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Representations of Space, Place and Landscape in Jack Kerouac's On the Road

Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road' is a novel about youth, freedom and the rejection of the American Dream. This essay focuses upon depictions of landscape, space, place, placelessness and betweeness of place as experienced by the protagonist, Sal Paradise.

On the Road is a work of semi-autobiographical metafiction. The protagonist, Sal Paradise, based on Kerouac himself and the hero, Dean Moriarty, based on his friend Neal Cassady set off on a road trip across America in the 1950s. 1950s America saw the beginning of the rejection of the American dream, by significant numbers of American men. The immediate post war decade saw growing numbers of men rejecting marriage for a bachelor lifestyle or leaving their families, searching for self-gratification. The 'beat' movement of the 1950s, of which Jack Kerouac was a key player, was based upon a romantic notion of the drifter, unfettered by possessions, free to roam the road. They rejected the restrictions of a settled domestic lifestyle choosing geographic mobility. Tim Cresswell[2] argued that mobility is a central theme in the history of American culture. However, early westward movements included women and children with resettlementas the purpose for travel. In On the Road, women are used for sexual and nurturing purposes. In each town, Sal and Dean meet up and sleep with women then move on without them. For the beat generation, mobility and placelessness was the purpose of travelling; the ambiguity between home and stability. The road and mobility is a central theme of On the Road.

On the Road was originally written as a 120 foot long continuous unpunctuated paragraph in an attempt to produce an uninterrupted account of the experience of constant movement, using language to penetrate the boundaries of standard grammar and sentence construction. Kerouac believed that stopping to change the paper hampered his creative flow, so he taped together pieces of drawing paper, making a continuous roll of paper.[3] Kerouac claimed that he wrote On the Road in six days; in order to get it published, however, he had to edit his text introducing standard grammar. Kerouac's paragraphs are often long and dense, giving an impression of overcrowdedness, a need to escape from restriction. The long, flowing sentences offer a sense of urgency, speeding the reader along to the conclusion. For example, the description of Dean's job as a parking lot attendant is 150 words long,[4]

Landscape plays an important role in On the Road. The main action in the novel takes place on the road, and the major cities travelled through, for example, New York City, Denver, San Francisco, Mexico, and New Orleans. Sal 'preferred reading the American landscape' (OTR, 93) than the book he had stolen for the journey. Landscapes can be viewed in both a natural and cultural sense. Donald Meinig argues that when we look at a particular scene, spectators incorporate their own beliefs and values into their assessment of a given landscape. Meinig argues that each individual viewer wears a unique pair of glasses with which they view the landscape, arguing that there are ten different lenses with which one views landscape: nature, habitat, artefact, system, problem, wealth, ideology, history, place, and aesthetic.[5] Each description is socially constructed by the viewer, 'landscape is composed not only of what lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads' [6]

'It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness of the late afternoon of time.' (OTR, 153)

People encode their ideas about the landscape according to a certain cultural code. Understanding these ideas involves a process of decoding, but only if the particular cultural context is known or experienced. Sal's dreams of places he has seen on a map become his experiences as he travels from place to place, his goal being the promised land of San Francisco. Sal's expectations are never met; his anticipation on approaching each new city and the subsequent disappointment on reaching them highlights the exhilaration of travelling on the road. It is the travel, the mobility and sense of placelessness Sal and his companions enjoy, they deliberately avoid the kinds of places and activities which, through association, would associate them with respectability.

Sal was excited by the prospect of not knowing how he would reach San Francisco. He enjoyed meeting and conversing with new people, as the following passage highlights:

'The greatest ride in my life was about to come up, a truck, with a flatboard at the back, with about six or seven boys sprawled out on it, and the drivers, two young blond farmers from Minnesota, were picking up every single soul they found on that road-the most smiling, cheerful couple of handsome bumpkins you could ever wish to see, both wearing cotton shirts and overalls, nothing else; both thick-wristed and earnest, with broad howareyou smiles for anybody and anything that came across their path. I ran up, said 'Is there room?' They said, 'Sure, hop on, 'sroom for everybody.' (OTR, 22)

When Sal and Dean are in Mexico, they are unaware of the cultural identities of the people who live there. Non-white people are referred to as other, and are sporadically placed in a non-white world, 'Hongkong humanity', 'Algerian streets' and 'Arabian paradise.'

Place and the domestic home are associated with the feminine whilst travel in space is associated with the masculine.[7] Sal associates the East with stagnation, age and intelligence; the West, for Sal is associated with passion, youth, exuberance and freedom. East is feminine, West is masculine. At the start of the novel, Sal believes that his destiny lies in the West, 'I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future...' (OTR, 15/16)

Sal's sense of displacement is heightened when, en route to Chicago, he rests in a hotel room. When he awakes from his sleep, he temporarily does not know who or where he is: '..I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I had never seen...'[8] His sanity comes from travel and mobility, 'we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one noble function of all time, move.' (OTR, 121) Sal constantly experiences betweenness of place; he does not want to be rooted.

In Place and Placelessness, Relph argues that the human experience of place is a fundamental aspect of a person's existence in this world. Places, 'are fusions of human and natural order and are the significant centers of our immediate experiences of the world'.[9] His text attempted to unravel and describe the essential experiential nature of place. Relph claims that the crucial quality of place was its power to order and focus human intentions, behaviour and experience spatially. Relph's most original contribution to the understanding of place was his discussion of 'insideness' and 'outsideness'. A person experiencing insideness feels safe as opposed to threatened, enclosed rather than exposed, relaxed and not stressed. Relph suggests that the more intensely inside a place a person feels, the stronger will be his or her identity with that place. A person experiencing outsideness feels alienated from place, and feels a division between themselves and world. Sal's notion of insideness clashes with his experiences of outsideness; his spiritual journey is very different from his physical one. Kerouac argued that the central theme of On the Road was that their journey was an inward, spiritual quest.

Sal experiences what Relph labelled 'existential outsideness' a sense of strangeness and alienation, experienced by new visitors to a place. Sal also experiences what Relph would term incidental outsideness; places are little more than backgrounds, landscapes streaming past when on the road. His principal aim is travel and mobility. He never reaches his goal, his destination, because it cannot be placed. His ideas about each place is marred by his actual experiences of it; when he eventually reaches San Francisco, he realises that he can only return East.

Relph states that an 'authentic' sense of place, is 'a direct and genuine experience of the entire complex of the identity of places‑-not mediated and distorted through a series of quite arbitrary social and intellectual fashions about how that experience should be, nor following stereotyped conventions"[10] Relph argued that authentic sense of place is being replaced by placelessness, 'the casual eradication of distinctive places and the making of standardized landscapes that results from an insensitivity to the significance of place'.[11] Many of the idealistic visions Sal and his companions experience are facades: 'The mountains, the magnificent Rockies that you can see to the west from any part of town were 'papier mache.' The whole universe was crazy and cockeyed and extremely strange.' (OTR, 43) Sal sees mere parodies of his dreams about the places he is visiting, and believes them to be sellouts. Dislocation and constant movement distract Sal from analysing the places he has dreamed about, lessening his disappointment. Sal is restless 'I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotive howling off to the mountains. I wanted to pursue my star further'. (OTR, 51) Relph suggested that placelessness occurs as a result of 'kitsch', a gullible acceptance of mass culture, and governmental authority, the 'undermining of place for both individuals and cultures, and the casual replacement of the diverse and significant places of the world with anonymous spaces and exchangeable environments'.[12]

In conclusion, On the Road is a novel about freedom and liberation. It describes a life without place, a life of experiencing the beauty of landscape and nature. However, the novel concludes with Sal settling down to a rooted existence of marriage and possibly a family. Sal's dream of the life on the road did not live up to his expectations. Humans need to identify with a place - it is in our nature to do so.

[1] Kerouac, J. On the Road. Penguin. London. 1957. p 77. Further reference to the text in this essay will be OTR.

[2] Cresswell, T Mobility as Resistance 1993

[3] Charter, A introduction to On the Road p xix.

[4] See OTR p 8

[5] Meinig, Donald W. (1979) The Beholding Eye. Ten Versions of the Same Scene. In: D.W.Meinig (ed.) The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press

[6] Meinig p34

[7] See Cresswell, p258

[8] Kerouac, p 15.

[9]Place and Placelessness p141

[10] Relph P64

[11] Relph, preface

[12] Relph p. 143