The City and The Self
by Lily Braumberger
Jack Kerouac’s New York, I know. His is a city of volatility, a state of perpetual becoming, which has become easy for the writer to inherit because it offers so little an explanation and much to desire. His is a city that’s real function is to absorb whatever version a person can bring unto it and return it as possibility. His is a city I study, in fragments, in movements, affiliations that suggest the city is and has already been entirely imagined as such. His is not to be mistaken for that of Allen Ginsberg or Joyce Johnson, though the distinction is often collapsed in the way the city is taught. To place them side by side is to begin noticing that what Kerouac calls “mongrel America,” in this literary sense, is never singular (Douglas).
I do not yet know what to do with their competing versions of the city, except to hold them provisionally, alongside another set of works or writers that came later in the same century. Prewar American literature, where the Harlem writers appear first as grammar for a city-wide movement, begins to merge into other accounts of postwar literature: the generation of Beats.
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is the central text of this imagination, most often treated as an utterance of Beat mobility. What he offers is less of a travel narrative and more so a way of thinking about New York City as a condition of the self; insofar as Sal Paradise’s identity is only mediated through his observations of others: “I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones,...” (Kerouac, 5). The figures who populate Paradise’s “life on the road” reflect his own restless relation to place.
Place becomes understood only through those who cannot inhabit it without wanting to leave. New York City, therefore, is more so a point of orientation from which desire continually projects outward, producing a subjectivity defined by this perpetual lack.
Along analogous lines, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is a city that bears down on the self, filling with impressions that overwhelm: drugged and ecstatic states and institutional violence. The motion of the streets and overheard speech. Ginsberg wrote similarly, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterically naked” (Ginsberg, line 1). Ginsberg’s syntax, differing greatly from that of Kerouac’s, reproduces a distinct experience of inhabiting the city for the reader. To assemble a more complete picture of a postwar New York City, no singular perspective can account for the whole. Kerouac and Ginsberg link, literally, by overlapping geographies, and figuratively, at a shared assumption that place allows the self to become. Attending to these differences is an act of reading against the intrinsic need to simplify and summarize and rightfully acknowledges that literary history is something at risk of re-presentation. Its value lies in teaching readers how to notice what categories inevitably obscure.
That being said, the Beats are hardly the only expression of this imagination nor without the influence that came before them. An earlier coalescence is already present in Black modernism, where the city had been nothing short of experimentation. You might know of James Baldwin’s Paris in Giovanni’s Room; but it is his New York City that more decisively writes the texture of his thought. Like stagehands moving through a rehearsed sequence behind the scenes, his is a city constructed through Black modernism, trained toward what is seen, what is not, and what is repeatedly misread as a result.
The force of this sentiment lies in his essays featured in Notes of a Native Son: “All over Harlem now there is felt the same bitter expectancy with which, in my childhood, we awaited winter: it is coming and it will be hard; there is nothing anyone can do about it.” (Baldwin, 59) New York City as something in anticipation; previously experienced and to be experienced once again, much to his dismay. Baldwin’s metaphorical understanding of history as cyclical as the seasons is a necessary regard in a similar way Ginsberg utilizes his syntax, though the two writers direct form toward different ends.
The first challenge to Beat romanticism is precisely this unevenness, that what reads as liberation in Kerouac’s writing can register, elsewhere, as foreclosed possibility. In On the Road, Sal Paradise and his counterpart Dean Moriarty's dissatisfaction with place becomes their impetus for leaving it. New York City is only valuable inasmuch as it can be escaped, returned to, and imagined otherwise.
For Baldwin, however, the possibility of movement and the ability to imagine it as such is less a freedom than a privilege denied to many.
In his account of Richard Wright’s Native Son, he notes that Bigger Thomas, the Black protagonist in a comparable big city, has “no discernable relationship to himself, [...] nor to any other people.” (Baldwin, 35) This alienation reveals limits of a “mongrel America” and even more so for cities being a space of total liberation.
I’d go even further to encompass later generations of New York writers, who offer another foreclosed possibility that earlier generations mentioned might not. In Patti Smith's memoiristic renderings, the city is valuable in its immersion; an artistic apprenticeship provided her relationships through which she could develop as a multifaceted artist.
Perhaps this is why New York City remains so insistently written. Even outside its literary movements, it is photographed, documented, reviewed, rewritten with no clearer picture of the city, but a competing struggle for interpretation. What is “correct” is neither here nor there.
If these visions differ so dramatically, which they do, why do they nevertheless return to the same city? Every attempt to describe New York City reveals as much about the writer as it does about the place being written, and so the city receives these projections almost indiscriminately. It accommodates Kerouac’s restlessness as easily as Baldwin’s argument against neutrality, so that no single vision appears sufficient on its own; rather, each becomes more convincing because the others exist beside it.
This conversation has no obvious conclusion; every generation imagines that it has encountered a new New York, only to discover that someone else has already experienced it similarly enough. Thus, I find myself returning, then, not to the question of which version is most accurate, but to why accuracy seems so inadequate a standard in the first place. New York City persists today as one produced through writing itself. If I began with Kerouac’s New York, it is because his is, in my opinion, the easiest city to make one’s own: as opposed to that of Ginsberg, who reads less generously in its dense prose. It's no less real for being contested; indeed, it is this very contest over meaning that allows it to permeate in its imagination.
New York City remains, in many respects, its prewar self living in a postwar age, belonging much to postwar writers and their prewar influences as to the enduring habits of seeing that contemporary artists inherit more readily. What is taken for novelty in the city is often only a revision of what preceded it and there is, certainly, no single one to be had.
Bibliography (for your convenience)
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. Penguin Books, 1957.
Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl.” Poetry Foundation, Howl | The Poetry FoundationPoetry Foundationhttps://www.poetryfoundation.org › Poems.
Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Beacon Press, Boston, 1955.
Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.
