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The Bible of the Beat Generation, 8. Dezember 2008
In June 1950 Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac hit the road in Denver to drive more than 1,700 miles to Mexico City to visit William Burroughs. Kerouac found it "the most pleasant and graceful trip in the world," and Mexico struck him as "the magic end of the road." The "civilized" world he'd left behind was gripped in Cold War paranoia. The U.S. had built the hydrogen bomb in January 1950, and the Korean War had begun on June 24. Kerouac was convinced that the world was lost, and he might as well die. But high on grass, bouncing along Mexican roads, he experienced a happy hallucination: a microburst of gold shot from the sky right into his startled eyes. This was the moment, he later wrote, that at last made "On the Road" possible, the "great occasion" when he had the vision that Neal was God, and God had the face of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the hero who had saved the world from oppression and slavery.
When Neal and Jack reached the city, Mexican hipsters had already preceded them, establishing a beachhead on Calle Redondas, where they peddled dope and crucifixes. The two friends found an apartment close to Bill and Joan Burroughs, who had fled the U.S. after Bill's last drug bust and was writing "Junky," one of the classic confessional romans à clef of Beat literature. But Mexico City turned out to be a disaster and soon Jack found himself at loose ends, stayed stoned, smoking fifteen joints a day, and helped himself to Bill's morphine. After another hallucination in which he saw himself canonized as the saintly hero and prophetic author of "On the Road," he left July 1950 and began walking to New York, occasionally hitching a ride. Despite the pain and heartbreak of his Mexican misadventure, "On the Road" was taking shape in his soul.
Jack's life in New York was as tumultuous as his stay in La Mexica, but in April 1951, the book that's built upon several notebooks and previous drafts tentatively titled "The Beat Generation" and "Gone on the Road," took its final form as an elegiac ode to Neal (as Dean Moriarty), narrated by his sidekick, Kerouac (as Sal Paradise), although he kept it brisk and simple in a no-frills reportage style. Once he started, he kept typing furiously, rarely sleeping and fueled by coffee and Benzedrine, and finished the first draft within twenty days. To type continuously without the interruption of reloading pages, he scotch-taped sheets of tracing paper together, creating a 120-foot-long roll he fed into the machine. The scroll has survived and was sold by the Kerouac estate for $2.4 million in 2001 to Jim Irsay (owner of the football team Indianapolis Colts), and is available for public viewing - it consists indeed of scotch-taped-sheets, not as some critics would have it, of a roll of Teletype-paper.
Though completed quickly, Kerouac had a long and difficult time finding a buyer for his work. Publishers rejected the manuscript due to its experimental writing style and its sympathetic tone towards minorities and marginalized social groups of post-War America. Many editors were also uncomfortable with the idea of publishing a book that contained, what were for the time, graphic descriptions of drug-use and homosexual behavior, a move that could result in obscenity charges being filed.
The book describes the road-trip adventures across the U.S. and Mexico and Kerouac's relationships with other Beat writers and friends (don't ever call them beatniks). He dates the narrative at 1947, marking it as a specific era in jazz history, "somewhere between its Charlie Parker Ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis," and it inspires Sal to think of his friends "from one end of the country to the other...doing something so frantic and rushing about." He starts out in New York, passes Chicago and drives across the continent to San Francisco, where Sal takes a job as a night watchman at a boarding camp for merchant sailors. But he is soon on the road again, where he meets one of his biggest temptations. Her name is Terry, and he meets her on the bus to LA. She is Mexican, and has run away from her husband. They spend "the next fifteen days...together for better or for worse." Sal spends the better part of a week with Terry and her family in a migrant worker's camp which he experiences as disillusioning.
Sal's last attempt at finding an answer to his problems is a trip through the Mexican countryside to Mexico City with Dean and a hanger-on. Some of the novel's more memorable scenes depict their marijuana-infused introduction to Mexican culture, including a vivid (but expensive) sojourn to a bordello offering mambo music and underage prostitutes. The novel ends a year later in New York, where Dean invites Sal and his girlfriend to move to San Francisco with him. The arrangements fall through and Dean returns to the West alone. Sal closes the novel sitting on a New York pier during sunset, looking west. He reminisces on God, America, crying children, and ends with "I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
The book was published in 1957 by Viking and created a sensation. Archibald Mac-Leish praised it to his Harvard class, Nelson Algren sent a wire full of praise and Charles Olson called Kerouac "the greatest writer in America." In Kerouac, the largely collegiate audiences began to embrace a new concept of literature: a glory in roughness, a raw, living texture, bold and unfinished as a Pollock or a de Kooning. Modern readers will see Kerouac in a different light, of course, but even today you can see young people making pilgrimages to Jack's grave, leaving notes, prayers, joints, or just empty wine bottles.
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5 von 5 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich:
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Mad to live, mad to talk. But worth reading?, 1. August 2000
"...and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, made to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!"" This is a sentence you do not read. You drink. You gulp and you lust for more. Unforunately in this nihilist anthem of the Beat generation, On the Road, there are few other pearls like this one. The madness turns out be commonplace and Sal and Dean's travels more pitiful, youthful folly than poetry. On the Road highlights a time when Sal is searching for definitions and a place, and where radical experiences with our friends often determine who we are. As Sal and his friend Dean pinball America as beat Bedouins, tilting for jazz, sex, and IT we hear Kerouac finding a rhythm that he would pound on his drum in the decades to follow. For many he defined freedom, and for a few a quasi-sustainable subculture called Beat. Kerouac's style is stream of consciousness, which sometimes works in the hands of master novelists (To the Lighthouse, Sound and Fury) but through others often doesn't. Here the results are mixed. Ginsberg and his crew largely built the mystique of this book on scattered gems like the one quoted here and misty extrapolations. And yet that is perhaps the beauty of it to so many people, for it is a flawed chronicle of travel and seeking but a magnificent dream. If you are searching for a book on the Beat era then this is one of the seminal works. However, if you are searching for a novel that reflects an authentic life journey I would recommend Siddhartha or Narcissus and Goldmund (currently OP) by Herman Hesse, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Pirsig, or Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr.. They are all finer pieces than On the Road by Jack Kerouac. (Please Note: I, in principal, believe that the rating of reviewers seriously affects the altruism of the review process...
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3 von 4 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich:
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But have you heard it?, 17. September 2000
Von Ein Kunde
Yes. I read On the Road years ago - and went back to certain chapters during certain chapters in my life. Ive read the articles on Kerouac, saw a few films, mourned the death of Burroughs. I thought I had all the experiences one could have with Kerouac's classic - until I discovered this new version.This is the audio of On the Road - read by actor Matt Dillon. Dillon (Drugstore Cowboy, etc.) - captures the exact voice in my head I heard when reading Kerouac. Listening to this recording is a great way to re-experience a classic. It doesnt matter if you've read the book once or 100 times - letting someone read Kerouac to you is quite something. Highly recommend.
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von Allen Ginsberg
von William S. Burroughs
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von Jack Kerouac
