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

College Literature, Fall 2001 by Mortenson, Erik R

The attempt to reach a separate temporal order situated apart from confining "clock time" through an appeal to a marginalized community occurs in American jazz clubs as well. In San Francisco, Sal and Dean spent a night in "the little Harlem on Folsom Street," where "colored men in Saturdaynight suits were whooping it up in front .... A six-foot skinny Negro woman was rolling her bones," and "Groups of colored guys stumbled in from the street." (Kerouac 1976, 196-97). Jazz scenes such as this occur frequently in On the Road, and are always depicted as events charged with frenzy and activity Crowds flow in and out, exhorting the musicians to "Stay with it!" (197) or "Blowblowblow!" (200) while the musicians themselves sweat and strain to reach higher and higher levels of ecstasy. And these characters are almost always African-Americans. Citing the anthropologist Jules Henry, Levine talks about how African-Americans "distinguish their own culture's sense of time ... from the majority standard of`white people's time"' (1997, 10). Like notions of time in Mexico, African-American time is structured around events, not the clock. But as the sociologist John Horton notes, while this slow tempo exists when money is tight, "time is 'alive' whenever and wherever there is 'action'. . . [it] accelerates exponentially on Friday and Saturday nights" (11). This dichotomy is a coping mechanism. Jazz scenes such as this show the "hot" side to the staid, "cool," beat character on the street.What Sal and Dean find in the African-American community is a different temporal order, one that maximizes joy by slowing when resources are not available and expanding when they are.

Yet this shift in temporal order is not only bound up with the social sphere of African-Americans, but exists within the music as well. The day after this scene takes place, Dean attempts to explain to Sal the different temporality that jazz music inaugurates. He says:

"Here's a guy and everybody's there, right? Up to him to put down what's on everybody's mind .... All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it-everybody looks up and knows .... Time stops. He's filling empty space with the substance of our lives .... He has to blow across bridges and come back to it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it's not the tune that counts but IT." (Kerouac 1976, 206)

Two points in particular bear comment. The first, and most important, is that "Time stops." At first glance, this seems at odds with the notion that Dean transcends time by living perfectly within each successive moment. If time stops, that would mean that Dean would have to become static in order to stay within the present. There is, however, another way of viewing this statement. The phrase "Time stops" could mean that the authoritative, oppressive "clock time" is what stops. In The Culture of Spontaneity, Belgrad discusses the notion of mitwelt, defining it as "the coordination of our internal, subjective reality with external processes" (1998, 191). According to Belgrad, "Clock time is the psychological state of mitwelt, reified and given objective status in the culture.... Rhythm, by contrast, preserves the sense of mitwelt time as relational and intersubjective" (191-92). Jazz challenges the dominant notion of time, creating instead its own internal temporality. As Belgrad notes, quoting George Lipsitz, such music allows the listener "to think of time as a flexible human creation rather than as an immutable outside force" (192). Clock time stops, but a new temporality, governed by the jazz musician, continues on, allowing him to "fill the empty space with the substance of our lives." It is also worth noting that this tune is finite. As Dean explains, the musician is looking for the "tune of the moment," a sound which is infinitely variable but limited by the audience and the particular present into which it must be meshed. The "IT" Dean refers to, then, is that temporal space chiseled out of capitalism's reified time that always waits in the background for the tune to end. But as Ermarth notes, "the substitution of rhythmic time for historical time has significant and threatening consequences" (1992, 53). This finitude allows listeners access to that plenitude of being in the present that Dean continually tries to achieve, but at the cost of knowing that any transcendence or understanding exists only for that duration. As Heidegger notes, it is this knowledge that things will not last that provides such access to the present. The tune reminds everyone that everything must eventually end.