The notion of breaking from tradition, taking the road less travelled, venturing from the beaten path, has been at work since the beginnings of American Literature. From the misadventures of Rip Van Winkle in the mysterious Catskills, to the dizzying cross-continental romps of Dean Moriarty, defection looms large in the American literary tradition. Three texts from the last sixty years, Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and David O. Russell’s Three Kings, recreate an American frontier so that their characters may defect into uncharted territory. By setting their narratives in the deep and mystical South, the vast expanse of Cold War America, and the unfamiliar deserts of Iraq, these texts give their characters an opportunity to defect from dominant society, in each instance sculpting a unique American identity.
In Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms defection occurs both physically and psychologically. Joel Knox’s voyage to a mystical rural Alabama signifies a journey into the American subconscious; to where cripples, invalids, and deviants have been banished. Characters such as Randolph, Miss Amy, Missouri, Idabel and Miss Wisteria populate the fringe of American society and the depths of its unconscious. By sending Joel, the closest-to-normal of the novel’s odd characters, to the frontier of American social conventions, Capote is defining a new American identity. He gives voices to other characters that embody perceived social ills such as child sexuality and adolescence (Joel, Idabel, Miss Wisteria), homosexuality (Randolph), civil rights and racism (Zoo), emasculation and castration anxiety (Mr. Sansom), to mention a few. In so doing Capote sends his readers with Joel to the psychological frontier of America, and from this defection seeks to create a more unified and accepting collective consciousness.
Therefore, Joel becomes the readers’ guide to their own unconscious, as he advances both physically and psychologically through rural Alabama. Even as his journey towards Noon City progresses, Joel becomes incapable of suppressing his subconscious. He “hadn’t had a proper hour’s rest since leaving New Orleans, for when he closed his eyes, as now, certain sickening memories slid through his mind” (Capote 8). As Ihab H. Hassan writes of Other Voices, “the image of adolescence throws a new light on that perennial conflict between the self and the world to which Freud assigned a decisive role in any culture” (Hassan 313). As he ventures from the comfort and familiarity of New Orleans to the challenging lifestyle of Skully’s Landing, Joel comes to belong in this community of misfits. The archetypal masculine Southerner Sam Radclif finds Joel “too pretty, too delicate and fair-skinned; each of his features was shaped with a sensitive accuracy, and a girlish tendency” (Capote 4). By defecting to the backwaters of Alabama, Joel Knox embraces the unconscious at the dawn of an era of thorough repression in modern American history.
In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a similar psychological motivation drives the protagonists to travel all over America incessantly. Much like in Other Voices, Kerouac seeks to acknowledge the need for personal development between childhood and adulthood, the period of adolescence. Therefore, defection for Sal Paradise, Dean Moriarty and their cohorts serves multiple purposes, all of which are ultimately formative. Firstly, their perpetual travels are a way of avoiding responsibility, prolonging the comforts of youth by fleeing adulthood on the open road. Secondly, Sal and Dean’s departure from settled life is a way of defecting from the American identities which their parents have come to exemplify. Thirdly therefore, defection is also a metaphysical search for their own identity; their journeys become tools of experience rather than travels with an explicit destination. As one critic writes, “[t]he book moves from hierarchy to openness, from the limitation of possibilities to their expansion” (Dardess 201). Sal betrays awareness of this when asked by another man of the road, a carnival owner, “‘[y]ou boys going to get somewhere, or just going?’ We didn’t understand his question, and it was a damned good question” (Kerouac 20). The roads of America become Sal and Dean’s open frontier, and a unique and uniquely American identity becomes the object of their defection.
In his film Three Kings, David O. Russell makes similar use of open territory as a way of giving his characters physical space for defection. Though their defection has very material goals at the outset, its result is an experience much like that Sal and Dean seek in On the Road; that is emotional growth and a new sense of identity. Set against the backdrop of the Persian Gulf War, Three Kings chronicles the efforts of Major Archie Gates, Sergeant First Class Troy Barlow, and Staff Sergeant Chief Elgin to recover for their own personal gain gold stolen by Iraqis from Kuwait. The fringes between war and civil society become their frontier, the desert space between American barracks and Iraqi settlements. Their quest is typical of American capitalism, echoing the westward expansion of the Gold Rush. However, while they begin by seeking financial wealth with no regard for the impact on others, their journey becomes a socially conscious mission when its focus shifts to the rescuing of Iraqi civilians. Through this tale of American soldiers’ defection in the Persian Gulf, David O. Russell posits a new American identity of social consciousness and humanitarian benevolence, rather than military peacekeeping abroad and irresponsible capitalism at home.
By setting their narratives in unsettled spaces, these texts allow their characters to seek out a new identity free of historical and geographical constraints. Many critics, most notably Richard Slotkin, have identified the frontier myth with conservative social politics and militaristic foreign policies. Capote, Kerouac, and Russell repossess the American myth of the frontier, incorporating it into a progressive, socially inclusive political project. Rural Alabama, miles of American highway, and the deserts of Iraq provide Capote, Kerouac, and Russell’s characters with the physical and emotional freedom to defect. In their respective frontiers these narratives carve out a new American identity. Capote brings his readers to the geographical and psychological fringes of America in an effort to create a more accepting national consciousness. Kerouac sends Sal and Dean out on the road in search of their own sense of American adolescence, and thereafter adulthood, free from the constraints of their parents’ mistakes. Finally, Russell goes to the Iraqi desert to forge a more socially conscious and responsible American political identity. All three texts acknowledge that change is needed, but also that the right conditions must exist before that change can take place.
Note: Written for English 325: Modern American Fiction course taught by Dr. Jason Polley at McGill University in the Winter 2006.
Works Cited
Capote, Truman. Other Voices, Other Rooms. New York: Modern Library, 1948.
Dardess, George. “The Delicate Dynamics of Friendship: A Reconsideration of Kerouac’s On The Road”. American Literature 46.2 (1974): 200-206.
Hassan. Ihab, H.. “The Idea of Adolescence in American Fiction”. American Quarterly 10.3 (1958): 312-324.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. London: Penguin, 1957.
Three Kings. Dir. David O. Russell. Perf. George Clooney, Ice Cube, Mark Wahlberg, Spike Jonze, Nora Dunn. Village Roadshow Pictures, 1999.
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