We're on a road to nowhere: Steinbeck, Kerouac, and the legacy of the great depression.(analysis of John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath and Jack Kerouac's On the Road)(Critical essay)

At first glance, John Steinbeck's seminal Depression-era text The Grapes of Wrath (1939) would seem to have little in common with Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957). However, like Steinbeck's work of realism, Kerouac's picaresque tale of mid-century fellahin hipsterdom serves also as a repository for the deep misgivings about America that the Depression sewed in the populace. For instance, both authors use tropes of the hobo-tramp, the road, and the American Dream-lasting and powerful concepts in twentieth century life-in startlingly similar ways. While it has proven convenient to read Kerouac's characters and their bohemian adventures as symbols of freedom, possibility, and rebellion, perhaps more compelling is how Kerouac employs these signifiers in ways that echo Steinbeck's renderings of limit, loss, and wandering. More broadly, On the Road is informed by Depression-era anxieties of what America represents as opposed to what it might and should represent. Kerouac's novel is a text that can be seen as actively calling into question the myth(s) of America. Beyond the joie de vivre of the main characters and the freewheeling narrative style, On the Road engages critically with the psychological and geographical landscapes of the 1930s. Kerouac's work serves as memory bank and moral conscience for victims of Depression trauma.

Equally compelling are the ways in which these novels each seem to respond to the socio-cultural and literary impulses of modernism. Indeed, it would be fair to say that Steinbeck and Kerouac, working within modernist aesthetic modes, produce works that are thematically antimodernist. Writing in decades that, when taken together, demonstrate perfectly the paradoxical nature of the American Dream, these writers nonetheless are in accord when it comes to the ideological dilemmas attendant to modernity. The 1930s and the 1950s are both eras in which consolidation and cultural hegemony were sought at the expense of individualism (tempered by a sense of interconnectedness) and spiritualism. In one decade, salvation takes the form of progress (industrial, social, etc.) and a return to plenty is promised; in the other, progress is lived, as is the anxiety that it must be perpetuated to circumvent another disaster. In both cases, the answer to the problems of the day lay in the conquest of nature by technology. Working against the alienating forces of modernity, Steinbeck and Kerouac seek to restore human interconnectivity and an ethos of the divine (in the form of a universal or "world soul"). And while each employs modernist techniques in his prose style, the message is not consonant to the vehicle.

The Great Depression and the Fabulous Fifties are historical points at which the accepted wisdom of modernity operates at an accelerated pace. Increased governmental control, a turn toward mass over individual welfare, and the growth model of capitalism as the antidote for hardship inform the dominant sociopolitical philosophy of both eras. In light of such similarities, we can think about Steinbeck and Kerouac as antimodernist in their privileging of ideas that critique and counter the logics of hegemony. Cultural historian Jackson Lears elaborates:

 
   The antimodern impulse stemmed from revulsion against ... the 
   systematic organization of economic life for maximum productivity 
   and of individual life for maximum personal achievement; the drive 
   for efficient control of nature under the banner of improving human 
   welfare; the reduction of the world to a disenchanted object to be 
   manipulated by rational technique. (7) 

The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road attack the cold logic of modernity by creating characters who refuse to accept the particular worldview promulgated by the forces of control and who instead seek to recuperate a sense of enchantment or spirituality in the midst of an ideological lockdown. And while one was written in a time of cultural famine and the other in a period of hyperkinetic capitalist feasting, these novels mutually lament the price of existence paid by the individual in modern America and gesture toward an antidote for the incivilities of civilization.

It is obvious, though important, that Steinbeck and Kerouac prosecute their antimodernist campaigns from disparate subject positions and, clearly, in different literary modes. The Grapes of Wrath is typically labeled a protest novel written predominately in the vein of American regionalism or realism (tinged, perhaps, with a certain primitivist romanticism). Sometimes using heavy pathos, at others a stark journalistic reportage (as in the intercalary chapters), Steinbeck gives the lie to modern ideas of progress and individual fulfillment. Kerouac's experimental and improvisational novel develops a critique that echoes Steinbeck's masterwork of social consciousness. In picaresque fashion, Sal Paradise adventures across the nation in a series of episodes that seem as lighthearted and spontaneous as they are entertaining. However the story itself and the narrative of how it was composed both call into question precisely what the novel seemingly strives to celebrate. (1) Kerouac employs the same symbolic lexicon found in The Grapes of Wrath, with the language of the young hipster replacing the vernacular of the dispossessed (and comparatively naive) southerner. Moreover, the rather disjointed and impressionistic narrative structure of On the Road might seem to create a philosophical gap where only a stylistic lacuna exists. As does Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, Kerouac articulates a space wherein ideas of agency and possibility in the first half of the American Century are examined as well as a space in which many of the assumptions of modernism are challenged. Ultimately, Kerouac's objective is, like Steinbeck's, a critique of the modern condition. These authors delineate cultural roads that lead at best to ennui and discontent, at worst to utter demoralization and the likelihood of psychic (or even literal) starvation. Whatever their differences in genre, tone and philosophy, when taken together, these novels share some interesting correspondences.

Born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac witnessed firsthand the economic struggles of the 1930s. Indeed, the Great Depression hit Lowell early as Paul Maher, Jr. relates in his recently-released biography: "By late 1928, the portents were forbidding ... . In Lowell, textile and shoe factories began to lay off workers ... . Many Lowell families were compelled to pull their children from school to put them to work despite the scarcity of jobs" (25). Biographers tend to agree that the Kerouac family suffered less than did many of their Lowell counterparts. However, the frequent moves that took place almost annually throughout the 1930s provide a mapping of the family's declining fortunes. Leo Kerouac, Jack's father, owned a small printing shop that did a fair business until a disastrous flood wreaked havoc on Lowell in 1936 (See Maher 40-41). Leo's ability to support his family was in irreversible decline and Jack's teenage psyche was greatly affected by the economic collapse--one that has a nearly archetypal resonance with so many Great Depression tales of loss. Biographer Tom Clark explains how Jack began to have recurrent nightmares (they would continue well into adulthood) about a "Shrouded Stranger" pursuing him through the apartment and across vast expanses of wasteland. While Clark implies that the threatening figure is an embodiment of his father's spiritual and economic ruination, the Shrouded Stranger might be more broadly read as the Great Depression personified with its mysterious origin and unjustified vengefulness infusing Kerouac's active subconscious with myriad anxieties.