Beating time: Configurations of temporality in Jack Kerouac's On the Road

College Literature, Fall 2001 by Mortenson, Erik R

The space Dean creates is inhabited by a variety of pursuits that likewise challenge the constricting notion of reification and the capitalistic system that utilizes it. Dean's actions are indeed "rationally fragmented," but this fragmentation is figured in an economy of ecstasy, not of oppression. Finding a girl for Sal, making plans to go to the midget auto races, having sex with various women, and getting drunk with his friends are all activities that focus on the fulfillment of desire rather than materialist production. In fact, this frenetic activity has left Dean broke. For all of his "production," he claims that "I haven't had time to work in weeks" (Kerouac 1976, 45). While it would be wrong to treat Dean simply as a Marxist rebel, he is able to avoid the production of commodities, which ultimately destroys the worker. Because Dean names it, time regains its "variable, flowing nature" (Lukacs 1968, 90) that is denied it by reification, and the space filled for Lukacs with "the reified, mechanically objectified performance of the worker" (90) is replaced by personal experience.

And against Lukacs's notion of time as rigid space, Dean's space is extremely fluid. Running from one place to another, Dean's temporality is inextricably bound up with movement, not stasis.While Dean may rationalize time, the uses to which he puts it often involve activity and change. If David Harvey is correct in declaring that "those who command space can always control the politics of place" (1990, 234), then Dean's restless itinerary poses a threat to established notions of capitalistic power.Through continual motion, Dean is able to avoid remaining in a fixed place that would render him susceptible to control. As Harvey notes, "The rigid discipline of time schedules, of tightly organized property rights and other forms of spatial determination, generate widespread resistances on the part of individuals who seek to put themselves outside these hegemonic constraints" (238). Dean's rejection of fixed place is emblematic of Beat attempts to escape a spatial control that becomes intertwined with temporal constraint. Rejecting the "spatialization of time" that Harvey associates with "Being," Dean opts instead for a "Becoming" that seeks "the annihilation of space by time" (273). Thus Dean's need to constantly "go," to perform "our one and noble function of the time, move" (Kerouac 1976, 133) as Sal says, needs to be understood as a desire for both spatial and temporal movement and flux.4

This questioning of conventional notions of time that Dean's tacit rejection of reification involves allows him to inhabit a different temporality, one based completely in the moment. On the Road provides ample evidence that Dean's conception of time is shifted away from past and future and towards an ever-changing present. Arriving at the doorstep of Sal's relatives in Virginia, Sal describes an altered Dean:

"cause now is the time and we all know time!"... he roared into downtown Testament, looking in every direction and seeing everything in an arc of 180 degrees around his eyeballs without moving his head .... He had become absolutely mad in his movements; he seemed to be doing everything at the same time. (Kerouac 1976, 114)