The Woman in White

Abstract

In June 1998, The New Yorker magazine published new excerpts from Beat writer Jack Kerouac’s journals. One excerpt, written in August 1949, recounts a night Kerouac spent walking through Denver’s “Negrotown.” Later appearing in shortened form in On the Road, the excerpt serves as a (more dewy-eyed) Norman Maileresque vision of what Kerouac perceives as the more earthily beguiling world of blacks, Mexicans, or, as Kerouac writes, “even a Jap.” Andrew Ross uses the passage, in its On the Road context, as an embarrassing example of 1950s white bourgeois glamorization of minority culture, which it surely is.¹ But what makes the writing so compelling is its self-conscious awareness of white (bourgeois) (male) self-loathing. Likewise, while attempting to anatomize the appeal of “minority culture,” the excerpt serves instead as an unconscious or half-conscious articulation of the construction of whiteness at Kerouac’s historical moment:

… [T]hat night my dream of glory turned gray, because I saw that the best the “white world” had to offer was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy kicks, music; not enough night…. I wished I was Negro, a Denver Mexican, or even a Jap, anything but a white man disillusioned by the best of his own “white world.” (And all my life I had white ambitions!).²

“… [O]n the back of each card there is a blank space. And on blank spaces, or even on written ones, there is sometimes invisible writing.”

—Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely