Was Michel Foucault Right About Jack Kerouac?

As I begin to research for my graduate thesis about the mythology of the rebel hero icon in America, I find that Michel Foucault presents an interesting viewpoint on outsider literature. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault posits that "the lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the 'outlaw', the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile frightened order" (1642). This certainly relates to the myth of Jack Kerouac (one of the subjects of my thesis) and most notably in regards to the cultural reaction to his novel, On the Road. On the Road presents a sort of "lyricism of marginality" and whether to Kerouac's liking or not, his image became one of an outsider rebel with no place to call home. I have always thought that Kerouac's work served to propel literature to a new artistic level, but under Foucault's theory the legend of Kerouac is nothing more than an instance in history which is already set up by the dominant cultural structure. On the Road, while seemingly delinquent, only serves to reinforce the panoptic, all seeing eye of discipline.

Kerouac and the Beat writers were often viewed by mainstream America as thugs and delinquent youth. To most of society, the Beats were outsiders. But were the Beats - as Foucault might suggest - simply reinforcing a prison-like societal structure? Foucault argues: "it is true that prison punishes delinquency, delinquency is for the most part produced in and by an incarceration which, ultimately, prison perpetuates in its turn.... The delinquent is an institutional product" (1642). The delinquent gives those in power the ability to have an example, a myth which can be held up to keep the mass populous in check. Ginsberg's Howl, while it seems to have produced a large awareness in America of a new type of writing, was simultaneously a product of power.