Changing Lanes: Textuality off and on the Road

Abstract

will agree that this exchange has proved invaluable in reshaping our ideas. Many of my arguments made originally when refereeing concerning McDowell's (1996) piece and Cresswell's (1993) original article and response (1996) have already been raised. Indeed, I am delighted that we all found each others' comments relevant and applicable to our readings and perhaps this amply demonstrates that any 'vexed' questions of relativism are easily addressed. There are, however, some difficulties with the ways in which geographers approach literature, made apparent in reading both Cresswell's article and McDowell's response. In what follows, I shall highlight these with particular reference to Jack Kerouac, On the road and the beat generation. Anglo-American geography has occasionally studied, sometimes plundered literature as a source of geographical meaning, from the subjective experience of characters/authors to the use of fiction in the reconstruction of topographies and regions (cf Darby 1948; Pocock 1981). Only recently have geographers turned to a more critical engagement with literary texts, usually novels. But a residue of older approaches is evident in this research, displaying an implicit fear that maybe this is not geography at all and that, perhaps to show that we do not enjoy our research that much, texts are sculpted or 'disciplined' to fit predominant concerns, whereby we set about uncovering evidence to verify geographical hypotheses (Brosseau 1994). And it is in this that I find some problems with both Cresswell's and McDowell's readings. Some have worried that geographers do not read literature at all (Daniels 1985). This is not to suggest that Cresswell or McDowell have not read On the road but that their readings display a restrictive sense of what the geographies of literature might be. Novels are inherently geographical, comprising a series of complex and often contradictory geographies within and about the text which can be explored with recourse to the contextual and particularly textual environments (Daniels and Rycroft 1993). Literature, in short, takes place and, in the process, refigures and reimagines particular geographies. And attention to these broad-ranging 'discursive dimensions' of literature opens fields of inquiry to an engagement with genre, style, linguistics and the relations between author and world (Brosseau 1994). A sympathy for a textual mode of inquiry forms the strength of Cresswell's article, particularly in the short section on modern jazz as a non-linear structuring device in Kerouac's writing. Whilst On the road is not the best of Kerouac's novels to make this point, it represents an innovative departure in his work and his experimentation with spontaneous prose and 'sketching': 'blowing (as per jazz musician) on the subject matter' (Kerouac 1992, 57) and so discovering the 'basic tones of existence' (Nicosia 1986, 336). But often, for Cresswell, despite disclaimers, literary style and linguistics seem merely representative or reflective of that being depicted (restless youth, rebellion and motion), the broader socio-cultural context (jazz culture and industrial society) and certain overarching theoretical concerns (hegemony/counter-hegemony). Consequently, a more sensitized approach which identifies greater significance in style itself as constitutive of meaning is not allowed to help explore the more complex geographies of the novel. In short, the geographical hypothesis of mobility as counter-hegemonic resistance dictates