Professor Amy
Hungerford:
So, today we find ourselves in
a very different novelistic
world than we've been in for the
last week and a half:
On the Road.
Did anyone take this course
because they love On the
Road?
Anybody?
One, sort of ambivalently.
Yes.
Okay.
Sometimes I do get students who
have just an image of this novel
in their mind,
or they read it when they were
in high school and have a sort
of irrational,
passionate love for it.
And so, sometimes people
approach it in that way,
and I think in a way it holds
that aura around itself in our
culture and in the history of
the novel in this period that
we're studying together.
I'm going to talk a little bit
about its publishing history,
its compositional history,
actually, at the end of my two
lectures on the novel.
So, I would ask you just to
reserve whatever curiosity you
have about that.
So, in a way,
I'm flipping my usual practice;
I would tell you a little bit
about its publication history at
the beginning.
I'm going to do that at the end
for this reason:
that it has such a special
place in the imagination of our
culture.
And so, I'm going to talk about
that after we have a better
understanding of what's going on
in the book.
My point, at the end of my
lecture on Lolita on
Monday, was that Nabokov is
trying to imagine an autonomous
work of art that has a life to
it,
that is in some sense animated
or personified,
and that this desire to make
the aesthetic something living
introduces to the world of the
aesthetic the problem of
mortality.
It's mortality that gives it
that sense of ephemeral value,
but it's also mortality that
threatens to cancel it out
altogether.
The language that the Beats
tried to imagine,
tried to write,
takes up some of these problems
that we saw in Nabokov.
Unlike Nabokov,
these writers are not trying to
make a language that is
autonomous and separate from the
world,
so you will not see the kind of
artifice and the labored
attention to form.
You're not going to have a
writer spending a month on the
representation of a barber from
Kasbeam.
You're not going to get that in
the Beats.
Instead, you're getting
something, a language that tries
to come as close as
possible--not necessarily to
life in all its facets--but to
life as we experience it.
In a certain way,
this is not a rejection of
modernism and its desire for the
autonomous work of art,
because partly,
as I've shown,
the desire for the autonomous
work of art shades into the
desire to replicate life.
There is that desire much more
explicitly in the writing of
Jack Kerouac,
the desire to replicate
experience as you read,
the feeling of having the
experience that the writer wants
you to have and that the writer
himself has had.
That's always going to be
important to understanding this
work.
So, that's one aspect in which
it shares something with
modernism, even though
stylistically,
and as a matter of craft and
composition, it looks very
distinct.
The other way it shares an
ambition of modernism is
precisely in that effort to
communicate experience,
consciousness.
So, if you've read at all in
the novels of Virginia Woolf,
for example,
or in James Joyce's novels,
you know that part of modernist
innovation, part of the
stylistic difficulty,
is the effort to put on the
page what happens in the mind,
that sense of the mind drifting
from one idea to another that
you get in Virginia Woolf's
prose,
so magically in Woolf's prose.
So, that is something these
writers share with modernism,
but there is one big difference
and I want to exemplify that for
you just by reading to you two
parallel texts,
one from the modernist canon
and one from the Beat canon.
So, first I want to read to you
the footnote to T.S.
Eliot's The Wasteland.
Now The Wasteland was
the first poem to have
footnotes, and you have to ask
yourself: what do you have to
think the poem is in
order to think that it needs
footnotes?
So, I'm going to say a little
bit more about that,
but let me just read to you,
first, from the notes on The
Wasteland:
Not only the title,
but the plan and a good deal of
the incidental symbolism of the
poem were suggested by Miss
Jessie L.
Weston's book on the Grail
legend, From Ritual to
Romance (Cambridge)." 
He has a little bibliography,
there:
Indeed,
so deeply am I indebted,
Miss Weston's book will
elucidate the difficulties of
the poem much better than my
notes can do;
and I recommend it (apart from
the great interest of the book
itself) to any who think such
elucidation of the poem worth
the trouble.
To another work of anthropology
I am indebted in general,
one which has influenced our
generation profoundly;
I mean The Golden Bough;
I have used especially the two
volumes Adonis,
Attis, Osiris.
Anyone who is acquainted with
these works will immediately
recognize in the poem certain
references to vegetation
ceremonies.
And then there are particular
notes for the different parts of
the poem.
That's the introduction to the
footnotes.
What I want you to note there
is the sense that the matter of
the poem comes from an archive,
an archive of scholarly work,
a body of knowledge that you
read about.
And I also want you to note
that language:
"Miss Jessie Weston."
It's a very mannered,
decorous language.
Now I would like to read to you
from the footnote to
Howl, Allen Ginsberg's
famous poem,
that for many people embodied
at the time what it meant to be
engaged in this new literary
project.
So, this is footnote to
Howl:
Holy!
holy!
Holy!
Holy!
Holy!
Holy!
Holy!
Holy!
Holy!
Holy!
Holy!
Holy!
holy!
The world is holy!
The soul is holy!
The skin is holy!
The nose is holy!
The tongue and cock and hand
and asshole holy!
Everything is holy!
Everybody's holy!
Everywhere is holy!
Every day is in eternity!
Everyman's an angel!
The bum's as holy as the
seraphim!
the madman is holy as you my
soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy!
the poem is holy the voice is
holy the hearers are holy the
ecstasy is holy!
Holy Peter holy Allen
holy Solomon holy Lucien holy
Kerouac holy Huncke holy
Burroughs holy Cassady holy the
unknown buggered and suffering
beggar holy the hideous human
angels!
A little different tone,
don't you think?
A few things I want to note
about that besides the obvious.
The fount of poetic inspiration
is not to be found in an
archive.
It is not to be found in Miss
Jessie Weston's book on ritual
and romance.
It is not to be found with a
bibliography saying "Cambridge."
That's not where you find the
fount of the great poem.
The footnote to Howl
says that the source of
Howl--that's what
footnotes are;
they're an indication of the
source--it says that the source
of the poetry is that holy,
lived experience,
and a particular slice of lived
experience: the formerly
rejected,
the indecorous, the ecstatic.
I noticed that several of
you were smiling,
in a way, as I read,
that suggested you were
embarrassed by the performance.
Right?
I did not elicit this by
accident.
Embarrassment is something that
the Beats value.
When Ginsberg first read
Howl, he was on stage,
and there was a little
bathroom.
It was--I think it was--in a
book store.
(I can't remember;
I didn't reread my notes on
Howl.) And so,
when the show started he was in
the bathroom,
on the pot with the door open,
and then he got up,
and he hiked up his pants,
and he waltzed out and he gave
his reading of Howl.
This is indicative of the sense
that he wants to lay bare,
in a literal way,
all the seaminess of human
life, all the aspects of what it
means to be an embodied person,
all the ecstasies that come
from that embodiment.
And, of course,
this is not at all original to
Ginsberg.
If you read Walt Whitman,
you will see much of the same
ethos (and probably a lot better
poetry).
So, Ginsberg is not the first
to do this in the American
tradition, for sure,
but it's a very important part
of what the Beats revive.
And I want to get at that
question of embarrassment,
because it comes up very
explicitly on page 36.
Embarrassment is thematized in
On the Road, and
it's assigned what I think is a
very interesting provenance.
So, this is Chad King talking
to Sal Paradise:
A quavering twang comes
out when he speaks.
"The thing I always liked,
Sal, about the Plains Indians,
was the way they always got
s'danged embarrassed after they
boasted the number of scalps
they got.
In Ruxton's Life in the Far
West there's an Indian who
gets red all over blushing
because he got so many scalps
and he runs like hell into the
plains to glory over his deeds
in hiding.
Damn, that tickled me!" 
The sense of embarrassment is
the sense that the excess
of--what?--joy,
in this passage,
the Indian's bravery,
his achievement,
his success;
all of that is in excess of the
decorous presentation of that
experience, of that real world
of life, of that excessive joy.
And it's given here this sort
of clichéd,
noble origin with the Native
American, the Plains Indian.
So, there is a sense,
in the Plains Indian,
that he is both the embodiment
of a noble, restrained lineage;
but also, deep in that American
past, is this sense of great
excess.
Embarrassment tells us we're in
the presence of the excess,
and that's why Beat writers
court it.
That's why I courted it today
for you.
The excess requires,
for the Beats,
a new kind of language.
One aspect of their language
which maybe you've noticed in
On the Road--it's not
quite so pronounced in On the
Road as it is elsewhere,
certainly--in the letters that
these figures write to each
other.
Part of that is the elimination
of small words,
"the," "and";
the abbreviation of certain
words, "your" to "yr."
There are all kinds of little
abbreviations they make,
and it suggests that language
has to be wrenched out of its
conventions;
syntax can be set aside;
language needs to move at the
speed of experience and at the
speed of ecstasy.
So, that's one small way in the
language that they practiced
tried to imitate the experience
that they were immersing
themselves in.
But there were more formulated
ways of capturing that
experience in language.
Jack Kerouac had a list of
essentials that he taped up on
his wall when he was writing,
and this is what they include:
Scribbled secret
notebooks and wild typewritten
pages for your own joy [and
that's "yr," your own joy].
Submissive to everything,
open, listening.
Try never to get drunk
outside your own house.[Well,
this is a piece of advice
clearly he never took.]
Be in love with your life.
Be crazy dumb saint of the
mind.
Blow as deep as you want to
blow.
Write what you want
bottomless from bottom of the
mind.
The unspenspeakable visions
of the individual.
In tranced fixation
dreaming upon object before
you.
And then, my favorite one is:
"You're a genius all the time."
Now, try putting that up in
front of your desk:
"You're a genius all the time."
It will help you to produce a
lot of writing;
I guarantee.
Kerouac tried over and over
again to write On the
Road, and it was an effort
to practice this kind of free
language that would be
uninhibited and that would
gesture towards some deeper,
bottomless part of the human
experience, the human soul.
Sometimes it was spiritualized.
In this sense,
this is why I put this quote up
on the board from On the
Road: "We've got to go
someplace, find something."
There is a relentless seeking
sense that's at the heart of
this work.
Now, for those of you who
don't know, On the Road
does document pretty closely the
actual road trips that Jack
Kerouac took with Neal Cassady
and a whole host of others,
and I can do a little decoding
for you.
Old Bull Lee is William
Burroughs, and his wife,
Jane, Jane Lee.
So, Allen Ginsberg is Carlo
Marx, and Ginsberg went to
Columbia.
He was kicked out of Columbia,
and then sort of went back.
He was in and out of school.
So, a lot of them were in this
little community,
and they picked up wanderers
and various people who wanted to
learn from them.
And that's what Neal Cassady
was to them at first,
a kind of wanderer who wanted
to be in their intellectual,
but bohemian,
circle.
So, you see the kind of
language that Neal represents at
the very beginning of the novel.
First of all,
he's introduced in this very
mysterious way:
"First reports of him."
This is on the first page of
Part One, the middle of that
first paragraph:
"First reports of him came to
me through Chad King,
who had shown me a few letters
from him, written in a New
Mexico reform school."
So, his letters come out of
this western land,
New Mexico, and a land of
criminality, the reform school.
So, he's exotic just from the
very beginning,
and it's an exotic language.
It's the letters that come out
of this exotic place that first
catch their attention.
I was tremendously
interested in the letters
because they so naively and
sweetly asked Chad to teach him
all about Nietzsche and all the
wonderful intellectual things
that Chad knew.
At one point Carlo and I talked
about the letters and wondered
if we would ever meet the
strange Dean Moriarty.
This is all far back,
when Dean was not the way he is
today, when he was a young jail
kid shrouded in mystery.
Then news came that Dean was
out of reform school and was
coming to New York for the first
time;
also there was talk that he had
just married a girl called
Marylou.
It's that passive sense:
"There was talk."
Who's talking?
We don't know.
That passive verb,
"there was talk," gives you the
sense that there is this wide
community passing word mouth to
mouth of the coming of a
mysterious spiritual figure:
"first reports of him;"
"news came;"
"there was talk."
So, language is this communal
set of rumors spiritualized by
its very vagueness and shared
quality.
And then, it's just fascinating
to listen to what Dean says.
Now this on page 2.
This is how he talks: 
All this time Dean was
telling Marylou things like
this.
"Now, darling.
Here we are in New York and
although I haven't quite told
you everything that I was
thinking about when we crossed
the Missouri and especially at
the point when we passed the
Booneville Reformatory which
reminded me of my jail problem,
it is absolutely necessary now
to postpone all those leftover
things concerning our personal
love things and at once begin
thinking of specific worklife
plans ..."
and so on in,
the way that he had in those
early days." 
His language is a sort of
mishmash of poorly used academic
locutions: "worklife plans."
It sounds almost like corporate
speak, in a way.
It has that dry quality to it.
And then, on the top of 3,
we get another example:
"In other words we've got
to get on the ball,
darling, what I'm saying,
otherwise it'll be fluctuating
and lack of true knowledge or
crystallization of our
plans."
So, this is not yet that
idealized speech that Kerouac is
dreaming of when he writes the
list of Essentials for
Spontaneous Prose.
Dean's language is not that in
these passages.
His desire for the intellectual
download from Chad is not what's
going to make him the figure of
the new language for Sal.
Rather, it is another kind of
language that he represents that
will be that kind of germ of
what Sal is looking for.
This is, you see,
also on 2 at the beginning
here:
I went to the cold-water
flat with the boys and Dean came
to the door in his shorts.
Marylou was jumping off the
couch.
Dean had dispatched the
occupant of the apartment to the
kitchen probably to make coffee
while he proceeded with his love
problems for to him sex was the
one and only holy and important
thing in life although he had to
sweat and curse to make a living
and so on.
You saw that in the way he
stood bobbing his head,
always looking down,
nodding like a young boxer to
instructions to make you think
he was listening to every word,
throwing in a thousand "yes"es
and "that's right." 
There is this sense of
enthusiasm, so his response is
not an articulation of some
thought, but an effusion:
"Yes;
that's right."
It's a visceral response,
and you see it even more
clearly on 4.
So, he's staying,
Dean is staying with Sal,
and Sal has been writing.
And they're ready to go out,
and Sal says:
"Hold on a minute.
I'll be right with you as soon
as I finish this chapter," and
it was one of the best chapters
in the book.
Then I dressed and off we flew
to New York to meet some girls."
So, I'm going to skip along a
little bit.
("I wasâ€¦"
Oh, let's see.
"As weâ€¦"Actually,
I am going to read that part.)
As we rode in the bus in
the weird phosphorescent void of
the Lincoln Tunnel,
we leaned on each other with
fingers waving and yelled and
talked excitedly and I was
beginning to get the bug like
Dean.
He was simply a youth
tremendously excited with life
and though he was a con man he
was only conning because he
wanted so much to live and get
involved with people who would
otherwise pay no attention to
him.
He was conning me and I knew it
for room and board and how to
write, etc., and he knew I knew.
This had been the basis of our
relationship but I didn't care
and we got along fine.
No pestering, no catering.
We tiptoed around each other
like heartbreaking new friends.
I began to learn from him as
much as he probably learned from
me.
As far as my work was
concerned, he said,
"Go ahead.
Everything you do is great."
He watched over my shoulder as
I wrote stories yelling,
"Yes, that's right.
Wow, man," and "Phew!" 
"Wow" is Dean's word.
"Wow" is the kind of word that
means nothing,
but it suggests the immediacy
of Dean's engagement.
So, all that talking on the
bus, and the way they're moving
their hands, the bug,
that's all where this language
is rising from.
That's where the new language
is going to come from,
and you can see how Sal
assimilates that on page 35.
This is just as he is coming
into Denver:
I said to myself,
Wow, what'll Denver be like?
I got on that hot road and off
I went in a brand-new car driven
by a Denver businessman of about
35.
He went 70.
I tingled all over.
I counted minutes and
subtracted miles.
Just ahead over the rolling
wheat fields all golden beneath
the distant snows of Estes I'd
be seeing old Denver at last.
I pictured myself in a Denver
bar that night with all the gang
and in their eyes I would be
strange and ragged and like the
prophet who has walked across
the land to bring the dark word
and the only word I had was
"wow." 
So Neal's--sorry--Dean's
sense (I will do this and please
forgive me.
I will sometimes slip in to
calling him Dean because he,
Deanâ€¦
nevermind.
You know what I'm saying.
I will sometimes slip in to
calling him Neal when his name
is Dean.) Dean has already
projected this mode of language
into Sal,
so even as he's saying to Sal,
"Teach me how to write," what
he's doing is teaching Sal how
to write,
how to write this kind of book,
how to be the prophet of "wow."
This is all over the text.
If you look at page 62,
it's in these little stories:
Remi woke up and saw me
come in the window.
His great laugh,
one of the greatest laughs in
the world, dinned in my
ear.
And then, if you just skip up
to the top of 63:
The strange thing was
that next door to Remi lived a
Negro called Mr.
Snow whose laugh I swear on the
Bible was positively and finally
the one greatest laugh in all
this world.
The laugh is a lot like the
"wow."
It's that sound you make just
because you're experiencing
something, just because you're
having a response to what's in
front of you,
something someone says.
Okay.
That's another example.
And the last one I'll give you
is on 55.
This is when they've gone up to
the mountain pass after getting
in fights in the bars in Denver:
In the whole eastern dark
wall of the divide this night
there was silence and the
whisper of the wind except in
the ravine where we roared and
on the other side of the divide
was the great Western Slope and
the big plateau that went to
Steamboat Springs and dropped
and led you to the western
Colorado desert and the Utah
desert all in darkness now as we
fumed and screamed in our
mountain nook,
mad, drunken Americans in the
mighty land.
We were on the roof of America
and all we could do was yell I
guess across the night,
eastward over the plains where
somewhere an old man with white
hair was probably walking
towards us with the word and
would arrive any minute and make
us silent.
Their yell at the top of the
world seems to Sal something
that calls for a replacement;
it calls for some other prophet
to come walking ragged towards
them and make them fall silent
with his word.
But, in the meantime,
what you have is the continual
reproduction of that yell,
that laugh, that "wow," that
"yes," that "that's all right,"
all those things that they say
just to register their existence
and their relation with one
another.
I want to note something
else, though,
about the first time that Dean
and Sal meet and the
contextualizing of that meeting.
When they first meet in that
passage that I read to you,
he's just rising up from having
sex on the couch with Marylou in
someone else's apartment.
He sent the owner of the
apartment into the kitchen so he
could have sex with Marylou on
the couch.
In other versions he says that
Dean got up and was naked,
not that he was in his shorts.
There is an immediate sexual
sense that charges the
relationship between these
people.
Those relationships take place
in the context of continual
negotiations of sexual
relationships,
and so the book begins with
that explanation that:
I first met Dean not long
after my wife and I split up.
I had just gotten over a
serious illness that I won't
bother to talk about except that
it had something to do with the
miserably weary splitting up and
my feeling that everything was
dead.
Dean's negotiations between
Marylou and Camille in
Denver--where he has his
schedule,
and he has his exact time he
has to get from one hotel to the
other to sleep with each of
them,
and then he has to meet Carlo
Ginsberg, Carlo Marx,
in the basement to have his
conversations to get to the
"bottomlessness" of each other's
mind--all those negotiations are
absolutely crucial.
It's what they spend their time
talking about,
often.
It's what they spend their time
negotiating.
So, the search for the
immediate language of experience
is part and parcel of a very
complex negotiation of sexual
ties between multiple people.
And it's not just between the
men and the women.
It's between the men and the
men.
And that moment when Sal meets
Dean at the door,
and he's naked;
it's reflected when he sees
Dean with Camille.
Camille opens the door to their
room when they're in Denver,
and he finally sees Dean in
Denver.
He opens the door to the room,
and there is a picture that
Camille has drawn of Dean:
a portrait of him completely
naked,
and it notes his penis in that
picture.
It's as if Sal's first
experience of Dean is already,
in that scene,
assimilated into the image of
Dean: the disembodied,
aesthetic image of Dean.
But that aesthetic image of
Dean is all bound up in these
negotiations.
So, it's a picture that Camille
has drawn, and of course Camille
doesn't know that he's sleeping
with Marylou in another hotel on
the same day,
and so on.
So, all of that is very
palpable, and Sal's own desire
for Dean is sublimated in those
scenes, but it's everywhere at
the level of the language.
And, if you note the repeated
presence of that question,
where was Dean?
Where was Dean?
He's always missing.
When Sal gets to Denver,
that's what he wants to know.
When he gets back to New York,
finally, at the end of this
first road trip,
he has missed Dean.
There's always the sense that
Dean evades him,
and I think part of that sense
of an evading object of desire
is,
again, the pursuit of sex in
this novel;
it's part of the pursuit of sex.
You might think,
given all this,
and given the ultimate plot of
On the Road,
that being on the road is about
pursuing that kind of desire,
and that it is necessitated by
leaving home:
you have to leave home in order
to pursue that desire.
But I would suggest to you that
home is absolutely crucial to
the production of this desire.
And I want to point you to page
26.
This is Sal's story about Big
Slim Hazard, a hobo that he once
knew.
He was a hobo by choice: 
As a little boy,
he'd seen a hobo come up to ask
his mother for a piece of pie
and she had given it to him and
when the hobo went off down the
road the little boy had said,
"Ma, what was that fellow?"
"Why, that's a hobo."
"Ma, I want to be a hobo
someday."
"Shut your mouth.
That's not for the like of the
Hazards."
But he never forgot that day
and when he grew up after a
short spell playing football at
LSU he did become a hobo.
Being a hobo is produced in
this little vignette by the
experience of seeing a hobo get
pie from your mother.
Now, did any of you notice how
often Sal eats pie?
Let me just demonstrate the
litany of pie.
Okay, page 15.
Actually, let's start on 14,
or perhaps on 13:
"Along about three in the
morning after an apple pie and
ice cream in a roadside
standâ€¦."
That's Sal.
Top of 14: 
I ate another apple pie
and ice cream.
That's practically all I ate
all the way across the country.
I knew it was nutritious and it
was delicious.
Fifteen, bottom:
I ate apple pie and ice
cream.
It was getting better as I got
deeper in to Iowa,
the pie bigger,
the ice cream richer.
There were the most beautiful
bevies of girls everywhere I
looked in Des Moines that
afternoon.
They were coming home from high
school but I had no time now for
thoughts like that and promised
myself a ball in Denver.
And if you look on 107,
the first thing Sal does when
he gets home is eat.
When I got home I ate
everything in the icebox.
My mother got up and looked at
me.
"Poor little Salvatore," she
said in Italian.
"You're thin. You're thin.
Where have you been all this
time?"
I had on two shirts and two
sweaters.
My canvas bag had torn
cottonfield pants and the
tattered remnants of my huarache
shoes in it.
My aunt and I decided to buy a
new electric refrigerator with
the money I had sent her from
California;
it was to be the first one in
the family.
There is a sense in which
hunger, the hunger generated by
the road, in Sal's case in this
last scene--he's been penniless;
all he had was cough drops to
eat at the very end--that the
hunger generated by the road
exists in a necessary relation
to the consumption of home.
And I would suggest to you that
the consumption of home is
driven by a certain kind of
desire as well,
that desire to move up in the
American class structure:
"the first electric
refrigerator in my family."
He's earned a little money on
the road and sent it home.
What it does for him is allow
him to buy his aunt this symbol
of a middle-class American
domesticity,
and he is a happy participant
in this new purchase.
This is not exactly just
what the women do while the boys
are out on the road.
The boys want the pie.
The boys want to become hobos
because there's a kind of hunger
that's generated at home;
it's satisfied at home,
but it's also generated at
home.
And I want to suggest to you
that part of the misogyny of the
novel--which I'm sure is
palpable to all of us as we
read--part of that misogyny is
connected to this consumptive
ethos.
So, when we talk about desire
for something--"we've got to go
someplace, find something--the
very vagueness of that desire is
connected with the basic hungers
of the body for sex,
for food, for sleep even.
We see Dean sort of begging for
sleep after his conversation
with Carlo Marx in the basement
in Denver.
Those kinds of desires are
connected also with that
American habit of consumption.
This is a consumer society;
in the 1950s it was already
very much so.
The mass production after World
War II had already taken hold.
Supermarkets,
as we saw in Wise Blood,
are already something one
can be fond of,
as Enoch was.
And so, if this is a novel
whose aura has always said to
us, "Be free,
be countercultural,"
what I'm suggesting is that
it's structured around a very
deeply embedded American
cultural trait of consumption.
It spiritualizes that kind of
desire, and my symbol for it is
pie.
I want to show you one last
thing about how the language
works, and this is on page 49.
To set aside the critique of
that search for a moment,
I just want to move back into
it in these spiritual terms and
see what we can see.
When Dean and Carlo are talking
to each other,
there's a lot of anxiety on
either part about whether they
have actually attained that
thing that they were looking
for.
On 48, their talk is described
as business in the beginning.
Then they got down to
business.
They sat on the bed
cross-legged and looked at each
other.
I slouched in a nearby chair
and saw all of it.
They began with an abstract
thought, discussed it,
reminded each other of another
abstract point forgotten in the
rush of events.
Dean apologized but promised he
could get back to it and manage
it fine, bringing up
illustrations.
And then, they have this very
complicated back-and-forth about
things that they remembered,
or didn't, and they hashed
these things over:
Then Carlo asked Dean if
he was honest and specifically
if he was being honest with him
in the bottom of his soul.
"Why do you bring that up
again?"
"There is one last thing I want
to know.'"
"But dear Sal, you're listening.
You are sitting there.
We'll ask Sal.
What would he say?"
And I said, "That last thing is
what you can't get,
Carlo.
Nobody can get to that last
thing.
We keep on living in hopes of
catching it once for all."
So, all this language is
produced because you can't ever
get to that last thing;
you have to keep hashing it
over.
But if you go to the next page
you can see--or actually two
pages over--you can see that
already Sal is taking what he
can get from this language and
transposing it into his
experience of reality.
So Carlo had earlier--sorry to
flip back and forth so much--had
read earlier his poem--this is
on 47--to Sal.
He had been reading poetry.
Carlo woke up in the
morning and heard the vulgar
pigeons yakking in the street
outside his cell.
He saw the sad nightingales
nodding on the branches and they
reminded him of his mother.
A gray shroud fell over the
city.
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.
So, this is what Carlo
represents in his poetry.
Well, if you look,
Sal, after witnessing what it
means--what their business is
with one another,
the way they try to get to the
bottom of each other's soul--he
looks out, and he sees the world
through Carlo's eyes.
He's been awake all this time
listening:
"What were you thinking,
Sal?"
I told them that I was thinking
they were very amazing maniacs
and that I had spent the whole
night listening to them like a
man watching the mechanism of a
watch that reached clear to the
top of Berthoud Pass and was yet
made with the smallest works of
the most delicate watch in the
world.
They smiled.
I pointed my finger at them and
said, "If you keep this up,
you'll both go crazy but let me
know what happens as you go
along."
I walked out and took a trolley
to my apartment and Carlo Marx's
papier-mache mountains grew red
as the great sun rose from the
eastward plains.
So, the poetry that is part and
parcel of the conversation
between Dean and Carlo--Carlo's
poetry--seeps out of that
basement room.
And there's a real spatial
sense here, that it's being
generated at the base of the
world,
and it goes up and it
transforms these mountains into
papier-mache.
It makes them in one sense
false;
there is a falseness to the
overlay that Carlo gives to Sal,
and through which he then sees.
There's a falseness,
a craftedness,
but it's a kind of folk
craftedness.
This is not the craftedness of
modernism.
This is papier-mache,
a fairly crude folk art.
Anyone can do it.
Get your strips of newspaper
and paste them up.
So, it has a quality that is
different from Humbert's
elaborate world view through
which we see or don't see
Lolita.
It's a very different kind of
crafting, but yet it does
replace reality in a similar
way, or it makes demands on
reality that push the real back.
And so, even though they
can never get to the bottom of
their souls--they can never get,
as Sal says,
that last thing,
that's what you can never
have--even though that's true,
it has this world-making power.
To what end will that power be
used?
This is one question I want you
to think about as you finish
this novel.
What do these figures think
language can be used for?
What's it good for?
What can it do for them?
What beyond that kind of
economics of desire,
that accounting?
If you look on 107-108,
again at the very end of the
section: "I had my home to go
to,
my place to lay my head down
and figure the losses and figure
the gain that I knew was in
there somewhere too."
What are the losses?
What are the gains?
Is it just a representation of
an imaginative and desireful
economy, or is there some other
thing being produced here?
What is the something?
What is the someplace?
So, in that relation,
I'd like you to think about the
representation of America in the
novel.
What do you see there when you
think about the America they're
giving us, all these figures?
So, that's for your reading.
In section please bring
Lolita.
I think you're going to
spend most of your time talking
about Lolita.
Section for On the Road
will probably be next week
unless your TF wants to bring up
some brief questions about it,
but that's all for today.
 
