Kick Kerouac out of the canon?

The excellent literary website the Second Pass has decided to take a bite out of the canon. Its victims are books by Don Delillo, Charles Dickens, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Jonathan Franzen, D.H. Lawrence, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cormac McCarthy and Virginia Woolf. And Jack Kerouac.

On the one hand, some of the targeted books are lesser works by masters whose other books, it is implied, would remain safely canonized. "Absalom, Absalom" should go, but other works by Faulkner should stay. "The Road" might be Cormac McCarthy's bestselling book, but it's not his best. "'A Tale of Two Cities' would be a good book by another writer," they write, "but for Dickens it was a failure."

But in other cases, it's a direct attack. If just one book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez could go on a must-read list, it would be "One Hundred Years of Solitude" -- but they would banish it. The same for Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." Which is where I draw the line. This is how the critique begins:

Like many nerds of the ’80s and ’90s, I read "On the Road," that classic of identity literature, in high school. I read it as a textbook on how to be cool. And like many of the traditional textbooks I read at the time, it filled me with awe and boredom.

I'm not sure when "On the Road" became "identity literature" -- is it creating an identity? How can something that described a lifestyle that was alternative to mainstream culture in 1950 be an adoptable identity today? The author goes on to describe the cultural role that the book played, both personally and in a greater sense, which she (it is a she, I checked with the editor) found alienating.

But I would argue that whatever cultural hallmarks it might signal, the book is a work of literature, one with an intensity of vision and a language of impure steamroller incendiary jazz.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Keep your cultural baggage: That's going straight into my canon. 

After the jump: Kerouac reads, accompanied by Steve Allen on piano. The above passage begins about 2 1/2 minutes in.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Jerry Yulsman / Associated Press

Comments

[Linda]

Don't kick out Kerouac. He's too good looking to kick out of the canon, even if he does look like Cosmo Kramer in some shots. Especially when there are so many goofy looking guys in the canon. We need a handsome 20th century man in the canon. REAL BAD.

[Gina Dalfonzo]

"Excellent literary website"? I don't think so. Any literary website that would kick out "A Tale of Two Cities" has forfeited all claim to excellence.

[Celsius1414]

Sometimes certain writers are in the canon for a reason: they're really, really good writers.

Other times, they're in there because they've been in there: i.e., inertia.

Kerouac, if only for On the Road, is the former.

[Peter (the Other)]

Just a traffic building trick by a bunch of losers. Heck, I would throw several of those out of the canon myself, but the arguments are going to have to be much more persuasive then these poseurs have mustered.

[John Micek]

Kick out Dos Passos?
OK -- now this is getting personal. Few writers really captured the sense of fragmentation of the early 20th Century. And a chronicler of The Depression and 1930s, he was without parallel.
If anything, his work is under-appreciated and should be taught more.

[K]

Anyone ever read the Mad magazine parody of My Fair Lady that had Cary Grant as the lead, working in an Madison avenue ad agency in the early sixties? It seems like "Kerouac" was the refrain for one of the songs. I always feel like with Jack Kerouac I'm being asked to buy a lifestyle. It's like his work starts in the fifties culimating with the public being asked to buy khakis from him in the nineties. I never see Virginia Woolf being asked to market Prozac.

[5]

On The Road has never done much for me as actual reading... as a study in process and documentation of state of mind it's brilliant, but it doesn't hold my attention

[Jukesgrrl]

Any novel that truly and beautifully enables those who come later to experience a particular era or subculture should be considered for the literary canon (e.g. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas). Kerouac and Dos Passos certainly qualify. Mr. Micek conveyed my opinion about Dos Passos and Ms. Kellogg my feelings about On the Road.

[jojo]

Kerouac is the Bohemian's Hemingway....I can kind of see why some gals wouldn't like him.....but not really....
Kerouac rules all and if he "doesn't hold your attention"...you simply lack the ability to have it HELD

[DStoneKy]

Truman Capote, "'On the Road' is more typing than writing." Agreed. A welcome boot....

[humanomaly]

Please keep in mind that Jack Kerouac's books were intended to eventually all be tied together to become one novel. That was his dream.Jack Kerouac was never able to do tha, perhaps the excessive alcohol and amphetamines got in the wayt, but he was able to give us many different forms of his expressive works through poems, jazz, and readings. I don't believe his books or his works should be judged alongside the others, for it is not the same, it was a piece of a much larger project, which never came to be.

[Will]

Kerouas was brilliant. On the Road, the Dharma Bums, Lonesome Traveler, Big Sur, Tristessa, and on and on. Sadly, some take cheap shots. I'd urge all to go back to his original texts and re-read them. Perhaps he won't be fully appreciated for another century or so.

Great You-Tube video -- thanks!

[Will]

And recall the many writers and other artists whom Kerouac knew and/or influenced: Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs, Bob Dylan, etc., to name just a few.

It seems, oddly, as though the late Chris McCandless, the subject of the book and film "Into the Wild," never read any of Kerouac's books. If not, a pity. Query whether McCandless would've taken his fatal trip into the Alaskan outback if he had read Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums" first.

[slipstream]

The passage you quote from "On the Road" betrays your argument: that's just bad writing. The book should be kept on the list of must-reads for high school students (along with Catcher in the Rye) but that's as far it goes.

[kt]

Before this goes any further we must ask: did Kerouac really want to be placed in the canon? it seems to me that it's not necessarily a compliment for a writer in his space....

[rockchick]

Yes, but does any truly sane person read Dos Passos et some equally grim al. for FUN READING? I didn't think so.

[MichaelRyerson]

Hey man, there are canons and there are canons, ya know what I mean? Dean would know. Keep it or reject it, makes no diff to the truly cool and downbeat. Crystalization is a lovely thing. rimshot.

[K]

"[I]t was a piece of a much larger project, which never came to be"....that's exactly what it is. "perhaps the excessive alcohol and amphetamines got in the way", yes and doesn't the sentence "God is pooh bear" make anyone else cringe besides me? Maybe the other posters are right and Kerouac influenced a lot of writers. But by the sixties, didn't the question, "are you an academic poet or a beat poet" become a little tiresome? Like those are the only two choices a poet can have, even at that time. (Why didn't anyone ask if someone was an Elizabethan poet?) We can be glad Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton learned to roughen up their lines by the late sixties, but even those two confessional poets are becoming forgotten. Kerouac should've read more besides Thomas Wolfe and let other writers influence his work. Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady went out on their adventures and came home and Carolyn Cassady cleaned the house and kept dinner waiting. Pretty middle class life there, some things never change.

[Joanne Kinney]

I'm so old I remember being at Mister Kelly's in Chicago
on Yom Kippur with Lenny Bruce in the house.
But for its time and Jack's time it was good...so good
like we always say in out late 70s "Ya gotta be there".

[B]

I read "On the Road" in my early 30s. I did not appreciate the lifestyle shown in the book, nor do I appreciate it now (about five years later). However, this book made me want to take a car trip across the United States. I can't explain why, or how but this is one of the books that moves people in a subconscious way. Removing the book from some "Best of" list just diminishes the list not the book.

[Rich Smith]

With all the good literature in the world, why must we poison our brains with the drug-fueled ramblings of Kerouac? What happens next in our schools? Do we teach Carlos Castaneda's _Yaqui Way of Knowledge_ in place of religious studies? I agree with the new canon. The 60'd ended almost 40 years ago. It is time to move on.

[Scott]

who cares? do you really need your opinions validated by having everyone agree with you? its art and expression, if you dont like it, so what?

[robbie saltaire]

Kerouac would belong in the "canon" if only for his unquantifiably powerful influence on so much work that came after him -- but VISIONS OF CODY is a much better version of the Neal Cassady/Kerouac road trip America than ON THE ROAD: it has vast quantities of heartfelt (rather than ultrapolished) prose that portrays Neal empathetically, much imaginative and innovative writing, and perhaps the finest ending of any book I've ever read.

n.b.: anyone who ever believed the canard that ON THE ROAD was first draft has either never read it or never tried to write.
,

[PJ Finnerty]

Good to see On The Road still frustrates and annoys the right people after all these years.

And funny to see a book written in the early 1950s about America in the late 1940s, is regarded by some to be a *60s book*. I guess that is what they mean when they something is ahead of it's time.

[CR]

How can "Kerouac" be kicked out of something that no longer exists? We kicked out the canon years ago. Are you Ripvanwinklin' it?

[mxp]

Anybody who calls any literature, other than that borne out of the contemporary social sciences "identity literature" lacks the significant context--historical, cultural, et al.--to understand art.

[justin Bailey]

Keroac had a big part in changing the consciousness of the nation, laying the groundwork for the 60's. I agree that the 60's were over 40 years ago and its time to move on. However, Keroac's role in shifting the cultural mindset to something more freedom oriented cannot be denied. Though I personally am not a big Keroac fan, he should stay in the cannon.

[thom]

never danced around the room after reading kero-whatever, but he's a milestone on our literary highway and what do we want, miles and miles of just road?

Celebrity is as much roulette as merit we all know.

my neighbor, mike fink, the most successful man I know in the important things, farm, family, fun -- a man always worth listening to, says On the Road pales in comparison to Woody Guthrie's memoir of being out there...

(btw -- Tale of Two Cities created our myth of what the French Revolution was about -- and it relied on the more brilliant work of Thomas Carlyle, a man much more beautiful, insightful, and fiery than Kerouac, most of the time... )

[K]

Have a lot of people lost the ability to empathize with characters from classic books from the fifties and earlier? There was an article in the New York Times that said people were losing empathy for Holden Caulfied and it was hard teaching "A Catcher in the Rye" to high school students because they all thought Holden Caufield should take Prozac. What is a canon anyways? The magazine the article refers to is making suggestions about what should be kept and what should be dumped out of the canon. Some people think there are canons in the United States and that they are a representation of the fragmentation of literature in the US. I think On The Road is taught in schools the same way Ayn Rand and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance are taught, which is, not very much. But people feel very strongly about these books. Maybe the ideas of lowbrow, middlebrow and highbrow should be brought back from the fifties to describe intellectual life in the US today.

[cc]

i felt strangely happy to read that so many others agreed that kerouac should be kicked out of the cannon. he's like the privileged white boy you see driving down the street blasting rap music who thinks he's a gangsta.

i also think it's funny that the author (a "he") takes issue with the fact that a "she" feels alienated by keruoac selfish, misogynistic view of the world. why should women be expected to embrace this? is this the same way that men so heartily embrace the viewpoint of "thelma and louise?"

[Polomoche]

On the Road has worthy artistic merit for both its resonance and what at the time was a revolutionary writing style. I read it when I was 16 and loved it; I don't think I could bear to read it now. But one must give credit to what breaks ground, like it or not.

[Nick]

Gotta love Scott's comment:

"who cares? do you really need your opinions validated..."

A guy who thinks discussion of art is pointless just read and commented on a discussion of art.

Nice.

[martin weiss]

Kerouac is timeless as consciousness, as Zen, as heartbreak. Therein lies his alternative to '50's thinking, which is still going on in the minds of those who dare not to jeopardize their machine-like lives with independent thought.
"Where the mystery is the deepest is the source of all that is subtle and wonderful."-- Lao T'se
What have these canon-definers written to compare with McCarthy? The canon is stuck in the fifties.
How can a person who just doesn't 'get' Kerouac be self-aware enough to know it?
Consciousness is no big deal. Ants are conscious.
Try it. It's an adventure.

[Rham Sumbda]

What seems like high art to you reads like hopeless pretense and hepcat posing to others. Many will agree with you, though. I'm sure they love it in Silverlake, Los Feliz and Echo Park. Or at least they say they do.

[K]

After the "culture wars" of the eighties and nineties, how can anyone say "[t]he canon is stuck in the fifties."? In a way one can say that Kerouac is "stuck in the fifties" with his appropriation of black slang and music and his attitude towards women. Has anyone read "The White Negro" by Noman Mailer? Kerouac's whole group of work reminds me of that essay.

[Jordan Lund]

"The Road" was fine... for an uncredited rip-off of the classic 1970s manga "Lone Wolf and Cub". It's certainly nothing more than that.

[a Lonesome Traveler]

While the idea of anything resembling an aesthetic canon has been disputed, denied, and rumored dead inside and outside the academy for decades -- after all, wasn't it Goethe who wrote that such petty categorizations are no longer important; rather, "it is the time for world literature, and all must aid in bringing it about” (Goethe, 83) -- ON THE ROAD has never been out of print since its 1957 publication.
Thus, 'a picture may be worth a thousand words,' but Kerouac's authorship is worth hundreds of thousands of readers. And any single attentive reader who listens to voice rise from those pages is of far greater value than any 'authority' speaking on what constitutes 'the' 'canon.'
Seems to me the folks at "Second Pass" are 'just typing.' After all, let's remember that those responsible for the Nobel award in literature think all American lit is drivel:
"The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That ignorance is restraining" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/01/nobelprize.usa). Considering this example, let's ponder the extent to which ignorance is restraining in the context of "Second Pass'" dismissive decrees. Kerouac's democratic aesthetic should not be overlooked because one of his novels fails to receive the 'seal of approval' from any source claiming to be a literary 'authority.'