Maggie's Farm

On the 50th anniversary of Kerouac's On The Road, we consider whether the book is worth reading, and whether its characters are of any interest - or is it just a road diary of an ordinary sociopath and his partner? Anthony Daniels in the New Criterion. One quote:

He (Kerouac) was the harbinger, though not the originator or only begetter, of an age in which every intelligent person was expected, and came himself to expect, to forge his own soul unguided by the wisdom of his ancestors. Convention was henceforth to be rejected not because it was wrong (for such reasoning might suggest that some, perhaps many or even most, conventions were right), but simply because it was convention: that is to say, an assault on the individual’s sovereignty over himself, a kind of lèse-majesté of the ego. There were to be no short cuts provided by others; everyone was to work everything out for himself by the bright light of his own ratiocination, and live according to what he found.

The attempt to achieve the impossible is seldom attractive in its consequences; in this case, it led to an inflamed individualism without individuality, and mass self-obsession without genuine self-examination.

That is rough, but probably true not only of most of the beat authors, but of much of my generation in our adolescence...and maybe beyond adolescence. A sort of historical discontinuity, leading nowhere except to self-indulgence.

Photo: Jack Kerouac