On the Road by Jack Kerouac
On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across America. The novel, published in 1957, is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations of the 1950s, with many key figures in the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee) and Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx) represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac himself as the narrator Sal Paradise. The film was produced by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Walter Salles, in 2012. It focuses more on the emotional relationships and love trianbgles than the book, with a much more sympathetic and rounded treatment of the women for a modern audience. But other characters on the road who are quite detailed in the book have been omitted. Jazz plays a less obvious and vibrant role in the film than in the book where it is a real source of energy and exploration.
The road is the central connecting element – a search for some meaning between episodes of drug abuse, sad relationships and meaningless sexual encounters. It is travelled in a variety of ways: on foot, hitchhiking, by bus and by car – often driven at breakneck speed under the influence of drugs, with sex in the front or back seats. On the one hand it is a symbol of freedom – speed, wide open spaces, long roads to distant mountains and dramatic lighting of dawn and sunset, and white driving snow. For Sal it is a search for his voice as a writer.
“the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad 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.”
“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
“because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars…”
But ultimately it is shown as meaningless – an attempt to run away from life, to avoid commitment and complexity, a road to suicide, to find something that does not exist.
“My whole wretched life swam before my weary eyes, and I realized no matter what you do it’s bound to be a waste of time in the end so you might as well go mad.” ― Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll
The break point is where Dean abandons Sal in Mexico when he is very ill. Then the successful writer Sal turns away from Dean when he is obviously messed up – but a rather ambivalent ending – does anything have any meaning if not the road?
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.
Kerouac died, at the age of 47, was determined to be due to an internal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis, the result of a lifetime of heavy drinking, along with complications from an untreated hernia and a bar fight he had been involved in several weeks prior to his death.
Part 2 Landscape as a Journey examines photography as a tool for research – enabling engagement with a place and a means of exploration – and the relationship between landscape practice and cartography. (Alexander 2013 pp 52-53)
Surveys
Alongside pictorial landscape photography during the later part of the 19th Century ‘topographic’ or ‘proto-documentary’ approaches arose making use of the ability of the camera to record external phenomena. This coincided with a rapid rise in industry, imperialism and means of communication, notably the print media and telegraphy. The photographic process was believed to eliminate any subjectivity on the part of the photographer. Photographs provided a means to communicate, with unparalleled realism, the far-flung corners of the country and the world.
2.1 : ‘Territorial Photography’
The Road
The road has featured prominently in art and literature as a means to get characters from one place to another, and as a stage for narratives to be played out.
Typologies and new topographies
The most significant influence on contemporary landscape practice was the exhibition, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape at George Eastman House, Rochester, USA in 1975, curated by William Jenkins.
See New Topographics
New Topographics Exhibition 1975
The typological approach remains a popular mode of photographic exploration. Power and control are recurring themes within topological practice. The process of photographing and collecting can also, in itself, be seen as a symbolic act of possession and control. See Sontag, S. (1979) On Photography. London: Penguin, pp.12–16
See for example the work of Donovan Wylie
Mapping and other technologies
A ‘map’ isn’t necessarily something used to navigate through unfamiliar territory; it’s also a visual ordering of features and information…a means of making sense of our physical surroundings in new ways. Alexander 2013 p67
Mapping and Other Technologies
Project 2.4: Is appropriation appropriate?
Land Art
Earth and land art use film and photography to document outcomes and incorporates aspects of performance art and sculpture.
Psychogeography and ‘edgelands’
Psychogeography is essentially the broad terrain where geography – in terms of the design and layout of a place – influences the experience, i.e. the psyche and behaviour, of the user. It has walking as a central component (Alexander 2013 p74)
2.6 Psychogeography and Edgelands