests new possibilities," and ultimately, it is this sheer potential and the possibility for new experience for which the Beat pilgrims search.
In The Theatre of Pilgrimage, Ernest Felita writes, "[P]ilgrimage is a theatre in which man, in his going forward, would free himself of every illusion but will not close his mind to mystery," and this is a wholly adequate description of the Beats' secular pilgrimage in "On the Road." In his representation, Kerouac utilizes two aspects of Turner's strcuture, liminality and communitas, but departs from convention in making his pilgrims' destination entirely abstract and symbolic. As a result, Kerouac's pilgrims do free themselves from illusion, while the purpose of their pilgrimage shifts to an indefinite involvement with life's mystery, a limitless pursuit of possibility.
Michael Garabedian
Independent Scholar (degree received from Whittier College, May 1998)
5822 Canobie Avenue
Whittier, CA 90601
garabedm@whittier.edu; garabedm@hotmail.com
562-695-4398
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