7. Literary geography

Sensing Places

Submitted by Ben on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 13:44
How we view and perceive
Yi-Fu Tuan presents the idea of home as a “nurturing shelter” (Tuan), one that you can always return to and be able to find comfort in. They are the “centers of meaning to individuals” (Tuan) in that they ground us. After a bad day, we always return back to their familiarity. Tuan claims homes to be “devoted to the sustenance of the body.” He defines as a place, “a center of meaning constructed by experience,” and believes that one must have lived in a certain place for quite some time in order to truly know and understand it. By just touring, people aren’t able to grasp the true essence of a place, because they are there for such a short amount of time; they don’t gain the knowledge that a native does. Because the whole concept of place is reliant on a knowledge of the area, Sal can’t say that he has gotten to know places in the sense that residents have. In moving across the whole country, he never stayed in one spot for more than a few days, with the exception of Southern California with Terry and home with his aunt.
 
Although he doesn’t have what Tuan calls a “place,” Sal does experience place. Kerouac’s description of Ritzy’s Bar helps us imagine the seedy, lowly vibes of the place. He says, “all types of evil plans are hatched in Ritzy’s Bar-you can sense it in the air.” The fact that this bar is where Dean asks Sal to try to see if Marylou would be unfaithful shows the spirit of it. Relating back to Tuan, we approach the idea of sense and how it affects our perceptions. “Seeing is thinking, in the sense that it is discriminating,” (Tuan) discussing how our senses play a major role in how we view things. Besides this, it is also largely reflective of Dean’s personal behavior; he merely used other people to get what he wanted. Overall, Kerouac does a wonderful job describing the scenery and places enveloping his story.

Blissful Abandon

Submitted by parkb on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 13:15
Around the world in a New Year's Eve.
Jack Kerouac does an amazing job of conveying scenes of exultant, twirling bliss so we feel as if we are right there with him and the gang.  One of said scenes that really made me feel as if I was there or at least wanted to be there was the New Year's Eve parties in New York and the concert at the club after.  Yes, these parties are taking place in New York but the reader gets the sense they extend beyond New York because: "Everything in life, all the faces of life, were piling into the same dank room" (pg. 117) and "Everything happened" (pg. 117).  When we are at these parties with Sal and the gang we are at home in manner of speaking, we are in New York, we are in the East, we are in America, and we are in the world or the world has come to us.  The reason I think the world is present is because of the "Everything in life, all the faces of life" quote.  These parties are like crazier versions of those Jay Gatsby throws.  On this night, New York or these parties have become the crossroads of the world.  This is New York turned up to 11, at its highest capacity, at its most extreme, at its most overstimulated and unbridled.  It's almost embodying the stereotype of New York or the city in general, the ultimate city: crowds filled with faces and no space to move.  These apartments and "cellar compartments near the furnace" (pg. 117) where these parties happen, enliven said environments because as Pocock says: "place is also people" (p. 342).  These party locales have "personality" (Pocock, 342, 343) because of the people in them.  And now that these parties have happened, these people will forever be in these apartments and cellar compartments (Pocock, 342-43).  Also, the fact that "there was a tremendous and wonderful snowstorm going on outside" (p. 117) adds more to the personality of the night, the city, this New York.  The weather matches our characters and the tone of the night.  The parties, the city on this night are a "snowstorm" of movement and energy.  It's exhilarating.

When Dean and Sal go to the George Shearing concert we get an example of Hardy's idea of "'permanent impression'" (Pocock, 344) as well as the people or in this case, a person and their music giving a space "personality".  Dean and Sal will decide to remember this club and how George Shearing personified it on that night because: "these were his great 1949 days before he became cool and commercial," (pg. 119).  The club and George Shearing will never be the way they were that night again.  

Sal says the party was "not an orgy but just a New Year's Eve party with frantic screaming and wild radio music," (pg. 117).  It was an orgy though, an orgy of life (I know that sounds weird and cheesy).  Kerouac managed to experience so many places at once all while staying in New York, party-hopping.  He saw the world in a way.
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Liminal Place

Submitted by wanderer on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 13:06
The tent in Sabinal, Texas

Sal rarely finds stability in his life on the road, so I found that his stay in a ramshackle one dollar tent in Sabinal, Texas to be a rather interesting arrangement. The tent’s original appeal was its cheap price tag, and for a desperate traveler with only four dollars to his name, this is paramount. Sal takes on the role of a father figure, traveling with his new love interest Terry, and her son, Little Johnny. Sal is used to fending for himself, bearing his burdens and his burdens only. A man on the road is responsible for no one but himself, until he finds so-called love. For this reason, the “place” becomes representative of a temporary home, not just because Sal finds a temporary family to fill a vacant space, but because his stay is more lengthy than anywhere else he has been; so lengthy in fact that he has time to get a job.
 
It’s hard to clarify whether Sal’s description of this tent is sarcasm or not. After noticing the bed in one of the tent’s corners, followed by a stove and broken mirror, he regards it as “delightful” (Kerouac, 87). Shabby accommodations wouldn’t seem delightful to most, but to Sal, a wannabe hobo, anything better than cold hard ground is idealistic. On the Road could be considered a quest for simplicity, and the tent is representative of his day-to-day lifestyle; working only enough to buy a nights worth of groceries, and living comfortably enough to survive.
 
To some extent, the tent could also be regarded as a liminal space, a place where normal social conventions are set aside, boundaries are broken down, and the concept of right and wrong blends together. In a liminal space, people are free to give in to what they really want at that moment, as demonstrated by Terry and Sal having sex in the same room as Little Johnny. As disturbing as this is, I had to set aside my own preconceptions to attempt to understand it.
 
The tent was situated outside, obviously, and the thin tarp it was made out of was so light that even dew could weigh it down, so much so that it sagged during cool mornings. Because of the tents closeness to nature and its surroundings, it gave Sal a chance to live “outdoors” more comfortably. He could listen to “twangy” cowboy music echoing across fields and see the sun rising each morning. The tent becomes a place where Sal doesn’t have to forget his love of “the Road”.
 
 

An Image of Life

Submitted by MAIA on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 12:11
The approach to a new place is the place itself
Yi-Fu Tuan describes a place as a center of meaning for a people or a person. A place can be anything, something as obvious as a country or something more abstract. In On The Road, Sal and Dean have a place that is the center of meaning to them, but this place is certainly more abstract than any name of a place that would in an atlas. This place is the approach, the entry into a new place.

As we know, the characters of On the Road love traveling. The idea of home as the most significant place is widely accepted. But for Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, the road is home. They feel more at home with their thumb out on the side of the highway than they do living with their aunt or living in New York City. And the place that they find the most appealing, even more appealing than their home on the road, is approaching a new place. There are many examples in the book of times that the approach new places and the excitement they feel at these moments.  They love feeling the “beyond”, like when they look ahead to Mexico and all Dean can say is “Whee!” “Yes!” “Whoo!” “Let’s move!” or even when he first got to San Francisco and described the city in the most cliché romanticized terms. But the pattern seems to be that whenever they get to these places and settle down for a second, they don’t seem to enjoy it as much or take the same pleasure out of it.

For Sal, his favorite place is not Denver, not San Francisco, not Mexico. Although he loved them all at some point, there was one commonality that spanned over the three places, and that was his place: the approach, the entryway.

Similarly, in contrast, the leaving of a place is the worst experience. Even if he hated it there, he still hates the feeling of driving away, of seeing everything turn into a speck. As George Eliot said, “In every parting there is an image of death.” And for Sal, that is the scariest feeling he can have. He is utterly frightened of death and will do anything to prevent his mortality. If parting brings images of death, then entering must produce images of life, living, immortality. And that’s all Sal and Dean really want.
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New York, The Region

Submitted by Amanda on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 11:50
Sal's connection to the city
 In On the Road, New York is one of the few constants in Sal’s life spent as a traveler. More specifically, the area of Times Square represents the “beat generation” of the story and represents Sal’s view of the city as a whole.  The book begins with a scene in New York, when Dean and all of his strange personality quirks are introduced by Sal. In response to Tuan’s piece, I began to question whether New York in this instance should be considered a city, a region (including the surrounding areas like New Jersey), or a neighborhood (Times Square). I believe New York falls into the category of a region.
 
This place holds sentiments of comfort for Sal. His travels around the country are sporadic and mysterious; he spends long spans of time not knowing how he will get back to New York. Also, although Sal spends weeks in certain places in the west, New York is always referred to as his home and he is on a never-ending, cyclical journey to get back to this place. As we saw with his relationship with Terry, Sal idealizes New York when he is traveling in the west and it appears that although he journeys throughout the west, New York becomes the ultimate goal. In addition, New York seems to be the place where Dean is always running from. He visits his friend Sal at various times but is usually described as leaving rapidly after he arrives.  New York is one of the few places in the country in which all of the main characters have been at one time or another. Sal’s home serves not only as a resting place for himself, but also as a place of refuge for his traveling partners.
 
In the region of New York, there is the neighborhood of Times Square. Now a tourist hub and one of the most famous sites to see in New York, this place was, at that time, a center for sleazy artists and illegal activity involving drugs, alcohol and sex.  Sal often relays stories of “nights out” in New York, referring to his adventures with Dean picking up women. This hardcore, high-energy area plays its part as a clear contrast to the land and people in the west. The western characters are more laid back and tend to be travelers as well. For example, Terry and her family always put their job search off until “mañana” where as in New York, everyone is constantly on the go. Home is also the only place in which Sal gets any actual writing work done. While traveling, Sal is unfocused and easy strayed from his conventional life goals but in New York he seems regress to his normal plans. We discussed in class that Sal is only content when on the search for a new place or in transit to a different location so New York seems to hold a certain degree of restlessness for him. He returns here to regain energy but is back on the road as soon as possible. The city is already known to Sal and therefore doesn’t hold the fascination that other places in the west do. 
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In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle...

Submitted by sunflowerseed on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 11:46
Sal's spiritual experience in the Mexican Jungle.
After leaving Gregoria, Mexico, Dean, Sal and Stan drive deep into the night without thinking of any place to stop and sleep. Soon they find themselves in the thick Mexican jungle. Dean quickly decides that they are going to sleep there that night. Everybody tosses and turns in the heat and humidity, but Sal is the only one who has a spiritual experience in the jungle that night.
 
After Sal tries to sleep in several positions in the car, he finally decides to sleep on top of it instead. After he climbs onto the roof, he describes: “for the first time in my life the weather was not something that touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me. The atmosphere and I became the same.” (281) Sal seems to be feeling something intensely mystic even though what he is going through sounds extremely unpleasant. He is covered in “dead bugs mingled with [his] blood” (281) and he smells the “rank, hot and rotten jungle” (281). But Sal still gets sucked into it. He doesn’t resist. He gives in to the atmosphere even though it seems disgusting. He finds a beauty in it. Sal says that he feels like he could “lie there all night long with [his] face exposed to the heavens” (281) making the experience holy.  He understands and absorbs the jungle just as much as it absorbs him.
 
This scene represents a common “going back to nature” and cleansing moment in literature. Sal sweats and bleeds and it seems as if he is expelling some bad feeling out of hid body. This event also fits into the broader context of the story. Sal says in the first paragraph of the novel that this book is going to describe his “life on the road” (1). This, however, is the first time that him and Dean actually sleep on the road. The fact that this experience is so meaningful and sacred to Sal marks a turning point in his life. After he sleeps in the jungle, Sal’s trip, and even life, seem to have become deeper and more serious. He no longer goes chasing after girls and even when he meets some accidentally, he turns the meeting into a religious experience rather than a sexual one. His night in the Jungle changes him. He sees the white horse which subconsciously reminds him of the fact that he is aging. Instead of fighting back like he does when Dean talks about his age, Sal understands and accepts this fact. It makes him more mature. Dean doesn’t have an experience like this which is why he leaves Sal (the only person to really understand and care about Dean) to run back to his many superficial marriages in the States. Sal’s new understanding of life is also what leads him to finally admit that Dean is a “rat” (288).
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Focusing on the Whorehouse

Submitted by eric on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 11:26
Finding moments that feel like forever.
The whorehouse scene in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is an example of a situation where Dean feels “IT”. He has that heavenly ecstasy that he desires all that time of being in the moment. The whorehouse has the music, the dancing, the women, and the booze for a good time. Dean and Sal feel as if they are immortal and time will never end. The music intoxicates them with its volume and intertwining rhythms. They lose themselves and Sal says, “…all these tremendous numbers resounded and flared in the golden, mysterious afternoon like the sounds you expect to hear on the last day of the world and the Second Coming,”(273) as if the music overwhelms him with energy and passion.

Also, the world seems to come together with mambo music. The music has origins from the Congo River in Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, as well as Cuba. The girls are multi-cultured too since there’s a “colored girl” a Venezuelan “queen”. Sal says, “It seemed the whole world was turned on,”(275).

Sal keeps repeating the word “dream” as if his experience is surreal. He recalls, “It was like a long, spectral Arabian dream in the afternoon in another life,” (273). Dean and he get the feeling of escape through travel. Dean does not have the responsibilities of his multiple wives and children while Sal is no longer a part of the New York scene of intellectuals. They are both on vacation and it upsets them when it becomes time to depart.

Sal realizes, “I was in Mexico after all and not in a pornographic hasheesh day dream in heaven,” (277) even though he’s mistaken. He only smoked marijuana and not hash so all of his intoxication must have altered his memory. He still thinks about his experience as he drives off and, “The haunting mambo followed us a few blocks. It was all over,” (277). Sal and Dean have their moment of bliss, but it must end like every other moment. Dean does not understand that he has responsibilities that he can not avoid and stay a functional member of society. 
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"I love the way everybody says LA on the Coast;it's their and only golden town when everything is said and done."

Submitted by labellavita on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 10:42
Sal's mystical California
Sal's California is a paradoxical mix of hopeful fantasy and surreality and despair and desolation. I once wrote an essay about Joan Didion's collection of essays about California, and the indoubitable link between the land and the people who inhabit it. Sal's mentions California as being " the end of this continent'', its denizens aimless stragglers at the very end of possibilities, the bitter finality of the wide expanse of America. Sal admires Fresno and the grape-picking towns at first for its rustic quality, and the connection he feels with the earth and the countryside. Yet, he recognizes the terminality of California, the last stretch of land before the bottomless Pacific. 
Though Sal notes that he loves the way people in California look up to LA for its dream-like connotation, he writes," I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in the streets. LA is a jungle." LA feels inauthentic and desperate in its neon garishness, screams and cries permeating the air. The discovery of California's unglamorous underbelly is a sort of shattering of the American pop culture fantasy. Hollywood, the center of cinematic glamour, is in fact dirty and poor. " All around me were the noises of the crazy gold-coast city. And this was my Hollywood career- this was my last nigh in Hollywood, and I was spreading mustard on my lap in back of a parking-lot john."
Sal leaves California somewhat dejected, but somehow is willing to come back again. 

Place through an Experiential Perspective

Submitted by John on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 03:03
Sal's journeys in San Francisco and how they relate to the theme of place.
Place is a concept that many writers now incorporate into their novels. With place, comes experience. Often many times, authors can write about a foreign place and never have even visited there or have done so for such a short amount of time that it can hardly matter. Pocock and Tuan argue this and its importance in the literature of today. In On the Road by Jack Kerouac, the reader is exposed to an author that has visited these places before. This gives the reader and unique and factual experience that can fill all the nostalgias about that place that he or she may have had.  Sal and Dean visit from place top place for long amounts of time and even sometimes come back and visit these areas which I think gives them the credentials that Pocock and Tuan stress when a person really knows the place they are visiting. One place that I think is significant in the story is Sal and Dean’s associations with the city of San Francisco.
 
Yi-fu Tuan says a city “depends far more on indirect and abstract knowledge for its experiential con-struction”. I think that this is an excellent way to start off the discussion on Sal and Dean’s journeys to San Francisco. They both travel to San Francisco in an experiential state of mind. They are both willing to travel here because it is basically what everyone else is doing and they do so because they are looking for an experience that will change their value systems. I think an interesting scene to look at is when Sal is in San Francisco. Sal says, “Meanwhile I began to go to Frisco more often; I tried everything in the books to make a girl. I even spent a whole night with a girl on a park bench, till dawn, without success” (73). After spending most of his time working in San Francisco, Sal finally ventures out into the city and does things that he wants to do. He is living for the experience which can be tied into place like Tuan mentions. Tuan says, “Places may be private to the individual”. I think this is an interesting connection between the two because Sal describes his task of finding a girl a hard one. He also places emphasis on the park bench where they sat all night which shows that it was a noble thing to do according to himself. Each person values things differently. Just like in Tuan’s argument about the rocking chair, objects and certain parts of a town can be considered places as well. This is because they hold some sort of private value to those who regard them as such which I think pulls the reader back into the whole idea of a  city being  constructed by experiential thought and it taking abstract knowledge when remembering and describing your visit to one of them.

I think it is also interesting how this passage ends as well. Sal says, “I walked by a jewelry store and had the sudden impulse to shoot up the window, take out the finest rings and bracelets, and run to give them to Lee Ann. Then we could flee to Navada together. The time was coming for me to leave Frisco or I’d go crazy” (73).  Sal like when he visits any other place (Denver, Cheyenne, Mexico etc.) always has the sudden urge to leave after “trying it out” for awhile. I think this goes back to his whole existential nature and the experiential perspective on place. Tuan says, “To live in a place is to experience it, to be aware of it in the bones as well as the head.” This is exactly what Sal does during his stay in San Francisco. From working as a policeman to staying in a cramped house with two other people to going out on the town looking for girls and even just walking through the streets of San Francisco, Sal is truly “living” in the place. Once he is done living there, he moves on to the next place where he will incorporate the same experiential outlook and continue to define what place is through and experiential standpoint.
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Be an Active Traveller

Submitted by Smag18 on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 02:51
To create a center of meaning one must impose meaning on the "place"
Yi-Fu Tuan defines a “place” as a center of meaning. Tuan continues to assert that there are different units of “place” ranging in geographic size: places range from items in a home to obviously larger units such as nation – states.  Interestingly, Tuan suggests that each uniquely “geographically sized place” requires a similarly unique relationship to the location (or thing). For example, Tuan intuitively suggests that in order to appreciate “home items” as a “place” one must have a much more personal first-person experience with the items, whereas in order to consider a nation-state as a “place” one is influenced by more second-hand accounts.
 
In On The Road, the character Old Bull Lee clearly and interestingly exhibits both the first person, and second person relationships with “places”.  Bull Lee’s more intimate, first person relationship with “place”, is nearly identical to an example Tuan gives in his essay.  Tuan offers the example of a chair as this “place”: “Places may be private to the individual.  My favorite rocking chair, wedged between the fireplace and the curtained window, is my special place within the house” (153).  Bull Lee’s almost has an identical “place” in his house: “He sat in his chair… the shades by his chair were always drawn, day and night; it was his corner of the house” (135).  Besides the obvious physical similarities between these two places, these “places” are similar in that it is the people that empower the “places”.  It is the first person experiences that each individual has with their chair that makes it a “place” (center of meaning) for them.
 
Old Bull Lee also has a relationship with more distant locations that are made into “places” thanks to second-person relationships.  These relationships are explained when Sal is describing Bull Lee’s travels: “In Paris he sat at café tables, watching the sullen French faces go by.  In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world. In English hotels he read Spengler and Marquis de Sade…” (134). Bull Lee’s experiences in these countries are clearly through a second-person point of view, because all of his experiences are through very cliché and obviously set-up lenses.   This makes sense since Bull Lee, spending only a short time in each of these locations, would not be imposing meaning on the place, but instead would be extracting the meaning from clichéd influences.
 
Bull Lee’s relationship with these foreign “places” also highlights how “place” plays into our class discussions about authenticity.  Tuan seems to suggest that to truly have a personal connection with a place one must impose the meaning upon the place.  In this way, to get to the authentic feel of different countries one must, as Tuan suggests, impose meaning upon the country by spending time in the place.  However, these “inauthentic” clichés had to derive from someone/somewhere.  Tuan offers this explanation: “In a large unit of space people may have common experiences of nature and work” (159).  In this way, the clichés may in fact be the authentic development of the native people; however from our discussions, it turns out that these clichés are often inaccurate representations of the life of the natives.  Therefore, to make foreign countries a “place” (by accessing the authentic) one must interestingly be an active traveler and impose their own meaning on the location.
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Place, People, Party

Submitted by emiliana on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 01:13
Parties after parties in New York are just another form of IT...
What would you be doing if you only had just today to live?? For me, I would call everyone I love and care for and have a one big happy party. For the assignment, I focused on the party scenes they have in New York. Sal and his gang arrive in New York and attend numerous parties that take place during the New Year’s weekend that “lasted three days and three nights.” Just like how they travel from one place to another, they “swerve[] in the snowy New York streets from party to party.”
 
There isn’t a lot of descriptions on the physicality place. The first party mentioned takes place “at a basement apartment in the West Nineties” and is “enormous…with at least a hundred people,” from all walks of life. Every corner is packed with wild, screaming people, and there is something going on every couch and every bed in the crowded apartment: “Everything in life, all the faces of life, were piling into the same dark room.” The place is sweaty, chaotic, and full of excitement and the beat.
Then “at five o’clock in the morning [they] all rush[] through the backyard of a tenement and climb[] in through a window of an apartment” for another huge party and “at dawn [they are] back at Tom Saybrook’s” for more beer drinking and picture drawing.
 
Just as D.C.D. Pocock claims in his essay “people then are place, but place is also people,” the new characters (Ian MacArthur, Rollo Greb, George Shearing) who epitomize IT and everything Sal and Dean are rooted for are introduced along with the minimum description of party places. Sal and his friends go to a party at Ian MacArthur’s place and rather than a detailed descriptions of the place, the character Ian MacArthur is introduced. “A wonderful sweet fellow,” he is just like Dean who delightedly says “Yes!” to everything. Then at another “roaring party” that takes place at “a nice house [of Rollo Greb’s] aunt [with] two libraries, two rooms loaded from floor to ceiling around all four walls,”  Rollo is introduced. Rollo is an educated, scholarly man who comes and lives in the white upper society Sal comes from. Yet “he [doesn’t] give a damn about anything. He is a great scholar who goes reeling down the New York waterfront with original seventeenth-century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting. He crawls like a big spider through the streets…” He is also what Dean wholeheartedly aspires to be, the epitome of blissful state that the entire novel is about.  
 
Although the places where New Year’s rowdy celebrations take place in New York are not given much physical descriptions, it is still significant because the whole partying scene is about the bliss in life that Dean and Sal are obsessed with. The people and the place mentioned are about the IT, living in the moment, immortality, timelessness. This “party after party” is just another form of IT, along with working on the soil, sex-love, driving at hundred miles per hour, music, conversations on nothing that take all night long, and travelling and excitement that takes place on the road. (part two-4)
 
 
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Intruding

Submitted by rosencrantz on Thu, 10/21/2010 - 00:53
How Sal and co. challenge Pocock's insideness vs. outsideness
In D.C.D Pocock’s essay Place and the Novelist, he discusses the concepts of insideness verses outsideness. A place is somewhere he defines as “wherever we feel ‘at home’, where things ‘fall into place’ beyond which we feel ‘out of place’, intruder in someone else’s domain” (2). During Sal and co.’s journey in Mexico, they are led to a whorehouse by Victor. As they enjoy the sites and sounds of “this strange Arabian paradise,” Sal’s reverie comes to an abrupt halt when,  “...somewhere I heard a baby wail in a sudden lull, remembering I was in Mexico after all and not in a pornographic hasheesh daydream in heaven” (291). The band of merry men had settled into this new location to a point where they had become comfortable and thoroughly unstable, forgetting that in reality, they were trampling on someone else’s turf. The baby’s cry wakes Sal up to the point where he remembers that he’s an outsider.
 
Pocock’s phrasing implies that a place can only be either somewhere we feel at home or somewhere upon where we are intruding. The locations the men stop at in On the Road challenge this point because while they feel at home wherever they land, those who are housing them feel differently about their guests. For example, Galatea clearly feels that Dean and the boys have overstayed their welcome and her statement that he has “absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself and your damned kicks...It never occurs to you that life is serious and there are people trying to make something decent out of it instead of just goofing all the time” proves that while they feel at home, she is less than thrilled with their presence (194).  The boys have adopted this “mooching” lifestyle in which they feel that it’s okay to use other people’s homes and belongings as their own, juxtaposing both the insideness and outsideness that Pocock describes. 


 

The Frantic Search For Place

Submitted by Sophia on Wed, 10/20/2010 - 23:21
How place is affected by time, history, and person.
Place is an important aspect in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, for the obvious reason that the plot is compromised of the places Sal and Dean visit. However, place is not used only for plot; it is incorporated and examined in an extremely sophisticated way during the novel. The use of place is better understood after reading the works of Pocock and Tuan. Tuan argues that a place cannot be properly experienced in a short visit. This is the case with both Sal and Dean, yet both men strive for, and appear to believe, that they have captured the authentic experience. This is most notable with Sal, especially towards the end of the novel when he, Dean, and Stan are taken to a brothel in Mexico. He believes that they are enjoying themselves and assimilating with the girls and the culture. But it is an illusion. They are tricking themselves with sleep deprivation and alcohol to heighten the experience. They do not know the place nor could they ever hope to. They flit from town to town, perhaps learning about the villagers, but never gaining the sort of “communal knowledge” Tuan suggests is necessary to actually know a place. The type of authenticity they strive for is impossible because they do not stay long enough to ever experience any place.
 
Pocock makes two arguments that I find relative to the novel. The first is that one’s early place influences all their subsequent places. The second is that places eventually become people. The argument that early place begins influences later places is most evident with Dean. While the reader does not know much about Dean, it is safe to conclude he did have a stable or pleasant childhood. Furthermore, his parents’ transient lifestyle led him to lead a similar lifestyle and turn into a crook. The fact that his father was a con man, and that, as Sal narrates, Dean was born on the road, means that Dean cannot see any place as anything but a temporary stopping ground or anyone as anything but a temporary mark. Additionally, whenever Dean gets close to his childhood town, he is frantic to search for his father though the search always turns up empty. Thus, his early life always affects the way he sees the places he visits.
 
The second argument Pococok makes—that places become people—becomes apparent during Sal and Dean’s trip to Mexico. The trip, which is a solid demonstration of the depths of Dean’s madness, always gives an insight into the lives of Mexican people. Dean, in particular, enjoys meeting natives, who live far away from cities. Upon encounters with them, he talks extensively—about them, and at them, but never truly to them—about how primitive, exotic, and wise they are. He often employs the same mystic language that Sal uses when describing Dean himself. When Dean describes Mexico—the jungle, the cliff, etc—he uses spiritual, reverent language. The way Dean describes Mexico and the people, as an exotic, spiritual “Other” clearly demonstrates how places can become people.
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Tonight's Attraction: The End of The Road

Submitted by Violette on Wed, 10/20/2010 - 21:38
Finding Nothingness in a Skid Row Theater

            A place, as described by D. C. D. Pocock in “Place and the novelist” is, “at its most obvious and familiar… where things ‘fall into place’.” For Sal, as he is traveling up and down the coasts of America, there is more than one place where things feel like, at least for a fleeting moment, they have come together; but it is within a beaten down movie theatre in Skid Row Detroit where the nothingness that he had been in search of in every one of his nationwide excursions took form. Though Yi-Fu Tuan argued in “Place: An Experiential Perspective” that in order to know a place one must experiences it through sensory modes such as taste, smell, and touch; Sal demonstrates that there are other means of establishing a connection that is just as strong.

Throughout his cross-country journey Sal is attracted to the bums he sees hitching rides on the road because they represent all that he is in search of. They are free of the responsibility of the working class, free of obligations and free of societal expectations that he finds so confining. It is their lack of rooting and sense of belonging to a “home” that he is so envious of. Ironically, this sense of “home” that Sal wishes so strongly to detach himself from is romanticized in both Pocock’s and Tuan’s essay. Pocock remarks that our home determines “the way we perceive the world,” and Tuan believes it is “a place of comfort”, a place we can always return to. In a novel driven both metaphorically and literally in search of finding IT in any direction but that of home, it is interesting to consider that some believe that home is the only true place where IT can be realized. 

The Skid Row movie theater provides some sense of realization for Sal in that it is there where he is able to recognize that he has become one with the scum and bums of the world that he so much admired. He is surrounded on all sides by “beat negroes” and those who had “reached the end of the road” and sees, perhaps for the first time, that by aligning himself with them, he has reached the end of the road as well. He identifies with a dusty pile of scum that the movie theater attendants are sweeping off of the floors and realizes that he could have been swept away just as easily. It is in this place, a theatre where people come to step outside of their lives and experience something foreign, that Sal is able to see his reality, his self and his life clearly. It is fitting that the setting for this realization is a beaten down theater because, through the course of his journey, Sal has become relatively beaten down as well.

The strength of a place comes from its ability to provide some sort of self- reflection, comes from Pocock’s claim of a place’s “ambience and mood.” Sal is able to experience that self-reflection and be tuned into the ambience of Skid Row because of the people he sees there; “if you sifted all Detroit in a wire basket the beater solid core of dregs couldn’t be better gathered.” These people provide the human connection that Tuan believes is the most important element of the place, the knowing it in terms of knowing others. This allows Sal to feel it and by feeling it he is able to gain something from it. He draws a connection with the theater because it is the embodiment of a place filled with fantasized ideals, and the all-night shows, a mirrored reflection of the disappointment that comes from realizing that the screen isn’t real. 


Kerouac, Jack On the Road (Pgs. 246-247) 
Tuan, Yi-Fu.  "Place: An Experiential Perspective"
Pocock, D. C. D.  "Place and the Novelist"
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The Throb of Neons in the Soft Night

Submitted by CXH on Wed, 10/20/2010 - 20:30
San Francisco
For Sal, his first glimpse of the "fabulous white city" of San Francisco is when he wakes up after falling asleep while Dean drives for hours trying to get money from the "Okie". His first glimpse is picturesque, with the "eleven mystic hills", "blue Pacific", and "potato-patch fog" that help to bring out the mid-afternoon "goldenness" of the city. As usual, the gang is excited to be in a new city, with Sal likening the experience to "getting on shore after a long voyage at sea".
 
The office buildings sparkle with the rest of the city, but right as Sal and Marylou are taking in the promise of a new city, they're out on the street, penniless again, as Dean drives off down the street in search of another adventure. While Dean goes off in search of Camille, Sal realizes that his dreams of Sam Spade and the glistening office buildings don’t fit with the real "lemon lot" of San Franciscans. As Sal looks out on the streets he sees the "broken-down movie extras", "midget auto-racers", "hustlers", "pimps", and "whores" who make Sal wonder, "how's a man going to make a living with a gang like that?"
 
The places in San Francisco that Sal encounters, the "flophouse on Mission Street", the "fish-'n-chips joint on Market Street", and the hotel room are all kind of transient places that Sal doesn't really experience because he is too exhausted. In a delirious state, he wanders the streets, picking up long cigarette butts so he can go back to the hotel room and smoke the tobacco, since he can't afford to buy food. While Sal is in his delirious state, Kerouac does what Taun talked about in his article, he "objectifies intimate feelings" that are provoked by the "special quality" of fragrance, taste, and touch. When Sal is at one of his lowest points in the novel, lying in his hotel paid with credit, completely broke smoking his pipe, he smells the promise of San Francisco: the "chow mien flavored air" from Chinatown, the spaghetti sauces from North Beach, the crabs of Fisherman's Wharf, the ribs of Fillmore, the beans of Market Street, the potatoes of Embarcadero, and the steamed clams from Sausalito, but he can’t taste any of it.
 
After Sal is finally “rescued” by Dean from the “hunger-making raw fog” and the “throb of neons in the soft night”, they quickly grow tired of Dean’s boring married life and decide to go have some fun at the jazz clubs. The jazz clubs are filled with “eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals” and the “mad” performers that make the clubs interesting. On the last night, Sal, Dean, and Marylou go down to the “jazz shacks” across the bay, presumably to find the more authentic clubs that are filled to the brim with “semi-intellectuals”. What they find there are people more beat and more hip then themselves. A guy pulls a chair out from under Marylou and both she and Sal get approached in the bathroom with “propositions”. The jazz shacks across the bay in the oil flats stand in stark contrast with the shimmering office buildings that make Sal think of Sam Spade when he first entered the city. Although Sal doesn’t know what he accomplished by coming to San Francisco, he seems to have gained the experience of living a more “beat” existence, specifically when he is penniless and hungry on the streets and when he visits the crazy jazz clubs than he normally is when he is in his comfort zone.
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