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Beating time: Configurations of temporality in Jack Kerouac's On the Road
College Literature, Fall 2001 by Mortenson, Erik R
After World War II, the United States Time Corporation was looking for a knew product line. It found it in the Timex watch. In a market traditionally dominated by the Swiss, this U.S. company revolutionized the field through a twin combination of industrial mechanization and marketing. As David S. Landes notes in Revolution in Time, "United States Time sold these watches in every available retail outlet ... a quarter of a million points of sale at the peak ... selling not elegance or prestige but cheap time ... people could afford not one watch but two or three or more" (1983, 339). United States Time's success is telling because it demonstrates the degree to which post-war America was becoming time-conscious. This company's name alone conjures up images of monolithic proportions, of a standard time that all Americans could set their lives by. In a booming post-war economy, such an attention to time was indeed necessary to ensure that everything "ran smoothly." After all, Benjamin Franklin's dictum still rang true: Time is money. But not everyone welcomed the idea of a wristwatch on every American arm.
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Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel On the Road was one such voice of dissent. Kerouac's novel has long been considered subversive in its questioning of America's booming post-war economy. Upon its publication it was both lauded as an "authentic work of art" by Gilbert Millstein (Nicosia 1983, 556) and derided by one critic as the quintessence of "everything that is bad and horrible about this otherwise wonderful age we live in" (Tytell 1976, 159). The novel was attacked for both its innovative style and its depiction of marginalized characters, causing one Time reviewer to label Kerouac the "Hippie Homer" writing about a "disjointed segment of society acting out its own neurotic necessity" (Charters 1973, 290). Yet for all this controversy, few remarked on the novel's questioning of one of the most fundamental (if often overlooked) underpinnings of any society-its use of time. On the Road wages an attack on constraining notions of time that companies like United States Time were so eager to exploit. Repeatedly questioning the accepted concept of temporality defined by the clock, Kerouac's work instead probes for a way to break through this constricting notion of time in an attempt to address the even larger existential problems of temporality.
In its most basic sense, On the Road is an attack on the corruption of time by capitalism. In his essay "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," Georg Lukacs explores capitalism's influence through an analysis of the notion of reification first established by Karl Marx.The central tenet Lukacs derives from Marx is that through reification "a man's own activity, his own labour becomes something objective and independent of him, something that controls him by virtue of an autonomy alien to man" (1968, 86-87). The commodity itself gains ascendancy, subjugating consciousness and establishing itself as the basis of interaction between humans. And the key element that allows this process to occur is time. Through rationalization, time becomes more and more precise, allowing for an ever-constricting set of temporal demands on the worker. Lukacs explains that "the period of time necessary for work to be accomplished ... is converted, as mechanization and rationalization are intensified, from a merely empirical average figure to an objectively calculable work-stint that confronts the worker as a fixed and established reality" (88). The specificity of"clock time" creates a greater precision that allows demands on time to become increasingly precise. This quantification of time is accompanied by the conversion of time into space. Again drawing on Marx, Lukacs concludes that "time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable 'things'. . in short, it becomes space" (90). Where work was once an individual craft tied to the organic notion of length of day or season, capitalist mechanization has now rendered production as being in a fixed place for a designated time.' The farmer and carpenter have given way to the factory worker, stuck in front of a machine, forced to reproduce the same motions for the length of his shift.
It is not difficult to see how Kerouac's novel On the Road is, on its most superficial level, a reaction against the Lukacsian notion of reification. Few characters hold a job, and those who do usually work only temporarily. Even while at work, Sal and Dean often show up late or skip out at various times, unconstrained by schedule or routine. Set against the repetition of mechanistic rationalization, we have an overabundance of idiosyncratic actions and behaviors.Very few actions in this novel are ever repeated exactly. Kerouac seldom gives the precise dates and times of his travels, referring only to months of the year or seasons. Thus reification's insistence on "clock time" is jettisoned in favor of spontaneity. Space in On the Road remains equally nebulous. The title itself hints at this; the book is more concerned with movement than with fixed location. In fact, the reader is often surprised by this need to avoid staying in one place, as cross-country trips are undertaken merely to see someone in another city or to stop by for "a few days." Many of the most important events in the novel, for instance, take place in the spaces between, while moving from one location to another. If reification congeals fluid temporality into rigid spatiality, Kerouac's insistence on the motion of travel sunders this bond by replacing stasis with flux. Sal's veneration of the "fellahin" is likewise a critique of reification.2 In Outline of a Theory of Practice, Pierre Bourdieu contrasts Western notions of linear "calendar" time with the North African Kabyle idea of "practical time, which is made up of incommensurable islands of duration, each with its own rhythm, the time that flies by or drags, depending on what one is doing" (1977, 105). The Kabyle concept of time is personal and idiosyncratic, depending not on an "objective" standard but on where one happens to be and what one happens to be doing. Yet On the Road confronts reification in a more specific manner, through the character of Dean Moriarty.
