The Liminal Heartbeat of the Beat Generation
In lieu of America’s greatest generation, the lost generation often describes the period between World War II and the “end” of the Cold War. The Beat generation was the artistic movement amidst an America’s identity crisis. This capstone project will consider Jack Kerouac’s novels On the Road with particular attention to liminal characters and their behaviors, microcosms for explaining social and cultural response and revolution of the Beats.
Kerouac’s novels are chronological autobiographical accounts that breathe life into our imaginings of the Beat generation. On the Road seen through Victor Turner’s lens of liminality sheds light on Kerouac’s novels as artifacts for his developing writing career and personal lives whivh were very much overlapping with each other. Victor Turner’s anthropological framework of liminality is the schema which the motifs of substance abuse and eastern philosophy within Kerouac’s novels will be reconsidered as reflections not only of his own development but metaphors for America’s desperation for stimulation and self awareness as it struggled to shape its identity during the uncertainty of the social politics of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
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Explaining Liminality
The conceptual framework of liminality is important to anthropological understanding of change between periods in history. Liminal theory in anthropological contexts explains cultural shifts by identifying the thresholds that distinguish one period from another. Originally used to describe the the transformational nature of rituals, Van Grennep separated liminal phenomenon into three stages:
“The first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group either from an earlier fixed point in the social structure, from a set of cultural conditions (a “state “), or from both. During the intervening “liminal” period, the characteristics of the ritual subject (the “passenger”) are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state. In the third phase (reaggregation or reincorporation), 94 Liminality and Communitas 95 the passage is consummated. The ritual subject, individual or corporate, is in a relatively stable state once more and. by virtue of this, has rights and obligations vis-a.-vis others of a clearly defined and “structural” type; he is expected to behave in accordance with certain customary norms and ethical standards binding on incumbents of social position in a system of such positions.”
For change to occur in an individual or a society as a whole, they must first recognize the social norms they plan to depart from therefor establishing a threshold or margin that defines and distinguishes the existing individual or society prior to the liminal, or transitional, phase. Within liminal space, identity is reconstructed as certain characteristics of the subject are discarded, revised, and even conceived. The characteristics that endure the liminal space become the new structural norms or the subject of the liminal experience. Van Gennep defines liminal phenomenon as “rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age.” The chronological organization of events by “beginning, middle, and end” illustrates the theory quite colloquially. To say the least, the “middle” is the space “beginning” and “end.” While this is an incredibly self-explanatory example, not all liminal narratives are as distinct as the binaries of “beginning” and “end.” Consider a more complex change such as “child” to “adult.” The liminal space between “child” and “adult” might vary depending on the basis of different definitions of childhood and adulthood. Liminal space is often ambiguous or otherwise complicated to explain. Below is a streamlined visual representation of the theory of liminality within different contexts. This exercise in liminal application demonstrates how the initial and end states are typically straightforward compared to the indefinite nature of liminal space.
| Seperation | Liminal Space | R-aagragation / Reincorporation |
| Beginning | Middle | End |
| Child | Teen | Adult |
| Caterpillar | Cocoon | Butterfly |
| Past | Present | Future |
Furthermore, the colored representation above symbolizes how in liminal space subjects share certain characteristics of their initial and inevitable states.
This essay will consider the literary movement known as the Beat Generation within a liminal framework in order to provide a perspective on Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road and understand him better as an outsider that embraces liminality and actively adopts his marginalized identity. Van Gennep’s original conception of the notion of liminality was specific to describing the phenomenon of rituals. In ritual liminal theory there three stages in ritual: separation, transition, and incorporation (Rites 11). In short, Gennep was describes the ritual process and how its participants move from one state to another through the liminal experience of a symbolic ritual signifying change. Transition is the phase that Victor redefines in order to broaden the theoretical framework from specifically describing rituals to a new critical lens applicable to any state of change or flux.
Turner and Van Gennep consider society to consist of different states of being determined by any sort of categorical organization. Liminal space occur in-between the determined states of being ranging from differing locations, states, social status or ages. In summation, liminality is the limbo between structural conceptions or states of being. Counterculture is inherently liminal because of its departure from the canonical and mainstream notions of the dominant societal structures.
Looking at Literature as Liminal
Victor Turner’s concept of liminality can be used to describe Kerouac’s view of the Beat Generation as well as his own and the nation’s attempts of self-definition. These novels are reflective of Kerouac’s personal ideals and memories in the context of the political, social, and economic strife during America’s own liminal period of its history. Turner explains that “liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between” states of being (Ritual, 95). Expanding on Turner’s formulation, the idea of liminality can be used to analyze and understand the culture that Kerouac and the rest of the Beats responded to: American society’s transition between different socio-political states in lieu of World War II. Turner’s anthropological concept of liminality helps to highlight social struggles embedded in the narrative. Liminality is still a novel framework for considering countercultural movements that reflect political-social change. There is a gap in the literature for liminal discourse specific to the texts as microcosms of a given author as microcosms or case studies for understanding the literary and historical time period as a whole. Analysis of the father of the Jack Kerouac’s novels with particular attention to alcohol and Buddhism as liminal behaviors allows for an enlightening reconsideration of his novels’ protagonists and the political and social contexts that they were written. The Beats’ efforts to carve out a space between established and accepted social structures, preserved within Kerouac’s spontaneous prose form depict the narrative potential of the liminal space. I argue that liminality can be especially useful to literature responding to personal or social development, post-War disillusionment, and other cultural processes.
On the Road to Liminality
In On the Road, Sal Paradise escapes structured society and experience liminality in the form of his uninhibited and free life literally on the road. Sal’s life on the road is unpredictable and a search for thrills as much as it is a search for oneself and in this way life on the road is liminal. Kerouac’s novel depicts the Beat generation’s attempt to consolidate its position within the confines of a highly structured white picket fence society competing with a plethora of emerging civil rights movements and women participating in the workforce. The novel depicts the emerging Beat identity that parallels the new American identity. Beat counterculture provided an outlet for expression and criticism that was suppressed by the trend of conformity in the 1950s.
Within the liminal space of the open road, Sal meets alternative perspectives to the societal structures of are day and age. Sal’s journey on the road is a narrative that serves as an effective metaphor for the Beats pursuing a spontaneous visceral life. Intrigued by the devil may care of Dean Moriarty, Sal embodies the Beats’ interest in intentionally pushing the boundaries of the thresholds of the liminal space they occupied as they refused conformity. Kerouac and other Beat writers aimed to deconstruct the American identity fixated with nuclear families and middle-class prosperity and shed light on the realities of the ostracized restless youths, homeless, African American culture, and jazz musicians that comprised Kerouac’s beat down but beatific Beat Generation.
Liminal Characters and Places
The lines are blurred between the fiction and reality of the historical figures that Kerouac’s characters represent considering his novels were almost entirely autobiographical. Although the story seems like a single unending road trip for the protagonist Sal Paradise, the experiences it was inspired by were a culmination of several individual road trips. On the Road, can be read as a bildungsroman and therefor the liminal space is defined within the thresholds of adolescence and inevitable adulthood. Throughout the novel, the literal setting of the open road provides the protagonists a departure from “s secure domestic environment into a “liminal space” … before questioning, at the end of their journey, the question of reassimilation” (War “. Sal refers to it as the “protective road where nobody would know us” (203), illustrating the road’s inherent social liberation from our preceding reputations and positions in the world. The liminal road is a setting where personal identity and national identity can be found in a state of flux. For both Sal and Kerouac, the road was less about the destination but the journey, the experience liminal freedom. Both Sal and Dean are perpetually drawn to the road and staying in one place for too long evoked a unnerving feeling they describe as “the bug” (On the Road, 104). After a failed attempt to settle down with Marlylou, his then girlfriend, Dean decides it is time to take off again and Sal comments as they drive away saying “we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind” (121). In this instance, the road serves an escape from the complexities of domestic life and the rut of routine that the two could not bring themselves to accept at that point in their lives.
The road is very much a liminal space representing the “present” between the “past” and “future.” These characters are not tied down by daily routines, they are spontaneous and alive. Sal says that on the road “unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you’re alive to see” (122). This is where Dean’s permanent liminality becomes clear. He cannot leave the road and return to society. Since the road is not a home according to the social norms, however, Dean cannot function in normal society, which will be explained further later. Dean’s ability to drive a thousand miles north and south in thirty hours to move Sal’s sister’s possessions from Testament to New York also shows his mastery of time through his control of the road (104). Dean’s different sense of time also enables him to negotiate his way through thick traffic at 110 miles an hour without causing an accident. He passed the slow cars, swerved, and almost hit the left rail of the bridge, went head-on into the shadow of the unslowing truck, cut right sharply, just missed the truck’s left wheel, almost hit the first slow car, came out from behind the truck to look, all in a matter of two seconds, flashing by and leaving nothing more than a cloud of dust instead of a horrible five-way crash (Road 215,). Dean’s temporal liminality will be discussed later in more detail, but it is important to understand that this temporal liminality is the result of the liminalizing space of the road itself, with which Dean has a powerful relationship. The process has gone on from early days to our own” (23). Mennell argues that Victor Turner might have said “that the frontier promoted a communitas, in which conventional differences of social class and ethnicity were played down in favor of a common quality of Americanness” (117). It is this “Americanness” that Sal Paradise hopes to learn from the road, as well as from Dean Moriarty. For Dean Moriarty, the road is where he lives; he was born on it, and he can control it, while trusting it to lead him wherever he needs to go. He even sleeps on the road in Mexico (Road 269). Although I agree with Martinez that Kerouac employs symbols and narratives associated with the mythic American frontier, which Sal Paradise uses to inform his hopes for the road as well as its reality, I do not agree that Kerouac himself subscribes to it readily, as the narrative of Sal’s gradual disillusionment with the mirage of American and Western experience reveals. On Sal’s first road adventure, for example, he arrives in Cheyenne, Wyoming, at a Wild West Week in the historic Wild West itself. He finds it commoditized and corrupted, however, by “fat businessmen in boots and ten-gallon hats, with their hefty wives in cowgirl attire” (Road 30). Kerouac here symbolically disrupts the purity of the Western myth early on in the narrative, foreshadowing his later feeling of abandonment by Dean and exclusion from his frontier dreams. As “blank guns” go off, and the saloons are “crowded to the sidewalk,” the spell is broken (30). Sal says he is “amazed, and at the same time I felt
it was ridiculous in my first shot at the West I was seeing to what absurd devices it had fallen to keep its proud tradition” (30). Furthermore, the mythic cowboys of the American landscape are not the pictures of self-sufficiency that Martinez suggests they are. The cowboys in Kerouac’s narrative affirm an exceptionalist American viewpoint, but significantly are out of touch with reality, stuck somewhere in a symbolic past. From this point, Kerouac embarks on a novel frontier, the old one proving inauthentic and stuck in the past. Sal’s image of the West is a mere simulation of the West that he has constructed in his imagination, with the help of books, maps and films. Sal’s initial fascination with the West of his future (Road 16) is disrupted by his realization that it is merely a construct, and is replaced by his renewed love for the east of his youth. “There is something brown and holy about the east: and California is white like washlines and empty headed – at least that’s what I thought then” (71). He continues to vacillate between the two poles throughout the novel, however, until they decide to venture south. Dean embodies “an earlier American spirit,” which is that of the rugged individualist in search of new frontiers (Stephenson158), but updated into the modern. Dean is the America of Carlo Marx’s phrase: “[w]hither goest thou America in thy shiny car in the night?” (Road 108). Gregory Stephenson notes that the irony and tragedy of this reading of Dean’s character are that, in industrial, suburban America, there are no new geographical frontiers for him to explore, which keeps him in a perpetual search with no goal (158). This resonates in Sal’s comment that San Francisco, the place where the frontier ended, is “the end of America – no more land – and now there was nowhere to go but back” (Road 70). Movement itself becomes the goal, the “one and noble function of the time” (121). The truly new frontier for both Sal and Dean, then, becomes Mexico, “no longer east-west but magic south” (241, emphasis in original). For Dean, Mexico is literally a new frontier, because he has never been there before. For Sal, however, it is new in the sense that he doesn’t have the symbolic references to give shape to Mexico. “I couldn’t imagine this trip,” he says (241). Throughout the trip in Mexico, Sal makes references to American landscapes and culture. Dean, more readily than Sal, leaves America behind both physically and mentally, when he says: “’the end of Texas, the end of America, we don’t know no more’” (Road 249). Although Sal says that leaving America means leaving everything they had “previously known about life, and life on the road,” and that they “had finally found the magic land at the end of the road” (251), Sal is still informed by his American construction of the self. Dean tells Sal to leave everything behind as they enter “a new and unknown phase of things.” Here, Dean wants to access the liminal space of Mexico, which is truly a tabula rasa, uninformed by his American nationality. Dean’s focus on the road in Mexico remains the same as it was in America, proclaiming that the roads in the two countries look the same (252), but that the Mexican road drives him instead of the other way around (254). Dean here doesn’t seem to have the same control over the road as he does in America. For Sal, his focus on the landscape is also the same, except that he cannot engage fully with Mexico without comparing it to America. “Entering Monterrey was like entering Detroit” (254), or “[t]he strange radio-station antenna of Ciudad Mante appeared ahead, as if we were in Nebraska” (270). Sal is still informed by his idealized vision of individuality, thick with Americanized reference. For Sal, the Mexican road still resonates with American myth. He tells Dean that “this road […] is also the route of old American outlaws who used to skip over the border and go down to old Monterrey, so if you’ll look out on that graying desert and picture the ghost of an old
Tombsone hellcat making his lonely exile gallop into the unknown, you’ll see further…” (252). And where Sal sees this “further,” Dean sees “the world” (252). Sal calls his road adventure a “pilgrimage” (Road 125). The road is “pure” (121) and “holy” (125), and though in his first pilgrimage, Sal’s relationship with Dean develops from that of dependence to the realization that Dean is a “rat” (276), and his view of life becomes more clear, he wishes in the end to go on a separate pilgrimage on foot by himself (277). The road’s chaotic space allows the protagonists to embrace their marginal labels. Sal is an outsider to the liminal road despite his attempts to become permanently liminal. Unlike Dean, Sal is able to leave liminal space to settle down and write and take part in society. On the other hand, Dean is forever a liminal character because liminal space is his norm. The distinction between Sal and Dean reflects Kerouac’s persona as an outsider and marginal person respectively.
Intentional and Artificial Liminal Space
At this point, I hope that I have presented a thorough analysis of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. There are countless liminal spaces within this text that make the margins that define them all the more clear. From the Beat Generation as the liminal space between an exceptionalist World War II America and a progressive liberal youth during and after the war in Vietnam right down to the personal narrative of Kerouac and his protagonists on the road who constantly sought liminal space. As it relates to writing, the liminal behavior that I want to explore going forward is alcohol. Alcohol is a recurring demon for both Kerouac and the protagonists of the worlds within his novels. The use of alcohol is very ritual in nature especially in the same way that Kerouac drinks.
But why did Kerouac drink? At a glance, his life away from the road was without strife. Living with is mother most his life, Kerouac would go out on adventures but always return to the hospitality of his mother’s home where he would spend days and even weeks at a time in his room behind his typewriter. For Kerouac, there does not seem to be incentive to depart from the safety and security of his home. While it is easier to sympathize and understand the motivations of someone looking to depart the security of a quiet life at home, Kerouac just like his Sal Paradise actively pursues the chaos and uncertainty of life on the road, in liminality. Uninspired amidst suburbia, Kerouac escaped through all kinds of liminal rituals. Travelling, drinking, even occasionally drug abuse became not the liminal space but the self imposed state of being and eventual norm for Kerouac and his protagonists. Not unlike Dean, seemingly in a perpetual liminal state, Kerouac looked to extreme influences to be inspired. For Sal, Dean, Kerouac, and the rest of the beats I would argue that what we consider liminal space became very much their norm.
While I have a difficult time sympathizing with self-destructive tendencies, the philosophy of intentional seems to hold some truth in terms of precedence for producing exceptional artists. Beat interest in individuality and spirituality echo the traditions of romantic literature whose gothic and more extreme symbolic veins often were conceived by artists with demons. Spontaneous prose, clearing the mind and writing without the limitations of structured knowledge seems familiar to Arthur Rimbaud’s systematic derangement of the senses or the fascination with inspiration as an inner darkness at odds with an inner light like Garcia Lorca often muses. The effects of alcohol seem to reflect the pursuit of freedom of inhibition and other mental and emotional limitations to creative expression.
I cannot in good conscience say that I agree with the extremity of their methods but I am fascinated and sympathetic to their perspective. As for myself, I wonder how to evoke my own liminal space as an aspiring writer. Inebriation perceived as a liminal space is dangerous; the tragedy of Kerouac and his protagonists is the false association between certain rituals and effective creative expression. I believe I have made a case for several liminal aspects in On the Road that provided inspiration for memorable chapters and quotes that often did not involve alcohol or other drugs despite our fascination with these demons. The Romanization of hedonistic or on the other hand extremely ascetics invocations of inspiration reflects our gravity towards binaries and absolutes because they are more comforting than the ambiguous nature of liminal space.