Visions and Hallucinations on the Road
Title: Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think)
Author: John Leland
List price: $23.95
Amazon price: $37.22
"Damn! You had a vision, boy, a vision. Only damn fools pay no attention to visions.“ These words, spoken by a character in a Jack Kerouac’s novel, indicate the tremendous importance of visions and hallucinations in the life and writings of the novelist Jack Kerouac. This form of dreaming is perceptively explored in John Leland‘s eminently readable book Why Kerouac Matters.
One of the factors that makes Kerouac and his fellow Beat writers seem so counter-culture, so subversive, and so compelling even in the 21st century is their belief in the importance of information that arrives in the form of visions and hallucinations. As Leland writes, "Where Goethe’s Faust, a child of the Enlightenment, sought wisdom through his own rational study, Sal and Dean [the main characters in Kerouac’s best known novel On the Road] are products of the Enlightenment’s failures – of Hiroshima, Auschwitz and Levittown – seeking wisdom only through revelations.“
These non-rational sources of information, says Leland, guide the structure of On the Road as well as of the character’s lives. The novel’s central character, Salvatore, is a barely disguised stand-in for Kerouac himself. "Sal’s visions organize the book, giving each journey a theme and purpose, and providing an arc for the novel. They lead him from a scary image of himself to a cuddly recognition of the almighty Pooh Bear.“ The importance of dreams and hallucinations in Sal’s life reflects their importance in Kerouac’s own life. "Like the book itself, the visions begin with loss and end with God.“
Sal/Kerouac is visited by an intangible character called the Great Walking Saint, who makes three appearances in On the Road. "This recurring figure, a central casting old man with white hair,“ Leland writes, "is Sal’s prophecy coach, helping him learn to tell a story. He enters the novel first as a feeling Sal has in Colorado that somewhere across the night, the old man 'was probably walking toward us with the Word, and would arrive any minute and make us silent.‘“
The Great Walking Saint is described by Sal as one "who, as penance, walks around America till the day of his death. He sits in the middle of Mexican shacktowns in the afternoon and chatters with the people in his own strange tongue they can all understand. He walks on. He will do so till he’s a hundred yeard old.“ The impact of this vision for Kerouac was powerful: "I have seen the light. That’s what is at the end of the night. The Light. That which God Hath Wrought. The Light.“
When Sal and his travel colleague, Dean, arrive in Mexico, the visions they experience there are, in Leland’s words, "some of the book’s richest writing, moving from hallucinatory images to biblical ones.“ These experiences are given powerful voice in the novel. "We’ve finally got to heaven,“ Dean says. Stoned out of his mind on drugs, Sal asserts that he is "recoiling from some gloriously riddled glittering treasure-box that you’re afraid to look at because of your eyes, they bend inward, the riches and the treasures are too much to take all at once. I gulped. I saw streams of gold pouring through the sky and right across the tattered roof of the poor old car, right across my eyeballs and indeed right inside them; it was everywhere. … For a long time I lost consciousness in my lower mind of what we were doing and only came around sometime later when I looked up from fire and silence like waking from sleep to the world, or waking from void to a dream.“
Later, Sal sees another striking apparition. "A wild horse, white as a ghost, came trotting down the road directly toward Death. The horse was white as snow and immense and almost phosphorescent and easy to see.“
These Mexican visions become more intense and even biblical, with Sal rousing Dean to "wake up and see the shepherds, wake up and see the golden world that Jesus came from.“ Watching the idealized Mexican peasants, Sal notes that someday the bomb will bring his country (the U.S.) to a similar state. "And they never dreamed the sadness and broken delusion of it: that through nuclear self-destruction his world might become as poor and Edenic as theirs.“
Leland notes that like Sal, Kerouac "was ambitious in his dreams but passive in his follow-through. Both looked for redemption to come from the outside, like lightning in a clear blue sky.“ This is one of the challenges for all dreamers, to make use of the information obtained from any form of dreaming in changing one’s waking life. If the goal of being on the road is to grow and create a life that feel worth living, visions and hallucinations can play an important role in such transformation. It takes commitment and work to integrate information from such dreams into waking life. Without an expenditure of elbow grease and determination, all dreams remain no more than shows of images, words and thoughts that distract and entertain us, but leave us unchanged.
