Kerouac’s On the Road was the first book I read after I moved to Reno a little over two years ago. The story tied in perfectly with the road adventure I had just embarked on; driving from St. Louis through flat Kansas, over the cold, tall Rockies, across the “Loneliest Road in America,” and down into what I would later see as the pit-hole that is Reno. I also felt a sense of connectivity with Kerouac’s character: the philosophic observer who throws caution to the wind in exchange for a life of experience and sensation. Where I got lost on my journey, I now realize, is that, after a while, it stopped being a journey. I still had bills to pay so I got a job. Instead of using what I worked for for higher purposes, I drank it all at crappy college bars where I rarely ever even had an intelligent conversation.
This all comes to mind after reading my first essay for the 2009 challenge, Existentialism and the Beats: A
Renegotiation, by Erik Ronald Mortenson. Like the title suggests, Mortenson’s main idea in this essay is that, while the Beats had an obvious respect for the existentialists who predated them, they themselves were their own entity whose members chose a path of experience rather than philosophical meandering. Mortenson highlights the different writing styles of the two movements as an example:
The schism here is between reflective and spontaneous forms of writing. Existentialists may try to “entice” their readers into authenticity with fictional accounts, but their use of the literary is almost always based on a concretization of abstract, reflective thought…The Beats do not entice; they demonstrate. An ancillary goal is to get the reader to develop their own brand of authenticity, but their primary goal is to present the authenticity that they have achieved (or are trying to achieve) to the reader via the written word.
Mortenson says that this experience is demonstrated to the reader by the Beat’s pervasive use of prose. This is evident in Ginsburg, from Howl, to his letter to the Hell’s Angels (no link, see Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels). Kerouac even suggests writing “without consciousness in semi-trance.” The influence of Freud upon the Beat’s does not go unnoticed in this essay.
After reading this essay, I am tempted to go back and reread On the Road as well as other Kerouac classics, like Dr. Sax and, of course, Dharma Bums and The Subterraneans. I also have a renewed optimism about the journey that life is and must not forget to keep on with the experience of every moment.
Tags: beat, challenge, essays, existentialism, Kerouac, On the road, reading
February 4, 2009 at 6:20 pm |
Great review – I’ll add it to the list of reviews on the challenge page.:)
August 13, 2009 at 3:52 pm |
[...] Presented to Charles Williams edited by C.S. Lewis – reviewed by Dwell in Possibility ~ Existentialism and the Beats: A Renegotiation by Erik Ronald Mortensen – reviewed by Lusid Disilliusions ~ The Freedom to Offend by Ian [...]