Kerouac, Rimbaud, Blake and Whitman: A Rejection of Pre-Modern Ideals - Essay Example

? Kerouac, Rimbaud, Blake and Whitman: A Rejection of Pre-Modern Ideals In this Paper, I am going to discuss four Jack Kerouac, Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake and Walt Whitman. All four writers resisted the beliefs and cultural practices of their time to create new and interesting literature. Their resistance to dominant cultural narratives, veneration for the vagabond, and portrayal of sexuality all work to shock middle class sensibilities, making them powerful counter-cultural influences on 20th century culture. On The Road is a tale about the adventures of Sal Paradise and his friend Dean Moriarty. Sal Paradise is a quiet, observant and educated young writer who lives with his aunt. When he met Dean Moriarty, he had just gotten over a serious bought of depression caused by him and his wife’s divorce. Dean had just been released from jail. Sal is intrigued by Dean’s exuberance, spontaneity, and impulsiveness, and also by his natural unintellectual intelligence. “He was a young jail kid all hung-up on the wonderful possibilities of becoming a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in the tone and using the words, but in a jumbled way, that he had heard from ‘real intellectuals’” (Kerouac, 4). He sees Dean as a foil to his own quiet, observant self and wants to be friends with him. He also sees Dean as an interesting person to write about. Sal remarks “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 (Kerouac, 7). Sal and Dean decide they want to take a trip together out west to California. Sal sees Dean’s youthful enthusiasm and unpretentious attitude as contrary to what he sees as the embodiment of east coast attitudes. He remarks that “all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love” (Kerouac, 8). Dean represents for Sal, the idea of fresh, west coast sensibilities, and the opportunity for an escape from the boredom of his tired, old pretentious east coast life. Together they embark on a series of road trips across the United States where Sal learns to escape the everyday droll of middle-class 1940’s life, and appreciate the world around him. Rimbaud lived a life similar to that of Kerouac and was on the road traveling the world for most of his life. Him and his boyfriend Paul Verlaine traveled the world, living in poverty, and writing poetry. Much like Kerouac who identified with the beat movement--a post-bohemian group of artists, poets and dissident intellectuals--Rimbaud identified with the French Decadent poets. This group believed that to write poetry that was new and different, you had to get outside regular mainstream sensibilities. They regularly abused absinthe and hashish to achieve this state, similar to how Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty use pot, amphetamines, and incorporate elements of Eastern spirituality to try to reach a new perspective. Just as Kerouac rejects what he takes to be the creative hindrance of east coast intellectualism and bourgeois culture, Rimbaud resists the dominant narratives of European culture. In Morning of Drunkenness Rimbaud rails at the tyranny of Christian ideals: “That promise, that madness! Elegance, science, violence! They promised to bury in darkness the tree of good and evil, to deport tyrannical respectability so that we might bring hither our very pure love...We have faith in the poison. We know how to give our whole life every day (Rimbaud). Rimbaud sees the idea of good and evil and the promise of redemption as tyrannical ideals, which hamper creative expression. Only those who transcend those concepts are capable of pure emotions, and living life to the fullest. Another important theme appearing throughout works by all of the discussed authors is their veneration for the vagabond. Homeless wanderers who are viewed by capitalist mainstream America as rejects, unfit for society, are talked about by these authors as equals who are perhaps more enlightened than the average person. For example, Sal Paradise runs into a hobo on his first journey across the country, when he catches what he deems “the best ride of his life” on the back of a pickup truck. He offers Gene and the young boy under his care whiskey and cigarettes and chats with them all night while enjoying his whiskey and the beauty of the open road. He describes Gene as being wise despite being a wanderer: Although Gene was white there was something of the wise and tired old Negro in him, and something very much like Elmer Hassel, the New York dope addict, in him, but a railroad Hassel, a traveling epic Hassel crossing and recrossing the country every year, south in the winder and north in the summer, and only 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, generally the Western stars” (Kerouac 26). Sal paradise sees the wanderers as just as lost and confused as the rest of us, and sees his life on the streets as bringing him certain wisdom. He even relates Gene’s lifestyle with the “West”, a concept that he idolizes. Sal even empathizes with Montana Slim, who he describes as “sneaky” upon first meeting him in the truck. Sal disapproves when Slim brags about being a pickpocket. But later reads a note Slim wrote to his father, which “gave [him] a different idea of him; how tenderly polite he was with his father” (Kerouac 33). The empathy Sal shows is similar to that of William Blake, in his poem The Little Vagabond: Dear mother, dear mother, the Church is cold; But the Alehouse is healthy, and pleasant, and warm. Besides, I can tell where I am used well; Such usage in heaven will never do well (Blake). In this poem Blake empathizes with the vagabond’s tendency to go the bar and drink. Instead of criticizing the vagabond for being a drunkard who won’t help himself, he criticizes the church for not providing adequate food, shelter and clothing. Walt Whitman displays a similar sensibility in “Song of Myself”: “I am enamour'd of growing out-doors, Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods, Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses, I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out (Whitman). Like Kerouac and Rimbaud, Whitman was also associated with an American counter-cultural movement, in his case Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists believed that society corrupts individuals, and in order to be free, you must transcend societal influences. Thus, Whitman venerates those who live outside of societal walls, amongst nature. The last concept I am going to discuss is the author’s liberal treatment of sexuality. All four writers portray heterosexual marriage as a construction of bourgeois society, and contrary to personal freedom. There are also many depictions of sexual promiscuity and descriptions that are homoerotic in nature. It is a well-known fact in biographical discussions about Rimbaud that he had a homosexual relationship with Paul Verlaine, who left his middle class life with his wife and family to be with him. In Vagabonds, Rimbaud talks about his lover Verlaine and how their relationship chemistry contributes to his artistic goals: Pitiful brother! What frightful nights I owed him! "I have not put enough ardor into this enterprise. I have trifled with his infirmity. My fault should we go back to exile, and to slavery." He implied I was unlucky and of a very strange innocence, and would add disquieting reasons.... I had, in truth, pledged myself to restore him to his primitive state of child of the Sun, - and, nourished by the wine of caverns and the biscuit of the road, we wandered, I impatient to find the place and the formula (Rimbaud). Rimbaud is depicted as the young and innocent one, while Verlaine is older, more corrupted and more evil. Rimbaud’s innocence is portrayed negatively though, when it is implied it would be his fault if they went back to “slavery”, presumably the slavery of a bourgeois lifestyle. Rimbaud uses medical imagery, referring to his partner as his “satanic doctor”, presumably curing him from his innocence. In the end, Rimbaud admits he actually sees curative properties in his childlike innocence because of its primitive beauty, and he wishes to “restore” his partner. The example of the relationship can be seen as similar to the relationship between Jack Kerouac (Sal Paradise) and Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassidy). Sal is portrayed as the innocent one while Dean is the wild one, but both are needed to balance each other out, completing the artistic duo. The relationship between Dean and Sal is not explicitly homosexual, but there are some homoerotic undertones. Their relationship is seen as contrary to heterosexual marriage, as Kerouac states in the beginning, he “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 split-up and my feeling that everything was dead (Kerouac 1). This portrayal of a male-to-male relationship as being free from the bounds of marriage is similar to when Verlaine leaves his wife and family to travel with Rimbaud. The same portrayal of marriage as a loss of freedom can be seen in William Blake’s Jerusalem: What is a wife and what is a harlot? What is a church and what is a theatre? Are they two and not one? Can they exist separate? Is not religion and politics the same thing? Brotherhood is religion, O demonstrations of reason dividing families in cruelty and pride! Here Blake portrays marriage as legalized prostitution. Just as politics are a slave to religion, a wife is simply a slave to her husband. There is also a slight hint at a homosexual relationship between Dean and Karlo Marx (known to be poet Allen Ginsberg whom is homosexual. “A tremendous thing happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are, they took to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes--the holy con-man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx. From that moment on I saw very little of Dean, and I was a little sorry too (Kerouac, 5). There is a hint of jealousy, when Sal subtly insinuates a yearning for Dean to spend time with him instead of Carlo. Walt Whitman, who is also a known homosexual, conjures a sexually proactive and homoerotic image in his famous vignette at section 11 of Song of Myself: You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room. Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather, the rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them. The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet, it ran from their long hair, Little streams pass'd all over their bodies. An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies, It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs. The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them, They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch, They do not think whom they souse with spray (Whitman, sec. 11). The description starts off with a fantasy of a woman, watching men bathe nude from her home. She wishes to join the twenty-eight men, making her the twenty-ninth bather, but wants to be invisible, so they cannot see her, and she can admire their bodies without being self-conscious. This description is already provocative, because men and society to maintain innocence, and to suppress their sexual desires expected females of the time. The description turns homoerotic when the narrator becomes the author, Walt Whitman, at the point where he describes, “the young men [who] float on their backs” (Whitman, sec. 11). Like the other writers, Whitman resists conventional views of sexuality, making his writing provocative. Kerouac, Rimbaud, Whitman, and Blake all resist conventionality, making their writing new and interesting. They write about concepts that are in opposition to the dominant bourgeois ideals of their time, making them influential to counter cultural movements for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond. Perhaps most important of all to American literature, they resist the formulaic rigid literary structures of pre-modern Europe and America, allowing for generations of innovative authors to follow. Perhaps this is stated best by Whitman himself at the end of his seminal poem: “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, / I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” The rejection of the traces of 18th and early 19th ideals leaves us with a new product that resists lexis and escapes delineation. Though this product may seem barbaric to predecessors, its influence ultimately resounds throughout the entire world. Works Cited "Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake @ Classic Reader." Free Classic Books Online at Classic Reader. Web. 08 Dec. 2011. Little, Roger. Illuminations : Rimbaud. London: Grant & Cutler, 1983. Print. Whitman, Walt. "Song of Myself." Princeton.edu. Princeton University. Web. . Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1997. Print. Hanson, Elisabeth M. My Poor Arthur; a Biography of Arthur Rimbaud. New York: Holt, 1960. Print. Read More