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PARTISAN REVIEW
more "Emersoni an " protest aga in st " the tyranny o f institutions" :
"Naked L unch,"
he writes, " is a hallucina tory vision of the very worst
expecta tions of the fifti es." This readin g overl ooks Burroughs's ghas tl y
deli ght in the (mos tl y sexual) possibilities of such tyranny. Burroughs,
that is to say, is no t Jo na than Swift; when hi s p rose foul s itself, it is no t
to be expected tha t the befoulment is in the ulterio r service of elegant
(
and virtuous ideas.
It
is nearer, in stead, to a schoolboy pl ay ing with
bad words. I hasten to say tha t Tytell' s chapter on Burrough s is in
many ways a contribution.
It
makes valuable comment on Burroughs' s
rela ti on to moderni st experiments with narra tive form, and demon-
stra tes the genuine compl exity o f tempora l structure in the novels.
Es pec iall y con vincing is the di scussion of the verbal richness o f some of
Burroughs's work . But criti cism and even apprecia ti on a re different
from sympa th y, and it is well to keep in mind, wha tever p leasure
reading Burroughs g ives, tha t sympa thy for hi s work brings one close
to hos tility for the species a t la rge.
Difficulti es of ano ther sort interfere with the a ttempt to read
Kerouac for the va lue of hi s social vi sion . The imagina tion of society
th at obtains in
On th e Road
or
Th e Dharma Bums
is as schoolboy ish ,
in its way, as Burroughs 's sca tology: it proj ects a world witho ut
grownups, for the purpose of li censin g infinite truancy. For the mos t
part , Kerouac's subterranean s a re not, as Tytell call s them, "youthful
seekers" after tran scendence, but hyperkineti cs- or, alternately, they
a re in fli ght. One o f the surpri ses of rereading
On th e Road
is the
di scovery tha t its central figures are not hungry for experi ence but
afra id of it. They take to the road precise ly to avo id the invo lved and
invo lving knowl edge of person s and pl aces encountered more than
fl eeting ly. T ytell 's formul a tion of their ambivalence toward such
knowl edge is apt. Sal Paradise is Kerouac's urge to settl e down , "a
p rojecti on o f the withdrawn Kerou ac who li ved a t home with hi s
mo ther," whil e Mori arty is the a lter-ego of anarchy and speed-in
Burro ughs 's words about Cassady, "compul sive, dedi cated , ready to
sacrifice famil y, fri ends, even hi s very ca r itself to the necessity of
movin g from one place to ano ther. " This tension in the pa rtnership
structures the novel, but a t neither po le is the domestic, "straight" idea l
itself brought into question . As Burroughs shrewdl y implied, Moria rty
honors the Ei senhower-era confo rmity quite as much in the breach as
Paradi se does, for exampl e, in hi s pastoral interlude of playing ho use
with a mi grant fa rm worker. But Tytell in sists upon seeing Dean
Mori arty'S road compulsion as a harbinger of ideological revo lt,
an earl y prolo lype of a n ew Ni elzchean , Dion ys ian irrespon sibil –
il y. . . . Wh en dressed he wea rs baggy lrou sers and
LOrn
T-shins.
