In the United States, secular politicians such as George W. Bush and Kanye West have also used the phrase. In 2004, the Republican Party included a plank in their platform for "Promoting a Culture of Life".
The expression "culture of life" entered popular parlance from Pope John Paul II in the 1990s. He used the term in his 1991 encyclical Centesimus annus, and then more fully expanded upon it in the 1995 encyclicalEvangelium vitae ("Gospel of Life"):
In our present social context,
marked by a dramatic struggle between the "culture of life" and the
"culture of death", there is need to develop a deep critical sense,
capable of discerning true values and authentic needs.
In the encyclical, the pope noted that even those who were not Catholic "can appreciate the intrinsic value of human life."
He also issued "a pressing appeal addressed to each and every person,
in the name of God: Respect, protect, love, and serve life, every human
life! Only in this direction will you find justice, development, true
freedom, peace and happiness!"
John Paul linked this to Catholic teaching, which believes every person is created in the image and likeness of God and is intimately loved by God. The Church, then, must build a culture of life that values each person as a person, not for what they own, do, or produce. It must also protect every human life, especially those that are threatened or weak. The doctrine had foundations in earlier church teaching such as Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae vitae,
which articulated the Church's position defending life from conception
to natural death, disapproving medical procedures harming an unborn
fetus, which the Church holds to be a person with an inviolable right to life. Catholic hospitals and medical institutions will not perform such procedures.
Following the promulgation of Evangelium vitae, advocates of a culture of life founded the Culture of Life Foundation in the United States to promote the concepts behind the Pope's encyclical. Pope John Paul II recognized and blessed the foundation in 1997.
On October 3, during the 2000 U.S. presidential election campaign, then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, a Methodist, cited the term during a televised debate against then Vice President Al Gore. Bush expressed concerns that Mifepristone,
then newly approved as an abortifacient pill, would encourage more
women to terminate their pregnancies; whereas his goal was to make such
terminations rarer:
Surely this nation can come
together to promote the value of life. Surely we can fight off these
laws that will encourage doctors or allow doctors to take the lives of
our seniors. Sure, we can work together to create a culture of life so
some of these youngsters who feel like they can take a neighbor's life
with a gun will understand that that's not the way America is meant to
be.
Leonard Mary of The Boston Globe
said that Bush had directly borrowed his language from John Paul II,
viewing this as a deliberate strategic attempt to gain political support
from "moderate" Catholics voters (while not coming out so strongly
against abortion rights that it would alienate pro-choice voters). Some voters believed that only the Republican Party would build a culture of life in the United States, and this helped Bush win. Some Catholics,
criticized Bush for apparent inconsistency between his support of a
culture of life and his strong support for the death penalty, which
Catholic doctrine permits where there is no other means for society to
protect itself. As Governor of Texas, Bush repeatedly authorized executions of convicted murderers.
Kristen Day, the executive director of Democrats for Life of America,
says that "achieving a culture of life cannot be done by simply voting
Republican." Day says that "to be truly pro-life, we must support a
broad spectrum of issues including worker's compensation, minimum wage,
and education assistance for displaced workers", as well as addressing poverty, including a livable wage and health care.
Day says that Republicans should broaden their definition of a culture
of life beyond simple opposition to abortion, and that to achieve a true
culture of life that members of both parties will be needed.
The 2004 Republican National Convention adopted a platform with a plank titled "Promoting a Culture of Life." The platform's anti-abortion
stance included positions on abortion; access to healthcare despite
disability, age, or infirmity; euthanasia; assisted suicide; and
promoted research and resources to alleviate the pain of the terminally
ill.
Other issues
The phrase "culture of life" was also invoked during the Terri Schiavo case of March 2005 when the phrase was used in support of legislative and legal efforts to prolong the life of a woman in an persistent vegetative state. It has also been used to promote providing inexpensive medical care for people in impoverished countries.
Following the Boston Marathon bombing, the Catholic bishops of Massachusetts opposed the death penalty for terrorist bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, citing the need to build a culture of life. In their statement, they cited a 2005 document by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, A Culture of Life and the Penalty of Death, which said "no matter how heinous the crime, if society can protect itself without ending a human life, it should do so."
A growing culture of life in the United States, one that took the
protection of life more seriously, led to the rapid adoption of infant safe-haven laws in the early 2000s.
Under these laws, mothers can leave their newborn children in places
such as hospitals, police stations and fire stations, without being
criminally charged with child abandonment.
In fact, while the climate of
widespread moral uncertainty can in some way be explained by the
multiplicity and gravity of today's social problems, and these can
sometimes mitigate the subjective responsibility of individuals, it is
no less true that we are confronted by an even larger reality, which can
be described as a veritable structure of sin. This reality is
characterized by the emergence of a culture which denies solidarity and
in many cases takes the form of a veritable "culture of death". This
culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and
political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively
concerned with efficiency.
He argued that there was "a war of the powerful against the weak: a
life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered
useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected
in one way or another."
Those who are ill, handicapped, or just simply threaten the well being
or lifestyle of the more powerful thus become enemies to be eliminated. John Paul said he saw this as applying both between individuals and between peoples and states.
He added his belief that every time an "innocent life" is taken (dating back to the time of Cain and Abel)
that it was "a violation of the ‘spiritual’ kinship uniting mankind in
one great family, in which all share the same fundamental good: equal
personal dignity."
Any threat to the human person, including wars, class conflict, civil
unrest, ecological recklessness, and sexual irresponsibility, should
therefore be regarded in his opinion as part of the "culture of death."
Without morals, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor
said, "it is the strong who decide the fate of the weak," and "human
beings therefore become instruments of other human beings... We are
already on that road: for what else is the termination of millions of
lives in the womb since the Abortion Act was introduced, and embryo selection on the basis of gender and genes?"
Wider usage
Advocates
of a culture of life argue that a culture of death results in
political, economic, or eugenic murder. They point to historical events
like the USSR's Great Purges, the Nazi Holocaust, China's Great Leap Forward and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge as examples of devaluation of human life taken to an extreme conclusion. The term is used by those in the consistent life ethic movement to refer to supporters of embryonic stem cell research, legalized abortion, and euthanasia. Some in the anti-abortion movement, such as those from the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, have compared those in the abortion-rights movement to the perpetrators of the Nazi Holocaust. They say that their opponents share the same disregard for human life.
On the Road is a 1957 novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use. The novel is a roman à clef, with many key figures of the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee), Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx), and Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac, himself, as the narrator, Sal Paradise.
The idea for On the Road, Kerouac's second novel, was
formed during the late 1940s, in a series of notebooks and then typed
out, on a continuous reel of paper, during three weeks in April 1951. It
was published by Viking Press in 1957.
The New York Times
hailed the book's appearance as "the most beautifully executed, the
clearest, and the most important utterance yet made by the generation
Kerouac, himself, named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar
he is." In 1998, the Modern Library ranked On the Road 55th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
Production and publication
After Kerouac dropped out of Columbia University, he served on several different sailing vessels, before returning to New York to write. He met and mixed with Beat Generation figures Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Between 1947 and 1950, while writing what would become The Town and the City (1950), Kerouac engaged in the road adventures that would form On the Road.
Kerouac carried small notebooks, in which much of the text was written
as the eventful span of road trips unfurled. He started working on the
first of several versions of the novel as early as 1948, based on
experiences during his first long road trip in 1947, but he remained
dissatisfied with the novel. Inspired by a 10,000-word rambling letter from his friend, Neal Cassady,
Kerouac, in 1950, outlined the "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" and
decided to tell the story of his years on the road with Cassady, as if
writing a letter to a friend in a form that reflected the
improvisational fluidity of jazz.
In a letter to a student in 1961, Kerouac wrote: "Dean and I were
embarked on a journey through post-Whitman America to FIND that America
and to FIND the inherent goodness in American man. It was really a story
about two Catholic buddies, roaming the country, in search of God. And
we found him."
The first draft of what was to become the published novel was written
in three weeks in April 1951, while Kerouac lived with Joan Haverty,
his second wife, at 454 West 20th Street in New York City's Manhattan.
The manuscript was typed on what he called "the scroll"—a continuous,
120-foot (37 m) scroll of tracing paper sheets that he cut to size and
taped together.
The roll was typed single-spaced, without margins or paragraph breaks.
In the following years, Kerouac continued to revise this manuscript,
deleting some sections (including some sexual depictions deemed
pornographic in the 1950s) and adding smaller literary passages. Kerouac wrote a number of inserts intended for On the Road between 1951 and 1952, before eventually omitting them from the manuscript and using them to form the basis of another work, Visions of Cody (1951–1952). On the Road was championed within Viking Press by Malcolm Cowley and was published by Viking in 1957, based on revisions of the 1951 manuscript.
Besides differences in formatting, the published novel was shorter than
the original scroll manuscript and used pseudonyms for all of the major
characters.
Viking Press released a slightly edited version of the original manuscript, titled On the Road: The Original Scroll
(August 16, 2007), corresponding with the 50th anniversary of original
publication. This version has been transcribed and edited by English
academic and novelist Howard Cunnell. As well as containing material
that was excised from the original draft, due to its explicit nature,
the scroll version also uses the real names of the protagonists, so Dean
Moriarty becomes Neal Cassady and Carlo Marx becomes Allen Ginsberg, etc.
In 2007, Gabriel Anctil, a journalist of Montreal daily Le Devoir, discovered in Kerouac's personal archives in New York almost 200 pages of his writings entirely in Quebec French, with colloquialisms. The collection included 10 manuscript pages of an unfinished version of On the Road, written on January 19, 1951.
The original scroll of On the Road was bought in 2001 by Jim Irsay
for $2.43 million (equivalent to $4.18 million in 2023). It has
occasionally been made available for public viewing, with the first 30
feet (9 m) unrolled. Between 2004 and 2012, the scroll was displayed in
several museums and libraries in the United States, Ireland, and the UK.
It was exhibited in Paris, in the summer of 2012, to celebrate the
movie based on the book.
Plot
The
two main characters of the book are the narrator, Sal Paradise, and his
friend Dean Moriarty, much admired for his carefree attitude and sense
of adventure, a free-spirited maverick eager to explore all kicks and an
inspiration and catalyst for Sal's travels. The novel contains five
parts, three of them describing road trips with Dean. The narrative
takes place in the years 1947 to 1950, is full of Americana, and marks a specific era in jazz history, "somewhere between its Charlie ParkerOrnithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis" (Pt. 1, Ch. 3). The novel is largely autobiographical, Sal being the alter ego of the author and Dean standing for Neal Cassady.
Like Kerouac, Sal Paradise is a writer who published two books over the
course of the plot, even though the names are not known.
Part One
The first section describes Sal's first trip to San Francisco.
Disheartened after a divorce, his life changes when he meets Dean
Moriarty, who is "tremendously excited with life", and begins to long
for the freedom of the road: "Somewhere along the line I knew there
would be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl
would be handed to me". In July 1948, he sets off from his aunt's house
in Paterson
with $50 (equivalent to $634 in 2023) in his pocket. After taking
several buses and hitchhiking, he arrives in Denver, where he meets up
with Carlo Marx, Dean, and their friends. There are parties—among them
an excursion to the ghost town of Central City.
Eventually Sal leaves by bus and gets to San Francisco, where he meets
Remi Boncoeur and his girlfriend Lee Ann. Remi arranges for Sal to take a
job as a night watchman at a boarding camp for merchant sailors
waiting for their ship. Not holding this job for long, Sal hits the
road again. "Oh, where is the girl I love?" he wonders. Soon he meets
Terry, the "cutest little Mexican girl", on the bus to Los Angeles. They
stay together, traveling back to Bakersfield,
then to Sabinal, "her hometown", where her family works in the fields.
He meets Terry's brother Ricky, who teaches him the true meaning of "mañana"
("tomorrow"). Working in the cotton fields, Sal realizes that he is not
made for this type of work. Leaving Terry behind, he takes a bus back
east to Pittsburgh, and then hitchhikes his way to Times Square in New York City.
Once there he bums a quarter off a preacher who looks the other way,
and arrives at his aunt's house, just missing Dean, who had come to see
him, by two days.
Part Two
In
December 1948, Sal is celebrating Christmas with his relatives in
Testament, Virginia, when Dean shows up with Marylou (having left his
second wife, Camille, and their newborn baby, Amy, in San Francisco) and
Ed Dunkel. Sal's Christmas plans are shattered as "now the bug was on
me again, and the bug's name was Dean Moriarty." First they drive to New
York, where they meet Carlo and party. Dean wants Sal to make love to
Marylou, but Sal declines. In Dean's Hudson, they take off from New York in January 1949 and make it to New Orleans. In Algiers,
they stay with the morphine-addicted Old Bull Lee and his wife, Jane.
Galatea Dunkel joins her husband in New Orleans while Sal, Dean, and
Marylou continue their trip. Once in San Francisco, Dean again leaves
Marylou to be with Camille. "Dean will leave you out in the cold anytime
it is in the interest of him," Marylou tells Sal. Both of them stay
briefly in a hotel, but soon she moves out, following a nightclub owner.
Sal is alone and on Market Street
has visions of past lives, birth, and rebirth. Dean finds him and
invites him to stay with his family. Together, they visit nightclubs and
listen to Slim Gaillard
and other jazz musicians. The stay ends on a sour note: "what I
accomplished by coming to Frisco I don't know," and Sal departs, taking
the bus back to New York.
Part Three
In the spring of 1949, Sal takes a bus from New York to Denver.
He is depressed and lonesome; none of his friends are around. After
receiving some money, he leaves Denver for San Francisco to see Dean.
Camille is pregnant and unhappy, and Dean has injured his thumb trying
to hit Marylou for sleeping with other men. Camille throws them out, and
Sal invites Dean to come to New York, planning to travel further to
Italy. They meet Galatea, who tells Dean off: "You have absolutely no
regard for anybody but yourself and your kicks." Sal realizes she is
right—Dean is the "HOLY GOOF"—but also defends him, as "he's got the
secret that we're all busting to find out". After a night of jazz and
drinking in Little Harlem on Folsom Street,
they depart. On the way to Sacramento they meet a "fag", who
propositions them. Dean tries to hustle some money out of this but is
turned down. During this part of the trip Sal and Dean have ecstatic
discussions having found "IT" and "TIME". In Denver a brief argument
shows the growing rift between the two, when Dean reminds Sal of his
age, Sal being the older of the two. They get a 1947 Cadillac that needs to be taken to Chicago from a travel bureau.
Dean drives most of the way, crazy, careless, often speeding at over
one hundred miles per hour (160 km/h), delivering the car in a
disheveled state. By bus they move on to Detroit and spend a night on Skid Row, Dean hoping to find his homeless father. From Detroit they share a ride to New York and arrive at Sal's aunt's new flat in Long Island. They go on partying in New York, where Dean meets Inez and gets her pregnant while his wife is expecting their second child.
Part Four
In
the spring of 1950, Sal gets the itch to travel again while Dean is
working as a parking lot attendant in Manhattan, living with his
girlfriend Inez. Sal notices that he has been reduced to simple
pleasures—listening to basketball games and looking at erotic playing
cards. By bus Sal takes to the road again, passing Washington, D.C., Ashland, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, and eventually reaching Denver. There he meets Stan Shephard, and the two plan to go to Mexico City when they learn that Dean has bought a car and is on the way to join them. In a rickety '37 Ford sedan the three set off across Texas to Laredo,
where they cross the border. They are ecstatic, having left "everything
behind us and entering a new and unknown phase of things". Their money
buys more (10 cents for a beer), police are laid back, cannabis
is readily available, and people are curious and friendly. The
landscape is magnificent. In Gregoria, they meet Victor, a local kid,
who leads them to a bordello where they have their last grand party,
dancing to mambo, drinking, and having fun with prostitutes. In Mexico
City, Sal becomes ill from dysentery
and is "delirious and unconscious." Dean leaves him, and Sal later
reflects: "When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I
had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to
leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes."
Part Five
Dean,
having obtained divorce papers in Mexico, had first returned to New
York to marry Inez, only to leave her and go back to Camille. After his
recovery from dysentery in Mexico, Sal returns to New York in the fall.
He finds a girl, Laura, and plans to move with her to San Francisco. Sal
writes to Dean about his plan to move to San Francisco. Dean writes
back saying that he's willing to come and accompany Laura and Sal. Dean
arrives more than five weeks early, but Sal is out taking a late-night
walk alone. Sal returns home, sees a copy of Proust,
and knows it is Dean's. Sal realizes his friend has arrived, but at a
time when Sal doesn't have the money to relocate to San Francisco. On
hearing this Dean makes the decision to head back to Camille, Sal's
friend Remi Boncoeur denies Sal's request to give Dean a short lift to
40th Street on their way to a Duke Ellington concert at the Metropolitan Opera House.
Sal's girlfriend Laura realizes this is a painful moment for Sal and
prompts him for a response as the party drives off without Dean. Sal
replies: "He'll be alright". Sal later reflects as he sits on a river
pier under a New Jersey night sky about the roads and lands of America
that he has travelled and states: "... I think of Dean Moriarty, I even
think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean
Moriarty."
Characters
Kerouac often based his fictional characters on friends and family.
Because of the objections of my early publishers I was not allowed to use the same personae names in each work.
On the Road
received mixed critical reactions upon its publication in 1957. While
some early reviewers of the book spoke favorably of it, the backlash to
these reviews was swift and strong. Since its publication, critical
attention has focused on issues of both the context and the style,
addressing the actions of the characters as well as the nature of
Kerouac's prose.
Initial reaction
In his review for The New York Times,
Gilbert Millstein wrote, "...its publication is a historic occasion in
so far as the exposure of an authentic work of art is of any great
moment in an age in which the attention is fragmented and the
sensibilities are blunted by the superlatives of fashion" and praised it
as "a major novel." Millstein was already sympathetic toward the Beat Generation and his promotion of the book in the Times
did wonders for its recognition and acclaim. Not only did he like the
themes, but also the style, which would come to be just as hotly
contested in the reviews that followed. "There are sections of On the Road
in which the writing is of a beauty almost breathtaking ... there is
some writing on jazz that has never been equaled in American fiction,
either for insight, style, or technical virtuosity." Kerouac and Joyce Johnson, a younger writer he was living with, read the review shortly after midnight at a newsstand at 69th Street and Broadway, near Joyce's apartment in the Upper West Side.
They took their copy of the newspaper to a neighborhood bar and read
the review over and over. "Jack kept shaking his head," Joyce remembered
later in her memoir Minor Characters,
"as if he couldn't figure out why he wasn't happier than he was."
Finally, they returned to her apartment to go to sleep. As Joyce
recalled: "Jack lay down obscure for the last time in his life. The
ringing phone woke him the next morning, and he was famous."
A backlash began a few days later in the same publication. David Dempsey
published a review that contradicted most of what Millstein had
promoted in the book. "As a portrait of a disjointed segment of society
acting out of its own neurotic necessity, On the Road, is a
stunning achievement. But it is a road, as far as the characters are
concerned, that leads to nowhere". While he did not discount the
stylistic nature of the text (saying that it was written "with great
relish"), he dismissed the content as a "passionate lark" rather than a
novel.
Other reviewers were also less than impressed. Phoebe Lou Adams in Atlantic Monthly
wrote that it "disappoints because it constantly promises a revelation
or a conclusion of real importance and general applicability, and cannot
deliver any such conclusion because Dean is more convincing as an
eccentric than as a representative of any segment of humanity."
While she liked the writing and found a good theme, her concern was
repetition. "Everything Mr. Kerouac has to say about Dean has been told
in the first third of the book, and what comes later is a series of
variations on the same theme."
Robert Kirsch in The Los Angeles Times
said, "Mr. Kerouac may one day be a good writer, but that day will come
when he stops riding around in a compulsive search for "material" and
settles down to learn some of the first things about the craft...Mr.
Kerouac calls this "The Beat Generation," but a much more accurate
description would be "The Deadbeat Generation." I don't know whether
such people really exist, but if they do, he has thoroughly failed to
make them believable."
The review from Time
exhibited a similar sentiment. "The post-World War II generation—beat
or beatific—has not found symbolic spokesmen with anywhere near the
talents of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, or Nathanael West.
In this novel, talented Author Kerouac, 35, does not join that literary
league, either, but at least suggests that his generation is not
silent. With his barbaric yawp of a book, Kerouac commands attention as a
kind of literary James Dean."
It considers the book partly a travel book and partly a collection of
journal jottings. While Kerouac sees his characters as "mad to live ...
desirous of everything at the same time," the reviewer likens them to
cases of "psychosis that is a variety of Ganser Syndrome" who "aren't really mad—they only seem to be."
Critical study
Thomas Pynchon described On the Road as "one of the great American novels".
On the Road has been the object of critical study since its publication. David Brooks of The New York Times
compiled several opinions and summarized them in an Op-Ed from October
2, 2007. Whereas Millstein saw it as a story in which the heroes took
pleasure in everything, George Mouratidis, an editor of a new edition,
claimed "above all else, the story is about loss". "It's a book about
death and the search for something meaningful to hold on to—the famous
search for 'IT,' a truth larger than the self, which, of course, is
never found," wrote Meghan O'Rourke in Slate. "Kerouac was this deep,
lonely, melancholy man," Hilary Holladay of the University of Massachusetts Lowell told The Philadelphia Inquirer. "And if you read the book closely, you see that sense of loss and sorrow swelling on every page". "In truth, On the Road is a book of broken dreams and failed plans," wrote Ted Gioia in The Weekly Standard.
John Leland, author of Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think),
said "We're no longer shocked by the sex and drugs. The slang is passé
and at times corny. Some of the racial sentimentality is appalling" but
added "the tale of passionate friendship and the search for revelation
are timeless. These are as elusive and precious in our time as in Sal's,
and will be when our grandchildren celebrate the book's hundredth
anniversary."
To Brooks, this characterization seemed limited. "Reading through
the anniversary commemorations, you feel the gravitational pull of the
great Boomer Narcissus. All cultural artifacts have to be interpreted
through whatever experiences the Baby Boomer generation
is going through at that moment. So a book formerly known for its
youthful exuberance now becomes a gloomy middle-aged disillusion."
He lamented that the book's spirit seems to have been tamed by the
professionalism of America today and how it has only survived in parts.
The more reckless and youthful parts of the text that gave it its energy
are the parts that have "run afoul of the new gentility, the rules laid
down by the health experts, childcare experts, guidance counselors,
safety advisers, admissions officers, virtuecrats and employers to
regulate the lives of the young." He claims that the "ethos" of the book has been lost.
Mary Pannicia Carden saw traveling as a way for the characters to
assert their independence: they "attempt to replace the model of
manhood dominant in capitalist America with a model rooted in
foundational American ideals of conquest and self-discovery."
"Reassigning disempowering elements of patriarchy to female keeping,
they attempt to substitute male brotherhood for the nuclear family and
to replace the ladder of success with the freedom of the road as primary
measures of male identity."
Kerouac's writing style has attracted the attention of critics. On the Road has been considered by Tim Hunt to be a transitional phase between the traditional narrative structure of The Town and the City (1951) and the "wild form" of his later books like Visions of Cody (1972).
Kerouac's own explanation of his style in "Essentials of Spontaneous
Prose" (1953) is that his writing is like the Impressionist painters who
sought to create art through direct observation. Matt Theado feels he
endeavored to present a raw version of truth which did not lend itself
to the traditional process of revision and rewriting but rather the
emotionally charged practice of the spontaneity he pursued.
Theado argues that the personal nature of the text helps foster a
direct link between Kerouac and the reader; that his casual diction and
very relaxed syntax was an intentional attempt to depict events as they
happened and to convey all of the energy and emotion of the experiences.
Music in On the Road
Music is an important part of the scene that Kerouac sets in On the Road.
Early in the book (Pt. 1, Ch. 3), he establishes the time period with
references to the musical world: "At this time, 1947, bop was going like
mad all over America. The fellows at the Loop blew, but with a tired air, because bop was somewhere between its Charlie Parker Ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis.
And as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop has
come to represent for all of us, I thought of all my friends from one
end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same
vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing-about."
Main characters Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty are clearly
enthusiastic fans of the jazz/bebop and early rhythm-and-blues musicians
and records that were in the musical mix during the years when story
took place, 1947 to 1950. Sal, Dean, and their friends are repeatedly
depicted listening to specific records and going to clubs to hear their
musical favorites.
For example, in one of two separate passages where they go to clubs to hear British jazz pianist George Shearing,
the effect of the music is described as almost overwhelming for Dean
(Pt. 2, Ch. 4): "Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of
the piano in great rich showers, you'd think the man wouldn't have time
to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea. Folks yelled for
him to 'Go!' Dean was sweating; the sweat poured down his collar. 'There
he is! That's him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!' And
Shearing was conscious of the madman behind him, he could hear every one
of Dean's gasps and imprecations, he could sense it though he couldn't
see. 'That's right!' Dean said. 'Yes!' Shearing smiled; he rocked.
Shearing rose from the piano, dripping with sweat; these were his great
1949 days before he became cool and commercial. When he was gone Dean
pointed to the empty piano seat. 'God's empty chair,' he said."
Kerouac mentions many other musical artists and their records throughout On the Road: Charlie Parker – "Ornithology" (Pt. 1, Ch. 3; also Pt. 3, Ch. 10); Lionel Hampton – "Central Avenue Breakdown" (Pt. 1, Ch. 13; also Pt. 4, Ch. 4); Billie Holiday – "Lover Man" (Pt.1, Ch. 13; also Pt. 3, Ch. 4); Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray – "The Hunt" (Pt. 2, Ch. 1; Pt. 2, Ch. 4); Dizzy Gillespie – "Congo Blues" (Pt. 3, Ch. 7 – recorded under Red Norvo's name and also featuring Charlie Parker; also Pt. 3, Ch. 10; Pt. 4, Ch. 3); Willis Jackson – "Gator Tail" (Pt. 4, Ch. 1 – recorded with the Cootie Williams Orchestra); Wynonie Harris – "I Like My Baby's Pudding" (Pt. 4, Ch. 4); and Perez Prado -- "More Mambo Jambo," "Chattanooga de Mambo," "Mambo Numero Ocho" ("Mambo No. 8") (Pt. 4, Ch. 5).
Jazz and other types of music are also featured more generally as
a backdrop, with the characters often listening to music in clubs or on
the radio. For example, while driving across the upper Midwest toward
New York City, Sal mentions that he and Dean are listening to the radio
show of well-known jazz deejay Symphony Sid Torin (Pt. 3, Ch. 11).
Kerouac also delves into the classical music genre briefly, having Sal attend a performance of Beethoven's sole opera, Fidelio (1805), in Central City, Colorado, as performed by "stars of the Metropolitan" who are visiting the area for the summer (Pt. 1, Ch. 9).
"It changed my life like it changed everyone else's," Dylan would say many years later. Tom Waits,
too, acknowledged its influence, hymning Jack and Neal in a song and
calling the Beats "father figures." At least two great American
photographers were influenced by Kerouac: Robert Frank, who became his close friend—Kerouac wrote the introduction to Frank's book, The Americans—and Stephen Shore,
who set out on an American road trip in the 1970s with Kerouac's book
as a guide. It would be hard to imagine Hunter S. Thompson's road novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas had On the Road not laid down the template; likewise, films such as Easy Rider, Paris, Texas, and even Thelma and Louise.
In his book Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors, Ray Manzarek (keyboard player of The Doors) wrote "I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed."
On the Road influenced an entire generation of musicians,
poets, and writers including Allen Ginsberg. Because of Ginsberg's
friendship with Kerouac, Ginsberg was written into the novel through the
character Carlo Marx. Ginsberg recalled that he was attracted to the
beat generation, and Kerouac, because the beats valued "detachment from
the existing society," while at the same time calling for an immediate
release from a culture in which the most "freely" accessible
items—bodies and ideas—seemed restricted. Ginsberg incorporated a sense
of freedom of prose and style into his poetry as a result of the
influence of Kerouac.
Eric Kripke, creator of long-running series Supernatural, has also cited On the Road as a major inspiration for the fantasy series.
A film adaptation of On the Road had been proposed in 1957 when Jack Kerouac wrote a one-page letter to actor Marlon Brando, suggesting that he play Dean Moriarty while Kerouac would portray Sal Paradise. Brando never responded to the letter; later Warner Bros. offered $110,000 for the rights to Kerouac's book, but his agent, Sterling Lord, declined it, hoping for a $150,000 deal from Paramount Pictures, which did not occur.
After seeing Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), Coppola appointed Salles to direct the movie.
In preparation for the film, Salles traveled the United States, tracing
Kerouac's journey and filming a documentary on the search for On the Road. Sam Riley starred as Sal Paradise. Garrett Hedlund portrayed Dean Moriarty. Kristen Stewart played Mary Lou. Kirsten Dunst portrayed Camille. The film screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012 and was nominated for the Palme d'Or.
In 2007, BBC Four aired Russell Brand On the Road, a documentary presented by Russell Brand and Matt Morgan about Kerouac, focusing on On the Road. In 2014 a feature documentary by Kurt Jacobsen and Warren Leming entitled American Road,
which explores the mystique of the road with an ample section on
Kerouac, premiered at the American Documentary Film Festival in Palm
Springs and then screened at two dozen more film festivals.
While many critics still consider the word "beat" in its literal
sense of "tired and beaten down," others, including Kerouac himself
promoted the generation more in sense of "beatific" or blissful.
Holmes and Kerouac published several articles in popular magazines in
an attempt to explain the movement. In the November 16, 1952 New York Times Sunday Magazine,
he wrote a piece exposing the faces of the Beat Generation. "[O]ne day
[Kerouac] said, 'You know, this is a really beat generation' ... More
than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of
being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and ultimately, of
soul: a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness. In
short, it means being undramatically pushed up against the wall of
oneself." He distinguishes Beats from the Lost Generation
of the 1920s pointing out how the Beats are not lost but how they are
searching for answers to all of life's questions. Kerouac's
preoccupation with writers like Ernest Hemingway shaped his view of the beat generation. He uses a prose style which he adapted from Hemingway and throughout On the Road he alludes to novels like The Sun Also Rises. "How to live seems much more crucial than why."
In many ways, it is a spiritual journey, a quest to find belief,
belonging, and meaning in life. Not content with the uniformity promoted
by government and consumer culture, the Beats yearned for a deeper,
more sensational experience. Holmes expands his attempt to define the
generation in a 1958 article in Esquire magazine. This article was able to take more of a look back at the formation of the movement as it was published after On the Road.
"It describes the state of mind from which all unessentials have been
stripped, leaving it receptive to everything around it, but impatient
with trivial obstructions. To be beat is to be at the bottom of your
personality, looking up."
Culture jamming employs techniques originally associated with Letterist International, and later Situationist International known as détournement. It uses the language and rhetoric
of mainstream culture to subversively critique the social institutions
that produce that culture. Tactics include editing company logos to critique the respective companies, products, or concepts they represent, or wearing fashion statements that criticize the current fashion trends by deliberately clashing with them. Culture jamming often entails using mass media to produce ironic or satirical commentary about itself, commonly using the original medium's communication method. Culture jamming is also a form of subvertising.
Culture jamming is intended to expose questionable political assumptions behind commercial culture, and can be considered a reaction against politically imposed social conformity. Prominent examples of culture jamming include the adulteration of billboard advertising by the Billboard Liberation Front and contemporary artists such as Ron English. Culture jamming may involve street parties and protests.
While culture jamming usually focuses on subverting or critiquing
political and advertising messages, some proponents focus on a different
form which brings together artists, designers, scholars, and activists[8] to create works that transcend the status quo rather than merely criticize it.
Origins of the term, etymology, and history
The
term was coined by Mark 3000 of The Upstairs Burned and Mark 3000 in
The Fascist States in a Flint Michigan fanzine called Death and Gravey
in 1981. Subsequently, it was mistakingly attributed to being created in
1984 by Don Joyce of American sound collage band Negativland, with the release of their album JamCon '84. The phrase "culture jamming" comes from the idea of radio jamming,
where public frequencies can be pirated and subverted for independent
communication, or to disrupt dominant frequencies used by governments.
In one of the tracks of the album, they stated:
As awareness of how the media
environment we occupy affects and directs our inner life grows, some
resist. The skillfully reworked billboard... directs the public viewer
to a consideration of the original corporate strategy. The studio for
the cultural jammer is the world at large.
According to Vince Carducci, although the term was coined by Negativland, culture jamming can be traced as far back as the 1950s. One particularly influential group that was active in Europe was the Situationist International and was led by Guy Debord.
The SI asserted that in the past, humans dealt with life and the
consumer market directly. They argued that this spontaneous way of life
was slowly deteriorating as a direct result of the new "modern" way of
life. Situationists saw everything from television to radio as a threat
and argued that life in industrialized areas, driven by capitalist
forces, had become monotonous, sterile, gloomy, linear, and
productivity-driven. In particular, the SI argued humans had become
passive recipients of thespectacle,
a simulated reality that generates the desire to consume, and positions
humans as obedient consumerist cogs within the efficient and
exploitative productivity loop of capitalism. Through playful activity, individuals could create situations, the opposite of spectacles. For the SI, these situations took the form of the dérive,
or the active drift of the body through space in ways that broke
routine and overcame boundaries, creating situations by exiting habit
and entering new interactive possibilities.
The cultural critic Mark Dery traces the origins of culture jamming to medieval carnival, which Mikhail Bakhtin interpreted, in Rabelais and his World, as an officially sanctioned subversion of the social hierarchy. Modern precursors might include: the media-savvy agit-prop of the anti-Nazi photomonteur John Heartfield, the sociopolitical street theater and staged media events of 1960s radicals such as Abbie Hoffman, Joey Skaggs, the German concept of Spaßguerilla, and in the Situationist International (SI) of the 1950s and 1960s. The SI first compared its own activities to radio jamming in 1968, when it proposed the use of guerrilla communication within mass media to sow confusion within the dominant culture. In 1985, the Guerrilla Girls formed to expose discrimination and corruption in the art world.
Mark Dery's New York Times article on culture jamming, "The Merry Pranksters And the Art of the Hoax" was the first mention, in the mainstream media, of the phenomenon; Dery later expanded on this article in his 1993 Open Magazine pamphlet, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs,
a seminal essay that remains the most exhaustive historical,
sociopolitical, and philosophical theorization of culture jamming to
date. Adbusters, a Canadian publication espousing an environmentalist critique of consumerism and advertising, began promoting aspects of culture jamming after Dery introduced founder and editor Kalle Lasn to the term through a series of articles he wrote for the magazine. In her critique of consumerism, No Logo, the Canadian cultural commentator and political activist Naomi Klein examines culture jamming in a chapter that focuses on the work of Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada. Through an analysis of the Where the Hell is Matt
viral videos, researchers Milstein and Pulos analyze how the power of
the culture jam to disrupt the status quo is currently being threatened
by increasing commercial incorporation. For example, T-Mobile utilized the Liverpool street underground station to host a flashmob to sell their mobile services.
Culture jamming is a form of disruption that plays on the emotions
of viewers and bystanders. Jammers want to disrupt the unconscious
thought process that takes place when most consumers view a popular
advertising and bring about a détournement. Activists that utilize this tactic are counting on their meme
to pull on the emotional strings of people and evoke some type of
reaction. The reactions that most cultural jammers are hoping to evoke
are behavioral change and political action. There are four emotions that activists often want viewers to feel. These emotions – shock, shame, fear, and anger – are believed to be the catalysts for social change.
Culture jamming also intersects with forms of legal transgression.
Semiotic disobedience, for example, involves both authorial and
proprietary disobedience,
while techniques such as coercive disobedience comprise acts of
culture jamming combined with a demonstration of the retaliatory actions
(legal consequences) handed down by the ruling apparatus.
The basic unit in which a message is transmitted in culture jamming is the meme.
Memes are condensed images that stimulate visual, verbal, musical, or
behavioral associations that people can easily imitate and transmit to
others. The term meme was coined and first popularized by geneticist Richard Dawkins, but later used by cultural critics such as Douglas Rushkoff, who claimed memes were a type of media virus. Memes are seen as genes that can jump from outlet to outlet and replicate themselves or mutate upon transmission, just like a virus.
Culture jammers will often use common symbols such as the
McDonald's golden arches or Nike swoosh to engage people and force them
to think about their eating habits or fashion sense. In one example, jammer Jonah Peretti
used the Nike symbol to stir debate on sweatshop child labor and
consumer freedom. Peretti made public exchanges between himself and Nike
over a disagreement. Peretti had requested custom Nikes with the word
"sweatshop" placed in the Nike symbol. Nike refused. Once this story was
made public, it spread worldwide and contributed to the already robust
conversation about Nike's use of sweatshops, which had been ongoing for a decade prior to Peretti's 2001 stunt.
Jammers can also organize and participate in mass campaigns.
Examples of cultural jamming like Perretti's are more along the lines of
tactics that radical consumer social movements would use. These
movements push people to question the taken-for-granted assumption that
consuming is natural and good and aim to disrupt the naturalization of
consumer culture; they also seek to create systems of production and
consumption that are more humane and less dominated by global corporate late capitalism.
Past mass events and ideas have included Buy Nothing Day,
virtual sit-ins and protests over the Internet, producing
‘subvertisements' and placing them in public spaces, and creating and
enacting ‘place jamming' projects where public spaces are reclaimed and
nature is re-introduced into urban places.
The most effective form of jamming is to use an already widely
recognizable meme to transmit the message. Once viewers are forced to
take a second look at the mimicked popular meme they are forced out of
their comfort zone. Viewers are presented with another way to view the
meme and are forced to think about the implications presented by the
jammer.
More often than not, when this is used as a tactic the jammer is going
for shock value. For example, to make consumers aware of the negative
body image that big-name fashion brands are frequently accused of causing, a subvertisement of Calvin Klein's 'Obsession' was created and played worldwide. It depicted a young woman with an eating disorder throwing up into a toilet.
Another way that social consumer movements hope to utilize
culture jamming effectively is by employing a metameme. A metameme is a
two-level message that punctures a specific commercial image but does so
in a way that challenges some larger aspect of the political culture of
corporate domination. An example would be the "true cost" campaign set in motion by Adbusters.
"True cost" forced consumers to compare the human labor cost and
conditions and environmental drawbacks of products to the sales costs.
Another example would be the "Truth" campaigns that exposed the
deception tobacco companies used to sell their products.
Following critical scholars like Paulo Freire,
Culture jams are also being integrated into the university classroom
"setting in which students and teachers gain the opportunity not only to
learn methods of informed public critique but also to collaboratively
use participatory communication techniques to actively create new
locations of meaning." For example, students disrupt public space to bring attention to community concerns or utilize subvertisements to engage with media literacy projects.
Some
scholars and activists, such as Amory Starr and Joseph D. Rumbo, have
argued that culture jamming is futile because it is easily co-opted and
commodified by the market, which tends to "defuse" its potential for
consumer resistance.
A newer understanding of the term has been called for that would
encourage artists, scholars and activists to come together and create
innovative, flexible, and practical mobile art pieces that communicate
intellectual and political concepts and new strategies and actions.
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