Peasant Dreams: Reading On the Road

Abstract

"We can learn something about the naive artist," Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy, "through the analogy of dream. We can imagine the dreamer as he calls out to himself, still caught in the illusion of his dream and without disturbing it, 'This is a dream, and I want to go on dreaming,' and we can infer, on the one hand, that he takes deep delight in the contemplation of his dream, and, on the other, that he must have forgotten the day, with its horrible importunity, so to enjoy his dream" (32). Its Dionysian ecstasies notwithstanding, Jack Kerouac's On the Road belongs to the tradition of Apollonian art that Nietzsche conceives of here: an art of willful illusion sustained against the encroachments (as Nietzsche later puts it) of "a whole world of torment" (33). Kerouac's is the work of forgetting, though the residues of memory, the shafts of daylight that trouble this dreamer's sleep, are precisely what intrigue me.

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