Hyperreality on the Moebius Strip
Considering the last two parts of On The Road, I will explore: the dis-emplacement of the natural world on Dean and Sal’s journey to Mexico and back; how the road is contorted and mis-shaped across the land, to the extent that it creates a Baudrillardian hyperreality in the shape of a Moebius strip; and the subsequent intra-action of the storytelling and the metanarrative, in which the compositional form of Kerouac’s “Spontaneous prose” creates playful meanings within and and beyond the narrative. As a result, Kerouac is not only describing the land as he travels across it, but he is also intra-actively re-shaping the natural world as he travels through it.
I will begin with the characters' journey to Mexico as a representation of Baudrillard’s simulation, which subsequently dis-emplaces the narrative. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard asserts that “it is the map that precedes the territory”, and as a result the territory is “slowly rotting across the map” (160). Kerouac displays these notions in the text through his characters’ depth-blindness. He achieves this by having his characters paint the landscape they travel through in a haze: its spacetime has collapsed before the speed of their car. He describes the landscape as an “endless poem”, and the places within it in opaque ways, such as “the dark and mysterious Ohio” (Kerouac 232). Kerouac later goes further than this, as not only is the car distorting the land, it is also eradicating it, describing “the path it [the car] burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, […] drying rivers” (236). Through this collapsing of space, Kerouac presents a natural world that has been dis-emplaced, it has been contorted and squashed outside the lines of the road, and its destruction by the car symbolises the anthropogenic dis-emplacement of the natural world to the destroyed outer edges of the Anthropocene.
Kerouac elaborates on this dis-emplacement by incorporating his characters into a hyperreal existence. Baudrillard describes “this as the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere” (167). Kerouac achieves this through a synthesis between the real and the imagined. For their Mexico trip, Sal describes their journey as “no longer east-west, but magic south” (Kerouac 241). This dichotomy of direction creates an othering of their previous Americanised narratives, and as a result implies their next journey exists beyond the borders of their reality, exemplified by the use of italicisation for “south”. Furthermore, Kerouac continues this magical extension when he describes their journeys taking place in “a growing absence in space, and the space was the eastward view toward Kansas that led all the way back to my home in Atlantis” (243). Kerouac’s journeys have dis-emplaced them between the “real” world and the magical hyperspace of the imaginary. At the same time, Kerouac also presents this hyperreal landscape as a Moebius strip – folding back on itself and reoccurring. Baudrillard describes this as “the subtle, maleficent, elusive twisting of meaning” where “all the referentials intermingle their discourses in a circular, Moebian compulsion” (176). This is evident in On the Road, where locations in the novel are referred to as identical, with “the strange radio-station antenna of Ciudad Mante appeared ahead, as if we were in Nebraska” (Kerouac 270), as if the journeys occur on a never-ending road that twists and turns in a loop. In this sense, Kerouac’s characters not only exist between the real and imaginary, but their “worlds” overlap in unnatural ways so that they are re-occurring, so that they, in the words of Karen Barad have "entanglements of part-ing" (406) with one another.
Considering this, we will further examine the characterisation of the main protagonists, and how they differ – specifically that Dean is perpetually moving on this Moebius strip. At the start of the Mexico journey Dean describes his trunk as “always sticking out from under the bed” (Kerouac 229), symbolising a constant dynamism. Furthermore, Dean’s existence is also heavily imbued with the dis-emplacement of the natural world between the real and imagined; his arrival is described as “the imminent arrival of Gargantua; preparations had to be made to widen the gutters of Denver and foreshorten certain laws to fit his suffering bulk” (236). His presence destroys and invades the boundaries of the world like a flooding river. He is also described in perpetual motion – when they are in Mexico City, he is in adoration – “This is the traffic I’ve always dreamed of! Everybody goes!” (278) – a permanence of moving yet also implying not getting anywhere, and no real destination. At the end of the novel, when Sal settles in New York, Dean carries on travelling, and he is clearly motivated by the road, the symbolic Moebius strip. He is described as having his “eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again” (280). Unlike Sal, who trespasses between the hyperspace of the real and the imagined through his long journeys, Dean is perpetually stuck on it, trapped in-between the boarders of the real and the imagined to the extent that he is permanently dis-emplaced, and that his perpetual motion is permanently separate from any fixed world, collapsed into the constant motion of spacetime.
Finally, we will explore the metanarrative of dis-emplacement in On the Road, to the extent that Jack Kerouac’s compositional style of spontaneous prose infects the narrative, and they then intra-act with one another. Kerouac composed the novel from a 120 foot “scroll” – paper sheets that were cut and pasted together (Nicosia 536). This creates an intra-active composition – where the text is continuous but together through parting. The effects of this can be seen in the narrative itself: On the Mexico trip, Sal imagines “Chad King was somewhere off the road in front of a campfire […] telling his life story and never dreamed we were passing at that exact moment on the highway” (Kerouac 245). This creates the effect of the narrative being dis-emplaced; where characters are moved and fixed to follow the narrative journey of Sal and Dean. Furthermore, the texts intra-acts in intertextual ways too. Sal says that “there was even a party in a castle to which we all drove […]I had finally found the castle where the great snake of the world was about to rise up" (240). This moment is a clear reference to another of Kerouac’s novels, Dr. Sax, and through this, Kerouac dis-emplaces his stories to overlap with one another, as if they have been cut and pasted to exist together in a hyperreal world.
In conclusion, Kerouac’s representation of natural worlds is one of dis-emplacement: it is contorted and twisted to fit the story of the narrative, in a literary and a literal sense. From this, Kerouac creates a hyperreal space, where the permeable boundaries of the real and the imagined cross over one another, to which his characters are dis-emplaced between – and in Dean’s case, perpetually, and forever. Therefore, we can see the intra-action between Kerouac's story and the natural world, not only as the details that hold his story together, but also his role in transforming it through dis-emplacement.
Works Cited:
Baudrillard, Jean, and Paul Foss. Simulations. New York: Semiotext (e), 1983.
Barad, Karen. "Transmaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 21 no. 2, 2015, p.387-422. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu.article/581607
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road (Penguin Modern Classics) (MC FICTION ENG). Penguin Classics, 2011.
Nicosia, Gerald. By Gerald Nicosia - Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (1994–03-10) [Paperback]. University of California Press, 1994.