Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory 9781501314346, 9781501314377, 9781501314360

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Kerouac, exile, and the force of literature
1. Unsettlements
2. On and off the Franco-American road
3. Writing in real time
4. Movements of return
5. The roots of abandonment
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Kerouac

Kerouac Language, Poetics, and Territory Hassan Melehy

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Hassan Melehy, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Melehy, Hassan, 1960- author. Title: Kerouac : language, poetics, and territory / Hassan Melehy. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015039220 | ISBN 9781501314346 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969--Criticism and interpretation. | Kerouac, Jack, 1922-1969--Language. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / General. | LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General. Classification: LCC PS3521.E735 Z777 2016 | DDC 813/.54--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039220 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1434-6 PB: 978-1-5013-3606-5 ePub: 978-1-5013-1435-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-1436-0 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

This book is dedicated to Joyce Johnson and David Amram, friends.

Moy à cette heure et moy tantost sommes bien deux; mais quand meilleur, je n’en puis rien dire. [Myself now and myself then are really two; but when I’ve been my best, I just can’t say.] J’suis tanné de moi-même. [I’ve had it with myself.]

Michel de Montaigne, Essais (1595)

Jack Kerouac, interview on Montreal TV (1967)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction: Kerouac, exile, and the force of literature  1 1 Unsettlements 21 2 On and off the Franco-American road  45 3 Writing in real time  83 4 Movements of return  119 5 The roots of abandonment  145 Conclusion  173

Notes  181 Bibliography  231 Index  249

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It would, of course, be impossible to thank everyone who has contributed to the form and substance of the coming pages. Despite the boilerplate status of that disclaimer, it is especially true of this book, which has taken shape through encounters and contacts with and by the grace of favors from an immense number of friends, acquaintances, scholars, students, writers, biographers, eyewitnesses, editors, and providers of local and transnational color. Nonetheless, some deserve supreme thanks: I’ll proceed in the rough order of starting close to where I live. At the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), I thank Dominique Fisher for the conversations about Québec that fanned the flames of my longstanding interest in Jack Kerouac; Honors Carolina, especially Ritchie Kendall, for sponsoring my course on the Beat Generation, in 2007 the first exclusively on the subject at UNC-CH; the undergraduate and graduate students in the classes I’ve taught on Kerouac and the Beat Generation, especially Anna Bernard-Hoverstad, Emma Monroy, Erica Diamond, Jordan Bessette, and Christian Caudill; the former and current doctoral students whose work has pulled mine in extraordinary directions, especially Lauren Du Graf, Sarah Peterson, Emily Cranford, and Gene Hughes; Michelle Robinson, a campus colleague whose interest in the Beat Generation is a pleasant complement to mine; other Faculty Fellows at UNC-CH’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities (IAH) in the fall of 2012, in particular Neel Ahuja, James Ketch, William Andrews, and Genna Rae McNeil; IAH Director John McGowan for believing in this project when it seemed no one else would; the IAH itself for a Faculty Fellowship in the fall of 2012; at the first-rate UNC libraries that have provided essential support for the project, Humanities Bibliographer Elizabeth Chenault and Rare Book Curator Claudia Funke; the Department of Romance Studies for a Research and Study Leave in the spring of 2013 as well as what has seemed like unlimited research funds; the University Research Council for what has seemed like unlimited research and publication funds. At nearby Duke University, for serving in all kinds of capacities ranging from journal editor to secularizing confessor to Lowell connector, I thank Priscilla Wald, Joseph Donahue, and David Need. I’m humbly grateful to the members of the Beat Studies Association who, as veterans in the field, have kindly embraced my tenderfoot presentations

x Acknowledgments

on Kerouac at several conferences and also been the most energetic and patient editors and collaborators, not to mention scholars from whose work mine has benefitted, especially Ronna Johnson, Nancy Grace, Tim Hunt, Oliver Harris, Timothy Murphy, Fiona Paton, Jenny Skerl, Tony Trigiglio, Ann Charters, Matt Theado, and John W. McHale. I thank the scholars of Franco-American culture who have shown enough interest in my work to provide orientation and encouragement, in particular Leslie Choquette, Peggy Pacini, and Susan Pinette. Other scholars whose inspiring work has led to inspiring friendship, both of which I’m grateful for, are Regina Weinreich, John Tytell, and Ann Douglas. For all the help he has given me, both personally and through his work, I give thanks to Gerald Nicosia. It would be out of the question even to begin assessing the value of gaining access to the Jack Kerouac Papers in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature in the New York Public Library (NYPL), without which, obviously, this book wouldn’t exist: for his most laudable oversight of the Berg Collection and particular interest in the Kerouac Papers, as well as for his years of interest in my work, I am deeply indebted to my friend Isaac Gewirtz, the Collection’s Curator; I thank Berg Librarians Ann Garner, Steven Crook, Lyndsi Barnes, and Joshua McKeon for their patience in fulfilling my many requests for materials; and the NYPL Short-Term Fellowships Program for enabling me to spend a month at the Berg in 2013. I thank the Centre de Recherche Interuniversitaire sur la Littérature et la Culture Québécoises (CRILCQ) at the Université de Montréal for the position of Visiting Scholar that I held there during the summer of 2009; my research at the CRILCQ on Kerouac, Québec, and the Québécois migration was greatly facilitated by Patrick Poirier, Scientific Coordinator, and Ariane Audet and Louise-Hélène Filion, Documentalists—I’m thankful to them for their efforts. I thank colleagues and friends there, in particular Catherine Leclerc and Gabriel Anctil, for the interest and support they’ve offered me over the years. I owe especial gratitude to Isabelle Beaulieu, who in Montreal pointed me to indispensable materials on the migration, and subsequently, as Director of the Québec Government Office in Washington, DC, invited Joyce Johnson and me to give a joint presentation on Kerouac’s bilingualism at the Smithsonian Institution in November 2013. That talk followed another that Joyce and I gave at the Barnard College Center for Translation Studies in February 2013, a wonderful event at her alma mater: for their programming skills and efforts, I’m thankful to Phillip Usher and Brian O’Keeffe, Associate Co-Directors, and Peter Connor, Director of the Center. Also at Barnard, for a most scintillating, comforting friendship, her steady curiosity as to all of my research, and her generous sharing of living space, I thank Anne Lake Prescott. In the sublime city of Lowell, Massachusetts, for their expertise on matters local, Franco-American, and Kerouac, as well as their familiarity

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with libraries and archives vital to my research, I’m very grateful to my friends Tony Sampas, Nomi Herbstman, Roger Brunelle, and Paul Marion; at the Center for Lowell History, University of Massachusetts–Lowell, I thank Martha Mayo, Head, and Janine Whitcomb, Archive Manager; for his generosity in allowing me use of Kerouac’s unpublished writing, I thank John Sampas, Executor of the Estates of Jack and Stella Kerouac. To those who encouraged and inspired my work by inviting me to give solo lectures on it, I’m indebted to Van Kelly and Bruce Hayes of the University of Kansas, Udo Hebel and Nassim Balestrini of the Universität Regensburg, and Valérie Dionne of Colby College; to those who encouraged me by making valuable comments at the talks, I thank Todd Giles, Roger Kuin, Edith Szlezák, Birgit Bauridl, Jay Sibara, Pearly Lachance, Richard L’Heureux, and Juliana L’Heureux; I give special thanks to the late Kenneth Irby. Though it once seemed a dream that this book would see the light of day, the dreamweavers are Haaris Naqvi, Publisher at Bloomsbury, and Mary Al-Sayed, Senior Editorial Assistant, to whom I’m endlessly grateful. I thank Maria Damon and Jonathan Arac, the formerly anonymous manuscript reviewers, for their exceptionally helpful comments. I reserve my most spirited thanks for dear friends who have never flagged in offering interest in my work, not to mention extreme patience and necessary humor in response to my moods: Todd Thorpe, Paul Assimacopoulos, Réda Bensmaïa, Tom Conley, Catherine Gimelli Martin, and Tomoko Kuribayashi. And my most beatific gratitude for Joyce Johnson and David Amram, to whom this book is dedicated. And for the love and companionship she never ceases to humble and astound me with, at home and on the research road, I reserve my warmest, most heartfelt thanks for Dorothea Beate Heitsch. This book’s flaws are my sole responsibility.

xii Acknowledgments

Excerpts from On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Copyright © 1955, 1957 by Jack Kerouac; copyright renewed © 1983 by Stella Kerouac; copyright renewed © 1985 by Stella Kerouac and Jan Kerouac. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Excerpts from The Town and the City by Jack Kerouac. Copyright © 1950 by John Kerouac and renewed 1977 by Stella S. Kerouac. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Excerpts from the following works by Jack Kerouac are reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.: MM

MM

MM

MM

Dr. Sax: Faust Part Three. “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” Letter to Yvonne Le Maître, September 8, 1950. Visions of Cody.

Copyright by John Sampas, Literary Representative. I am grateful to the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations, for permission to quote from the following unpublished writings in the Jack Kerouac Papers: MM

MM

MM

MM

8.21: Holograph fragment, notes and sketches. 15.20: Holograph draft novella “La Nuit Est Ma Femme – Winter/ Spring 1951.” 39.10: Holograph notebook “Old Bull.” Includes “On the Road by Jack Lewis,” and “Sur Le Chemin—Jack Lewis Dec. 16, 1952,” and “Workbook Mexicay.” 5 Laid-in leaves of “On the Road Dec. 26” (paginated 1–4) and a fragment note, untitled and unpaginated. 43.17: Holograph notes for “Galloway” novel which became “The Town and the City.”

I am grateful to the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin, for permission to quote from this unpublished document from the Jack Kerouac Collection: 1.3, On the Road journal, 1948–49. Preliminary versions of some parts of this book appeared in the following publications, and I thank the publishers for permission to reproduce the material:

Acknowledgments

MM

MM

MM

xiii

“Jack Kerouac and the Nomadic Cartographies of Exile,” The Transnational Beat Generation, ed. Nancy M. Grace and Jennie Skerl (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 31–50. “Kerouac’s Quest for Identity: Satori in Paris,” Studies in American Fiction 41, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 49–76. Copyright © 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. “Literatures of Exile and Return: Jack Kerouac and Quebec,” American Literature 84, no. 3 (September 2012): 589–615. Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press.

Introduction Kerouac, exile, and the force of literature

In approaching the writing of Jack Kerouac (1922–69), I begin with a basic biographical fact: his bilingualism, his knowledge of English as a language second to his native French, the result of his family’s and community’s participation in the immense and difficult migration from Québec to the United States that took place in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At birth he was given the name Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, at the time his native Lowell, Massachusetts was about 25 percent Frenchspeaking,1 and by his own account he didn’t speak English before he was six or so, and with an accent until age sixteen.2 Attending the FrancoAmerican3 parochial schools through the fifth grade, while growing up he was regularly reminded of the conditions of the migration and the status of his community in their adopted home. Despite his repeated insistence that this background was of paramount importance to his writing and his sense of who he was, with some notable exceptions it receives little more than routine attention in both biographies and critical studies in the Anglophone world, as one set of circumstances in his life. Where it is acknowledged as significant, treatments of its role in his writing are in most cases limited to its status as the incidental subject matter of some of his texts, and rarely as an important part of his poetics and stylistics. In this light, in the pages ahead I will address two major aspects of Kerouac’s work: 1)  his literary experimentation, which involved moving between languages and a steady awareness that English remained foreign to him, and 2) the thematics of much if not all of his writing, which concerns the travel, migration, and mixing of populations, in other words movement

2 KEROUAC

between cultures and territories. A preoccupation with the global dispersion of peoples informs the texture and substance of the prose and poetry he wrote throughout his career. In order to develop such a translingual and transnational poetics, he drew on a number of major experimental currents in Western literature in procedures that I will also discuss.

Authorial images Almost sixty years after the first publication of his best-known work, On the Road (1957), critical studies of Kerouac remain caught, to greater or lesser degrees, in a defensive posture. The disparagement that his writing mostly received in the press during his lifetime has held its momentum through the present day. Despite their demonstrable falsehood, a number of presuppositions continue to resurface, offering the basis for critical devaluation: the author’s lack of industry, lack of writing ability, shortage of literary education, and poor knowledge of his subject matter. In both journalism and scholarly writing in the United States, many treatments of Kerouac present him, rather than as a serious contributor to American literature, as a cult figure, a hipster writing of his travels in a casual, youth-oriented way, and at worst a drunken or drugged-out hack. Although some of his novels— On the Road, The Dharma Bums (1958), The Subterraneans (1958)—will turn up in university classes in American literature or American studies, too often they’re placed in the context of the Beat Generation, a designation that in some ways illuminates his writing but in other ways limits understanding of it. This is especially true insofar as the Beat Generation itself still tends to be viewed above all as an exemplary phenomenon of midcentury counterculture: more accurate assessments reveal it to be a literary and aesthetic movement with a certain set of preoccupations and a certain relationship to the Western and other traditions, which Kerouac and a small group of fellow writers roughly yet self-consciously envisioned in the late 1940s. In an often surprising inversion of priorities, Kerouac’s writing tends to be the occasion for fascination with the man rather than the writer—some expressions of interest even come with suggestions that they have arisen in spite of his writing.4 A November 2012 article by Ethan Todras-Whitehill in the New York Times offers a splendid example of such treatment of Kerouac. This piece appeared during the most recent resurgence of interest in Kerouac and the Beat Generation,5 following the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Road in 2007 and the production of two movies based on Kerouac’s life and work, On the Road and Big Sur, and a third one, Kill Your Darlings, on the way.6 Todras-Whitehill opens his account with the reverence for Kerouac that often accompanies acknowledgment of his

Introduction

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towering stature among U.S. cultural figures: the degree of detail in the article signals the momentousness and genuineness of a pilgrimage to the site in the mountains of Washington state where in the summer of 1956 the author worked as a fire lookout. However, Todras-Whitehill reports his ambivalence concerning the project: “For my college graduation, my uncle gave me a copy of ‘On the Road’ with the heartfelt wish that I would find it as life-changing as he had…. Instead, I found Kerouac’s ‘masterpiece’ rambling and frivolous; it took me two years to get through it.”7 Despite this impression, he affirms his open-mindedness: he gave Kerouac “another shot” in preparation for the pilgrimage, adding a biography to his collection of novels. And through renewed study Todras-Whitehill became “a Kerouac convert. Not to his writing—the guy needed an editor after Desolation Peak possibly more than he needed a bath—but to the story of his life,” which “reads like a classical tragedy.” In this perspective, Kerouac’s life is the essential part and his “unabashedly autobiographical” writings secondary, even accidental, a gauche appendage. Insofar as his writing was the source of media attacks targeting a purportedly wild lifestyle, according to Todras-Whitehill, it was even the occasion for the author’s tragic downfall. Noting flashes of beautiful poetic description of the mountain wilderness, Todras-Whitehill nonetheless describes Kerouac’s writing as “tiresome” because of the many “tangents” that blemish it. Although he doesn’t elaborate this point, the passage from Desolation Angels that concerns Todras-Whitehill moves from lyrical adulation of the landscape’s mystical grandeur, to a metaphysical reflection stemming from that grandeur, to a memory of childhood in Lowell, the latter triggered by the “clammering” of a can falling down the mountainside.8 Taking place at the dump, a Saturday afternoon playground for mill town children, the memory contributes to reflections on the fleeting nature of the material world and the meditative disposition the mind may take so as to best apprehend it—but none of this matters to Todras-Whitehill because of an implicitly invoked rule against narrative digression. What is most curious is not the judgment of such digressiveness as fatiguing, but rather the blithe attribution of this stylistic trait to a lack of ability or discipline—it’s simply bad writing, filth Kerouac doesn’t care to clean up. There isn’t the hint of a suggestion that digressive prose might serve a literary purpose or that Kerouac had an education in which he might have learned this. Indeed, Todras-Whitehill avows his especial attraction to Kerouac’s supposed lack of education, the naïve quality in his life and writing, that of the man who “seeks truth,” without finding it “in any real, sustained way,” before the fame he achieved with On the Road. The summer on Desolation Peak came close to the end of this enticingly innocent quest, as Todras-Whitehill sees it, of the time the author spent “in America’s boxcars, bars, and wildernesses”—instead of on the pursuits that actually took most of Kerouac’s time in 1956, writing in disciplined fashion

4 KEROUAC

and bringing equal application to reading deeply in the Western literary tradition and a few other areas, mainly, at the time, Buddhist thought. In the first seventy pages of Desolation Angels, up to the passage from which Todras-Whitehill quotes, among the authors and texts Kerouac mentions and sometimes discusses in detail are Auden, Gide, the Lankavatara Sutra, Dos Passos, Céline, and Shakespeare. Todras-Whitehill doesn’t list a single writer who might have figured in his subject’s continuous studies—nor does he acknowledge that such studies occurred at all, as surely he would know from the biographies, such as Dennis McNally’s Desolate Angel, that he claims to have read.9 As I will show beginning in Chapter 1, the digressiveness in Kerouac’s prose, among many other aspects, is in large part the effect of considerations ensuing from extensive study. In early notes he explicitly identifies a major conflict in Western aesthetics, that between the linearity of organized presentation and works of art that resist the imposition of convention on the variegations and vagaries of reality—as I will phrase it, between a representational and an expressive poetics. Among the literary models whom Kerouac repeatedly cites in journal entries, letters, novels, and poetry is sixteenth-century French writer François Rabelais, whose fantastical novels about the bodily and social excesses of giants proceed in many different narrative directions, in blatant challenge to the Scholastic requirement of prudently and economically delimited subject matter. Another is Marcel Proust, whose prose transforms experience from the perception of everyday objects to a recognition that they are materially permeated with memory: “The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect.”10 Description gives way to an immense flood of details and impressions from the past, the “recherche du temps perdu” or “remembrance of lost time” of his multivolume novel’s title—the classic example is the “Petites Madeleines” passage that follows the quoted sentence.11 The sudden introduction of apparently unrelated subjects, including memories triggered by a sound, smell, or other sensation, reveals Kerouac’s debt to both Rabelais and Proust, not to mention many other authors on his reading lists. Of course, it’s an open question whether Kerouac was effective in his borrowings, whether his studious efforts were successful in the creation of literary technique; but to omit acknowledgment of these attempts is tantamount to denying him any chance at being a real writer— as well as at memorializing a disappearing French-Canadian culture that, as evidence shows, he set out to do in embarking on a writing career. In far too many accounts, Kerouac becomes a source of inspiration for a kind of idyllic, back-to-primitive-life experience: this idea demands an insistence on the naïve and optimistic, boldly masculine disposition of a man who out of semiliteracy wrote ineptly though sometimes sweetly. It only repeats an

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image that is in many ways the contrary of what Kerouac was, strangely tapping into the fantasy of the nonintellectual yet inventive pioneer rooted in one of the most reactionary American cultural traditions. This image of Kerouac is uncannily persistent. Reviews of Joyce Johnson’s first-rate, assiduously researched biography, The Voice Is All (2012), tended toward harsh, mainly in response to her characterization of her subject as a native speaker of French who studied and wrote diligently for many years before producing On the Road, as an author whose writing practice was heavily shaped by both these aspects of his life. Indeed, Johnson’s is in the minority of the twenty-five or so biographies of Kerouac for its extensive emphasis on his literary education and relentless dedication to craft. And her book is exceptional in its treatment of his French-Canadian background as a communitarian and social phenomenon, rather than as a set of local and personal circumstances, that was a principal factor in his relationship to language and literature as well as a source of his consciousness of history as the migration of peoples.12 This is, of course, a Kerouac whom few critics have recognized13—some went so far as to declare this characterization something they’d rather not have heard about. In the New York Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan transitions from a review of the film version of On the Road to a review of Johnson’s biography by writing, “Everything— including Jack Kerouac’s life—seems destined to undermine the magic of On the Road…. Every biography has fresh blunders and renewed shocks.…”14 In other words, too much exposure to the ordinary and uncouth aspects of Kerouac’s life dulls the seductiveness of the romanticized picture. In the New York Times Book Review, James Campbell ventures doubt as to Johnson’s claim that Kerouac knew French: in response to her assessments of the degree to which his linguistic traversals mark his prose, Campbell counters by quoting the opening of a 1950 letter from Kerouac to Franco-American journalist Yvonne Le Maître: “I have no proficiency at all in my native language, and that is the lame truth.”15 However, Campbell neglects to say that further in the letter Kerouac also speaks of repeatedly reading Le Maître’s French-language review of The Town and the City, of thinking in French while writing in English, and of his plan to write a novel in French. The context of the letter makes evident that his opening statement is hyperbolic, in the manner of the New England French-Canadian community underscoring his sense of exile from his native language and the province of Québec.16 Campbell insists, then, not only on Kerouac’s monolingualism but also on his lack of rhetorical nuance. These comments are the setup for Campbell’s next criticism of Johnson, which is to suspect her account that the author read through the entirety of his friend William S. Burroughs’s hefty collection of untranslated nineteenth-century French poetry, and even whether this collection existed. Given Johnson’s extensive documentation of the Francophone environment in which Kerouac grew up, a Québécois immigrant community, large but

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tightly knit through tenacious adherence to the native language,17 as well as the fact that he studied French in his one year at the Horace Mann School and then at Columbia University, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would question his linguistic ability, or for that matter that of the patrician Burroughs, a Harvard alumnus. Hard to imagine, unless this skepticism merely reiterates the image of Kerouac and the Beat Generation as sturdily nonintellectual despite schooling, a condition that would deny them access to French-speaking status, in the Anglophone world usually acquired through the soundness of a finer education. Moreover, it bars Kerouac from one of the primary purposes that, in the very letter Campbell quotes, he himself claims for his writing: the memorialization of a people whose culture is tending toward obliteration through geographic scattering and consequent cultural assimilation (in Chapter 1 I will discuss this letter). In other words, it refuses acknowledgment of Kerouac’s major sources for understanding the historical sway and importance of his writing. Again, Kerouac emerges as a rugged, ingenuous individual making his way through a world he doesn’t quite understand but about which he occasionally writes a few shimmering lines of unsubtle poetry, an author ambiguously worthy of serious literary consideration. In the area of scholarly criticism, for more than three decades there have been some excellent books on Kerouac. In the wake of the first scholarly work on the Beat Generation in English, John Tytell’s Naked Angels (1976), Tim Hunt’s landmark and still relevant Kerouac’s Crooked Road appeared in 1981. Yet apart from such studies, quite often the treatment in scholarly circles repeats in detail this pathetic image, in some cases to the point of omitting his work altogether from the dignifying classification of “literature.” For almost forty years, for example, between 1974 and 2012, the much-respected journal American Literature didn’t feature a single critical study of Kerouac (though reviews of books addressing the author have regularly appeared in its pages).18 According to Hunt, for long it was the journal’s editorial position that Kerouac’s writings didn’t qualify as literature.19 However, it’s far from the case that there has been a dearth of serious scholarship on Kerouac: a search of the Modern Language Association (MLA) International Bibliography with the term “Kerouac, Jack” in the “author as subject” box dating back to 2001 yields seventyseven English-language articles in peer-reviewed journals (in contrast to eighteen for Joseph Heller and twenty-seven for Truman Capote, two of Kerouac’s longer-lived contemporaries).20 My point is rather that it has remained easy for scholars to relegate Kerouac to sub- or paraliterary status—as Harold Bloom does in the 2004 volume of his Modern Critical Interpretations series devoted to On the Road, unsurprisingly describing the novel as a “rather drab narrative” in which he “can locate no literary value whatsoever.”21 The essays in the volume, with Tim Hunt’s “An American Education” at the opposite end of the spectrum from Bloom’s

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introduction, vary in their acceptance of Kerouac’s work as literature.22 Though affirming the literary status of On the Road, Mark Richardson ends up rehashing one of the most durable commonplaces concerning the racism that supposedly permeates Kerouac’s texts: Richardson considers scenes in On the Road in which Kerouac examines, through his narrator Sal Paradise’s meditations, the cultures of nonwhite ethnic groups. Although there can be no question that these descriptions draw on racializing clichés, especially of African-Americans and Latino/as, Richardson, making the mistake of equating the voice of Sal Paradise with that of Kerouac (hence of imagining a writer low on artfulness), treats these images as simple statements of the author’s vision.23 However, as I will show in Chapter 2, Kerouac often rhetorically situates these commonplaces, strategically attributing them to a naïve narrator. In full awareness of his own background as a member of a recently despised minority with the official and quasi-official designation of nonwhite in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Kerouac was ambivalent about his own relationship to the domination of whiteness, understanding it as involving vital cultural renunciations. And he treated ethnic stereotypes as a frequently inevitable by-product of cultural interaction, the very crystallization of a culture’s epistemic limits. Especially in light of these reasons, Kerouac’s depictions deserve close scrutiny—as I will give them in Chapter 2. In addition to accepting the image of the unreflective prose mill, Richardson couples it with that of the “White bourgeois,”24 whose fascination with nonwhite cultures excludes any understanding of them, the dominant American who has never known anything else. Again, Kerouac’s interest in the operations of cultural and linguistic marginalization, an interest stemming from his own situation yet moving well beyond it, completely vanishes in this rendition, the literary-critical stake of which is all too clear: the maintenance of an unwary, all-American writer who may serve as an example, even a whipping-boy, for pointing the pious finger at ethnocentrism in literature. Often cited in connection with Kerouac’s alleged misapprehensions of African-American culture is the practice that he lists among the principal sources of his theory of spontaneous prose, jazz improvisation. In The Color of Jazz, Jon Panish maintains the image of an undisciplined, ignorant, racially fetishizing Kerouac. Quoting from the author’s two theoretical statements on method, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose,” Panish writes, “No mention is made anywhere in Kerouac’s pronouncements of study being necessary prior to the undertaking of ‘spontaneous prose.’”25 Although this may be true of the two texts at issue, it contradicts all evidence bearing on the discipline and labor that Kerouac put into his craft. There are certainly very good reasons to investigate Kerouac’s appropriations of jazz practice and culture—I will discuss them in Chapter 3—but the seemingly casual disposition of the

8 KEROUAC

author’s formulations in these statements doesn’t constitute proof that he regarded jazz improvisation as something “individualistic, ahistorical, and ‘naïve,’” or as a mainly primitivist phenomenon.26 Again, like so many critics, both scholarly and journalistic, Panish insists on the image of the callow, unindustrious Kerouac whose principal cultural investment is in dominant whiteness.

First impressions This widespread though quite distorted image of Kerouac dates to the earliest media reactions to his work.27 Writing about Mexico City Blues in the New York Times Book Review in 1959, Kenneth Rexroth describes Kerouac as “a Columbia freshman who went to a party in the Village twenty years ago and got lost”28—as a white bourgeois who mistakes his kid-hipster fetishization of African-American culture for the key to knowing the larger world. Alluding to his review of The Subterraneans from the previous year, Rexroth also says that Kerouac “gave us his ideas about jazz and Negroes, two subjects about which he knows less than nothing….”29 To curtail impressions that he is accusing Kerouac of anything but the most extreme racism, Rexroth adds, “In this reader’s opinion, his opinions about Negroes are shared only by members of the Ku Klux Klan.” Besides its vitriol, which probably stems from a personal conflict between the two writers,30 this characterization is unequivocal in its simplistic placement of Kerouac, seizing on the latter’s willingness to examine white fantasies and refusing to consider that intellectual reflectiveness might be part of his procedure. Though usually less scorching, other reviewers at the time were ready to admit the basic terms of this facile picture. Most didn’t share Gilbert Millstein’s appraisal of On the Road in the New York Times, published September 5, 1957, as “an authentic work of art” and “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and whose principal avatar he is.”31 Just three days later in the Times Book Review, David Dempsey offered a riposte: “Jack Kerouac has written an enormously readable and entertaining book but one reads it in the same mood that he might visit a sideshow—the freaks are fascinating although they are hardly part of our lives.”32 On the Road comes out as anything but a work of art, written by an “uncommitted” author (that is, one with no particular moral direction) whose “plotless and themeless technique” is based on non sequiturs, whose characters are “not developed but simply presented.” Nonetheless, Dempsey remained dimly sympathetic, reviewing no fewer than four of Kerouac’s novels from 1957 to 1959. He was probably the

Introduction

9

only major U.S. critic at the time to at least glimpse the importance of the Franco-American culture that regularly appeared in Kerouac’s novels. Although he doesn’t mention this aspect of the book in which Kerouac most extensively explores this culture, Dr. Sax (which Dempsey terms “perverse and gnomic wordmongering”),33 he notes it in connection with Maggie Cassidy, which he judges a limited artistic success. Nonetheless, he finds the depiction of young French Canadians “shadowy”—and he repeats his reservation about Kerouac’s technique, saying that the author “is not creating character here, but simply recalling it,” and qualifying the novel as “an impressionistic playback.”34 The latter observation curiously resonates with the tape recorder experiment Kerouac included in his composition of Visions of Cody, which he undertook in 195235 but which wasn’t published until the novel’s first edition, an abridged version, in 1960.36 This experiment is quite in keeping with Kerouac’s theory of spontaneous prose, an important part of which involves approaching the inexhaustible complexity of reality so as to allow it to speak for itself, through the apparatus of writing (in this case, through the new medium of home audio recording technology). The aim of this and other “playback” techniques in Kerouac’s work is to transcribe reality, in contrast to representing it, the latter an affair of ordering procedures that would offer an ostensibly full but inevitably reductionist image—I will address this subject at greater length in Chapter 3. Dempsey’s reservation is that Kerouac doesn’t offer such plenary representations but merely remembers—whereas it is precisely Kerouac’s aim to remember, to memorialize, in particular the disappearing culture of the French Canadians of New England. In other words, though Kerouac develops technique for the purpose of addressing an unusual, even unheard of cultural memory, Dempsey, keeping his distance from this memory and its purpose, sees at best poor technique. Dempsey’s degradation of this memorializing literature is all the more notable for being almost exactly contrary to the judgment of the first critic to explore this function of Kerouac’s writing. In his Jack Kerouac: A Chicken-Essay [Jack Kérouac: Essai-poulet] (1972), the earliest book-length study of Kerouac in French, one of the earliest in any language,37 Québécois novelist and critic Victor-Lévy Beaulieu speaks of the Franco-American Lowell of Dr. Sax as losing its culture, “se déculturalisant”—hence, he says, “the large number of monsters, idiots, neurotics and depraved people Jack describes in it.”38 Instead of the “mishmash of avant-gardism (unreadable), autobiography (seemingly Kerouac’s), and fantasy (largely psychopathic)” that Dempsey finds in the novel,39 Beaulieu sees the coherency of an unraveling community, filled with figures of the night whose shadowiness is the very light in which a vanishing culture may poetically emerge so as to be memorialized in its tenuousness. As for the recording function of Dr. Sax (and more broadly of the Lowell novels), Beaulieu writes, “I’ll… say that it’s a novel which provides the best documentation we possess on

10 KEROUAC

Franco-American life in the 1920s and 30s.”40 Much in Kerouac’s portrait of his immigrant population, then, to which Dempsey condescends as subliterary, the result of a lackadaisical disposition toward craft, Beaulieu sees as affirmative, the sign of a literary power whose prose takes shape as it addresses certain vital cultural questions. Although this critical position certainly deserves scrutiny,41 for the moment I wish to signal the very different stakes of a perspective in which the struggle for cultural survival is at the center, as opposed to off the map. In Chapter 4 I will discuss Dr. Sax as a novel of Franco-American culture and also as the further creation, following Kerouac’s discovery of spontaneous prose, of a literary discourse and system in which cultural heterogeneity may be allowed to emerge.

Different kinds of exile This image of the know-nothing42 folk-artist is that of the all-American Kerouac who, whatever his “ethnic” background, had no strong or consequential ties to it and hence claimed enough white privilege to be more concerned with “kicks” (a word he used frequently, hence sometimes contributing to the impression) than with assiduous reading or putting his mind to technique. This Kerouac is unperturbed in his relationship to dominant, white America, has succeeded in his efforts at assimilation, and looks with wide-eyed wonder at all those nonwhite segments of North American culture that, to someone who sees them responsibly, would make the very idea of assimilation problematic. Although there are a few complications in Sal Paradise’s relationship with his Italian background, and he’s certainly not without intellectual leanings, the narrator of On the Road is at times an approximation of this image of Kerouac. Implicit or explicit in the above-cited critical texts is the notion that Kerouac is in effect reporting, writing memoirs in which he has changed the names for merely legal reasons—and somehow not, in the case of Salvatore Paradiso, to signal a highly blissful, utopian outlook. Kerouac’s texts, though beginning with On the Road based closely on biographical events, are constructed novelistically, through narrative that to different degrees selects and orders events for storytelling purposes and in language whose poetic thrust departs drastically from empirical description. Kerouac’s writing presents a dream of America, always in order to reveal its limitations and the ways that it obscures the realities of broader American culture; yet this dream is frequently taken for the authentic expression of a view reliant on factual observation, and hence it is stripped of critical force. It isn’t a coincidence that in this prevalent image his background in the Québécois migration, entailing struggles with English that left him in an outsider’s relationship to it, are almost completely missing—this Kerouac must be all-American.

INTRODUCTION

11

What has been hidden in Kerouac, aggressively so, is the very part of him that U.S. assimilation had hidden, one of his principal motivations for embarking on the trying and uncertain career of writer. It is also not a coincidence that the Québécois migration remains a relatively unknown phenomenon in the United States:43 besides that its numbers were small in comparison with, say, Irish, German, or Italian immigration, the French-Canadian or Franco-American population long bore a legacy of being especially targeted for Anglophone assimilation on both sides of the border, a legacy that Kerouac knew intimately. When the migration saw its peak during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the FrancoAmerican communities, especially of industrial New England, cultivated awareness of their conditions: various institutions—churches, parochial schools, newspapers, associations—emphasized the struggle that had taken place in Québec of the difficult task of maintaining cultural identity in the new environment. Collectively, communities engaged in survivance, or cultural survival, a set of practices by which to maintain cultural and linguistic identity.44 Among the Franco-Americans of New England, survivance was an adaptation of the disposition of the Francophone population of Québec, which was frequently characterized through popular and official narratives of exile—exile from France in the case of Québec, and a second layer of exile for those who had left the province. Versions of this characterization began at least as far back as the French and Indian War (the North American part of the Seven Years’ War), with the fall of Québec under the command of General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759 and the cession of the territory to Great Britain in 1763. The conquered population felt the pressures of a threatened linguistic and cultural minority when, following the Lower Canada Rebellion of 1837–38, the British government unified Canada and, though not blatantly excluding Francophones, took measures to degrade the use of French and gave clear political advantages to Anglophones.45 In the 1839 Report on the Affairs of British North America, the Earl of Durham, commissioned by the Crown to assess the causes of the insurrection and to make policy proposals, finds the primary issue in the largely French-Canadian revolt to be “a contest of races”46 (in the nineteenthcentury sense, variously connoting nationality, lineage, and language). He then recommends “obliterating the nationality of the French Canadians” (299) through assimilation—mixing the populations and allowing the cultural and linguistic domination of the “superior” English (he uses versions of this expression throughout). In utterly classic nineteenth-century imperialist fashion, he justifies this position by claiming that assimilation does a favor to the French Canadians (as well as the native population): “It is to elevate them from that inferiority that I desire to give to the Canadians our English character” (292). In this vein he famously writes, “There can hardly be conceived a nationality more destitute of all that can invigorate

12 KEROUAC

and elevate a people, than that which is exhibited by the descendants of the French in Lower Canada, owing to their retaining their peculiar language and manners. They are a people with no history, and no literature” (294— my emphasis; Dickinson and Young, 182). He explains this assessment by recourse to the rights of the victor: as a conquered people, the French Canadians have fallen into this condition by being cut off from France for eighty years (Durham, 294–5). It isn’t too big a claim to say that much of French-Canadian survivance in Québec and the United States is a direct or indirect response to the Durham report and its ramifications: the imperative of maintaining language and traditions was often repeated in order to ensure that French Canadians indeed conserved and produced a history and cultural identity of their own. One of the material effects of the marginalized position of French Canadians was the economic fact of restricted access to affordable credit; interest rates in the early 1860s went as high as 72 percent.47 Many peasant families knew overwhelming debt and consequently sought other sources of income.48 A combination of the policies of pressured assimilation, the various factors contributing to weak agricultural production among this predominantly peasant population, and the growth of industrial cities south of the border resulted in the Diaspora, the migration of about 900,000 Francophones to the United States mainly between 1840 and 1930.49 Historians have characterized the movement south as “the major event of French-Canadian history in the nineteenth century.”50 Many fully intended to return, and hence the importance of maintaining identity among the Anglophone majority of New England remained strong: it entailed fluency in French, consideration of Québec as the homeland, devotion to French Catholicism, and a conception of cultural and “racial” kinship with France itself.51 To assure survivance in exile, members of the clergy also participated in the migration, establishing churches and parochial schools in all communities. In the face of this massive extension of the population well beyond provincial borders, the official clerical narrative was that the Diaspora was part of the “providential mission” of the French Canadians to spread Catholicism in predominantly Protestant North America.52 Through divine will, according to this narrative, Québec fell in 1759 for the purpose of preserving the authentic, militant, medieval Catholic faith and therefore civilization itself from the atheism that overran France just three decades later with the Revolution of 1789.53 Survivance was more than a matter of the identity of a particular ethnic group—some influentially conceived it as essential to the salvation of the human race.54 By the turn of the twentieth century, Franco-Americans had firmly established their communities in New England; they numbered around 573,000, an astounding figure given that the Francophone population of Québec was just under 1,322,000. The total number of French Canadians in the United States and Canada at the time approached 2,413,000, so about

Introduction

13

24 percent of the population lived in New England, almost half as many as the 55 percent in Québec, the rest in other parts of both countries (Roby, Histoire, 7, 22–7). The French-speaking population of some New England cities exceeded 50 percent (7). The region was literally understood on both sides of the border as an extension of Québec, an idea captured in the term “le Québec d’en bas,” “lower Québec.”55 At the same time, community leaders were interested in bringing the population to prominence in the United States: education emphasized full bilingualism, and distinction in Anglophone society could serve as a means of increasing awareness of Franco-American identity and culture. However, the French Canadians were not the most welcome of immigrant populations. In their new location, to which they were actively recruited as millworkers, they were greeted with such epithets as “the Chinese of the Eastern states,” a designation that became official in 1881 when Carroll D. Wright, chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor and subsequently the first U.S. Commissioner of Labor, used it in his annual report, elaborating with the phrase “a horde of industrial invaders.”56 Wright’s major interest was limiting the industrial working day to ten hours, a project for which he cites the successes of factories in Connecticut and Massachusetts that reduced hours with little loss of production (139–44), as well as the testimony of laborers who felt that a shorter working day would be “the greatest boon” to their lives (144–5). In making his argument he presents three objections to his proposal, citing the economic concerns of the smaller mills, the ill effects of idleness among many workers (146–9), and, most vehemently, “the presence of the Canadian French” (149). Characterizing them as uninterested in U.S. civic life and dishonest in their daily lives, he states that “so sordid and low a people” are best kept busy working as many hours as possible, their “one good trait” being that they seek every opportunity to do so. But he reflects, “Society should be shaped to the better portion of the people,” advocating that “laws should be so amended and enforced that these people will either be coerced to conform to our established ways, or else go where the already established ways of the country do please them” (150). Wright’s progressivism, manifest in his adamant commitment to improving factory conditions during the Gilded Age, relies on the social homogenization that forced assimilation would bring about. To his credit, in response to strenuous protest from Franco-American spokesmen and resolutions passed by the Massachusetts Legislature referring to “the earnest and patriotic condemnation of the Canadian French of New England”57 that his statements received, Wright held a hearing with community representatives. In his 1882 report he published the entire transcript of the meeting, revising his negative views, though insisting that the phrase “the Chinese of the East” didn’t amount to disparagement: somewhat disingenuously he explains that the words are “simply

14 KEROUAC

an expression used by economists to-day everywhere, to denote the kind of labor that is migratory” (86). This is his defensive follow-up to Charles Lalime, a Canadian immigration official whose statement that “we are a white people” (80) reflects the completely justifiable understanding of the phrase as racist. In his résumé of the hearing, Wright makes the effort to show his acceptance of the French Canadians as Americans, citing the very phenomena he previously took for signs of transience: the establishment of Francophone and Catholic institutions, which he now presents as indications of permanent residency. His conclusion that “complete assimilation with the American people is but a question of time” (92) met with objections in the Francophone press more vigorous than those to his initial slur, since it predicted that the project of survivance, widely perceived as integral to the mission and identity of French Canadians, would be its own undoing.58 Reacting to these communities’ very public activism, newspaper editorials termed French Canadians a “danger” for keeping their language and customs. In 1889, the birth year of Kerouac’s father, Joseph-Alcide-Léon (Leo) Kérouac, also not long before his family moved from Québec to the United States, the New York Times offers as reason to believe that the French Canadians don’t make good citizens the fact that “for two centuries they have succeeded in retaining in Canada, the religion and the language of their ancestors, as distinctive badges of their separation from their neighbors.”59 In the event that a great number of French Canadians gained U.S. citizenship, the editorial warns, “there would be a real danger that they might demand and obtain legislation favorable to their special and separate interests, and in the same degree hostile to the general interests of the community.” The text finishes by declaring it a “patriotic duty for all Americans, in communities in which the French Canadian population is considerable, to insist upon maintaining American political principles against all assaults.” This position finds strong echoes in today’s xenophobic journalistic and political discourse, particularly with regard to Latino and Muslim immigrant communities; the phrasing suggests to what degree such discourse is indebted to nineteenth-century, racially informed notions of democratic culture, even when, as in the case of Wright, these were quite progressive. This editorial indicates the hostility and despised minority status that the Québécois faced in the United States in the era of their most numerous migration—a backlash that didn’t quickly let up. In an 1896 article in The Nation, William MacDonald quotes Wright’s condemnation, explaining that “it can hardly be doubted…that views very similar to those expressed are still, after a lapse of fifteen years, widely held in different parts of New England.”60 At the time of Kerouac’s birth in 1922, the public airing of these attitudes was intensifying, part of the surge in nativism that accompanied and followed U.S. involvement in the First World War. 1916 had seen the

Introduction

15

publication of Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, one of the foundational texts of between-the-wars white supremacy. In 1923, again in The Nation, a disciple of Grant’s, Robert C. Dexter, published “The Gallic War in Rhode Island,” addressing the objections in the French-Canadian community to the recently passed law mandating English as the principal language of instruction in all private schools. In the fall of 1922, he writes, opponents of the law made sure that “the fires of racial hatred were stirred to the depths”;61 the result was a new Democratic majority in the state government that enacted a law nullifying the first. Detailing the many patriotic organizations opposing this newer legislation, he concludes by calling Rhode Island “the most thoroughly foreign State in the Union.”62

Critical intersections In response to such well-paced hostilities, survivance continued through its network of institutions, operating largely by way of the parishes and often involving narratives that combined claims of victimization with affirmations of providential status.63 As I will show in the coming pages, Kerouac was heavily marked by the culture of survivance; the history and culture of Franco-American New England, and more broadly of Francophone North America, are always in the background and frequently in the foreground of his writings. In the United States the assessment of his work from this perspective has barely begun: although writers and critics in Québec have long been aware of this dimension, there has not been a thoroughgoing study of his work in connection with the migration or cultural and linguistic issues he raises in connection with it.64 Viewing him this way considerably shifts understanding not only of his own particular situation as a FrancoAmerican, an outsider to the English language and dominant American culture, but much more importantly of his conception of how cultures and languages work: as a set of contacts and exchanges that never ceases its migrations and transformations, a conception he brought to his writing— extending it, most often imaginatively, to a continental and global scale. None of this is to say that there haven’t been superb commentaries on Kerouac’s poetics that illuminate its transcultural and (to a lesser degree) translingual purview. In my research I have benefitted tremendously from the work of a number of scholars: I will refer, repeatedly in most cases, to studies by Tim Hunt, Regina Weinreich, Michael Hrebeniak, Nancy Grace, Omar Swartz, among others; Isaac Gewirtz’s Beatific Soul, a magisterial textual archeology of On the Road, has proven indispensable to my research. To this conversation I hope to bring a context that allows the historical, material, social, and cultural dimensions of Kerouac’s poetics to be much more evident. Although the reach of his poetics goes well beyond

16 KEROUAC

the French-Canadian migration, his own experience remained a reference for him, functioning as an allegory of the mixture and metamorphosis of culture. A telling omission from the major studies is his relatively late Satori in Paris (1966), in which he relates the tale of his quest for identity in such a way as to raise questions concerning the very efficacy and integrity of cultural grounding. As I will show in Chapter 5, one may easily overlook this short novel without sufficient background in the Québécois migration, survivance, and the accompanying practice of genealogy, despite the fact that in the book Kerouac revisits major concerns of his meditations on the workings of culture, language, and identity. Although the cultural specificity of Kerouac’s work gives way to much broader conceptualizations, it is also one of the main factors that have kept this work from equitable evaluation until recently. This is not only because of a lack of reference in most of the critical literature to the history of the Québécois migration, but also because it has only been in the last twentyfive years or so that paradigms have emerged in which cultural specificity is accorded great importance—their contact with Kerouac’s writing has yet to flourish. The year that On the Road first appeared, 1957, also saw the publication of Northrop Frye’s monumental Anatomy of Criticism: Frye makes no less a claim for literature than that its study “takes us toward seeing poetry as the imitation of infinite social action and infinite human thought, the mind of a man who is all men, the universal creative word which is all words.”65 This observation isn’t strictly speaking at odds with Kerouac’s literary project, but the emphasis on universality, on the notion that a single writer (despite the specified gender, Frye admitted women authors) could and should speak for all human beings, is an indication of the low regard in which midcentury criticism held supposedly regional, singular points of view and concerns. In the critical assessments from the time that I addressed above, Kerouac’s often quite poetic accounts of his Québécois background and community are treated as at best someone’s very particular biography and at worst nonsense. His stylistic experiments met with similar and related incomprehension: the most forcefully stated is probably Norman Podhoretz’s 1958 comparison of the prose of The Subterraneans to “an inept parody of Faulkner at his worst.”66 That is, Kerouac’s lengthy, sinuous sentences and often surprising word choices, made partly under the influence of deliberately thinking in two languages, could be nothing but an unschooled derivation of a style that in a few respects—liberal use of uncanny descriptors, elaborate syntax—superficially resembles it. In the same vein, Truman Capote’s famous quip about On the Road on David Susskind’s TV show in January 1959, “That’s not writing, it’s typing,”67 implicitly promotes a standard of American English that favors the clean, even sentences and rhetorically ornate descriptions that the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s was known for and proud of.68 This standard disparages prose inflected with foreignness, prose that strives to

Introduction

17

admit into its address and depiction what might be largely invisible in the perceptive and cognitive apparatus of dominant culture.69 Such an approach to Kerouac’s work has become possible in light of developments in the overlapping areas of minor literatures, translation studies, postcolonial theory, and diaspora studies; among the many names in the background of what follows are Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Rancière, all of whose work has enabled a view of literature as endowed with local character but broad sweep, its force acting to cut into systems of domination and exclusion. But my study is not a mere exercise in warming Kerouac in a theoretical food or word processor. Despite the fact that, over the decades since the theory boom of the 1980s, some practitioners have been eager to leap into the shoes of the caricatural theorist, making a career of “applying” readymade vocabulary sheets to literary texts, the best theorization always derives its concepts from as much as it brings them to a phenomenon. This book is rather an attempt at a rapprochement between Kerouac and certain philosophical, aesthetic, and other theoretical currents that have taken shape in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with much longer histories. The best justification for this rapprochement is that, since their initial composition, Kerouac’s texts have closely interacted with these currents. It’s not only the case that many of the key works figured in his reading—one finds in his writing intelligent mentions, discussions, and incorporations of Freud, Nietzsche, Spengler, and Heidegger, as well as some of their major predecessors, among them Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Goethe—but also, and more importantly, as I hope to make evident, that in his theorization and practice Kerouac confronts some of the same major problems as they do. Examining Kerouac in connection with certain areas of critical theory and philosophy is no more than a further articulation of what his writing already does, and a consideration of his contribution to their positions and concepts. The argument I make over the course of the book concerning Kerouac’s value is not so much that he wrote “worthy” literature and that critics who don’t see this have been wrong, but rather that, in his time and for many years afterwards, his writing has posed serious challenges to the functions and effects of literature, to its established conventions and institutions. Assessment of his work should start with recognition of that challenge and the remarkably consistent reaction to it: it’s less a matter of saying that some critics are mistaken than of pointing out the aesthetic, cultural, and ideological investments that attend on their judgments. Although the principal focus of each of the following chapters is one or two of Kerouac’s novels—The Town and the City in Chapter 1, On the Road in Chapter 2, On the Road and Visions of Cody in Chapter 3, Dr. Sax in Chapter 4, Desolation Angels and Satori in Paris in Chapter 5—I will make reference to many other of his texts, mainly published but some

18 KEROUAC

unpublished. Notable among these are the two short novels he wrote in French, La Nuit est ma femme (1951) and Sur le chemin (1952), both of which I address in Chapter 2 in connection with their important role in the composition process of On the Road; so far they have received little scholarly attention.70 As for Maggie Cassidy (1959), Visions of Gerard (1963), and Vanity of Duluoz (1968), which tell stories of Franco-American life and the dilemmas of assimilation, I won’t be addressing them in detail because my focus is less Kerouac’s representations of Franco-Americans than the poetics that ensues from his relationship to his native language and heritage. More important, then, are the writings in which he works out and pursues the consequences of that poetics, through both execution and reflection, and my choice of texts follows that imperative. Comprising a vast number of documents and proceeding in many directions, Kerouac’s œuvre nonetheless involves a continuum from beginning to end, in the form of a certain set of aesthetic and thematic preoccupations: many of his writings, from the multiple manuscripts of On the Road to a library call slip, have turned out to be relevant to my project. The books I privilege are the completed works toward which his efforts gravitated; however, it will become apparent that the relationship between them and the other writings is far more complicated than that of principal to supporting documents, and even that it’s inaccurate to describe any text by Kerouac as “complete” because of the motion and transformation integral to its composition (this may well be the case for all literary works, but his methods especially underscore it). As selection criteria, my interests and approaches are as I state them here; other choices were possible— notably The Subterraneans (1958), Mexico City Blues (1959), Big Sur (1962)—but space has been a primary concern. The distinction between his prose and his poetry is hardly a neat one, yet my comments on the texts designated through publication as poems are intermittent—the novels more fully address the cultural and even the poetic concerns subtending this study. The other writings provide further background into the books, through either earlier versions or composition notes; they also illuminate his theorizations of writing, his relationship to the French language and the Québécois migration, and his biography. Of the many biographies that have appeared since Ann Charters’s ground-breaking Kerouac (1973), in addition to it I have benefitted especially from Johnson’s recent work, Gerald Nicosia’s Memory Babe, Paul Maher Jr.’s Kerouac, and McNally’s Desolate Angel. Where I rely on others, I cite them accordingly. Perhaps seemingly against some of the critical frameworks I draw on, and notwithstanding my explicit criticism of the understanding of Kerouac’s novels as “thinly disguised memoirs,”71 I examine his biography extensively. One of the main reasons for this, paradoxically, is to bolster my case for changing the view of his work as primarily autobiographical. Besides that his writing is poetic, in many places in his narratives he changes details;

Introduction

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the reasons for these alterations are often discernible, going well beyond the familiar explanations that his publishers wished to avoid lawsuits. But even in the examination of such differences, it becomes evident that he indeed engages life in his work—not, however, as the quasi-reporter that so many have taken him for. Rather, his work is a participation in life, a writing of life that doesn’t so much reproduce as explore it, not only in its events but also in their consequence, sensation, and intellectual resonance. It is a vécriture, according to the term that François Ricard proposed for Kerouac’s work by combining the French words écriture and vécu, a writing of what is lived that reciprocally contributes to actualizing what is lived.72 Appropriate to an assessment of Kerouac’s work is the category of life writing called autofiction: steadily gaining ground in the Anglophone world, since the early 1990s this term has been in wide use among French critics. It offers a way of overcoming the distinction, unsupported by formalist analysis, between fiction and autobiography, as well as of recognizing the importance of the author’s life in relation to her or his writing, after formalism had for decades disregarded it.73 When Podhoretz accused Kerouac, nearly sixty years ago, of “destroying the distinction between life and literature,”74 it was ostensibly to underscore one of the worst things an author could do: this judgment endures in the characterization of the ingenuous chronicler who as such winds up reinforcing dominant ideology. But it’s time that criticism embraced Kerouac’s destructiveness, his traversal of this border, in order to appreciate the extraordinary paths on which his work takes literature.

1 Unsettlements

“Because I cannot write my native language and have no native home any more,” wrote Jack Kerouac to Yvonne Le Maître in 1950, in response to her French-language review of his first novel, The Town and the City, “and am amazed by that horrible homelessness all French-Canadians abroad in America have—well, well, I was moved.”1 Her review, published in the March 23, 1950, issue of the weekly Le Travailleur in Worcester, Massachusetts, is a mainly laudatory judgment of the twenty-eight-year-old author’s work. Earning her praise was no small feat on his part. Besides her status as the most distinguished Franco-American journalist of the first half of the twentieth century, she was also well placed in Anglophone circles: from 1911 to 1913 she covered the Paris literary scene for several periodicals, including The Smart Set under H. L. Mencken’s editorship; during this time she counted among her friends and acquaintances such authors as Colette.2 Recently she has also been recognized as the most important woman writer in Québécois literature of the period.3 Returning later in life to the Franco-American newspapers of New England where she had begun her career, she wrote for both Le Travailleur and the Lowell daily L’Étoile. Le Maître calls the young John Kerouac (as the first edition of the book identifies him) “a first-class animator; he knows how to populate a place with an active, quivering, trembling, dense life. That’s the strong point of his considerable talent, which already in this first attempt reaches a color and relief well beyond ordinary.”4 However, she is quick to state her reservation: Kerouac “has pulled off the feat of giving life, in the American forest, to a vigorous tree spreading out an exuberant sap, without once telling us of the old blood whence the tree drew its life and vigor.”5 Missing, she finds, are the regard and reverence toward the ancestors that she holds to be the source of life and cultural identity. “Throughout the book there is a pronounced realism, if you will, but a certain degree of unreality also hangs over it. In the starter soil, the manifold and diverse ethnic humus, Lowell, where this tree grows,

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John Kerouac didn’t plant…human roots. Imagine Hamlet without the father’s ghost….”6 She signals this lack as a problem because she rightly sees in The Town and the City a novel that presents an acute challenge, as does all of Kerouac’s work, to the U.S. ideology of assimilation, but that nonetheless avoids recourse to fully formed cultural identity. In much of Franco-American culture, the commitment to survivance meant that such recourse was the vehicle of the challenge. With a word choice that uncannily prefigures the writing practices that Kerouac would soon come to, Le Maître characterizes the tension in the novel: This Lowell, then, is spontaneous generation; it is a uniform mass in which none of the elements that created it springs up with its own face. And yet…yet Lowell is everything except uniformity and fusion. Lowell—“Galloway” is the name of the city in the book—is the melting pot [in English in Le Maître’s text, a signal that the very concept belongs to an Anglicizing ideology] in which nothing is yet perfectly melted; Lowell is the French Canada of Québec, the English Canada of the Maritime Provinces; Ireland, England, and Scotland; Portugal and the Azores; Italy, Sweden, Norway, Greece, Armenia, Syria, and Lebanon; Poland and Lithuania, Israel—and what else! I’m only touching on the forty-seven varieties and the forty-seven survivances.7 It’s worth noting that Le Maître uses the charged word survivance, which I leave in French because of its special sense in Québécois and FrancoAmerican culture, to describe the practices of all the immigrant groups in Lowell. In connection with this novel whose realist qualities are so pronounced as to occasion an interrogation of the reality that it presents, Le Maître raises the following problem: in his Lowell/Galloway, Kerouac gives close attention to many of the signs of these survivances and almost none to the specificity of the surviving cultures—that is, he makes a partial concession to the ideology of assimilation, a lapse in the pursuit of survivance. His response to this criticism is direct: in his letter he underscores his distance from his “native language” and “native home.” Le Maître’s kind but firm reprimand to Kerouac for leaving ancestry and language out of his literary debut reflects the widespread commitment to survivance in both Québec and Franco-American New England from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Although she commends him for eschewing the “childish banality” that tends to mark the “immigrant novel”8—among her derisive examples are choruses of “O Sole mio” sung over spoonfuls of minestrone—she also characterizes the absence of traces of the fathers’ land as a defect in his otherwise fine realism, since those traces indeed persist in the form of ghosts that haunt even his word choices. “When John Kerouac himself calls the Holy Child ‘the Little Jesus,’ with English words he is still speaking French.”9 Actually, he

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twice writes “the little Child Jesus,”10 which is idiomatically acceptable in English; nonetheless, “le petit enfant Jésus” occurs much more frequently in French, and Le Maître is shrewd to note the French permeating the author’s linguistic reserves. Several times she states his first name, John, emphasizing the anglicization of his given name, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac. A resident of Lowell for most of her life,11 she knew the Kerouac family well: she characterizes them as “of purely French origin” and “pronounced survivants,”12 their commitment showing in their excellent French, though “the young novelist himself speaks a chastened French.”13 The rest of her review is quite positive. She notes the high quality of Kerouac’s prose, defending him from the charge, which some reviewers made, of overwriting.14 Her assessment is perceptive, as she homes in on aspects of his writing in The Town and the City that in his later work become more pronounced and defining. Among these is his lyrical realism— descriptions of the gritty details of hidden, sometimes frightening parts of social reality, in a poetic language that responds closely to that reality, and his attention to the accompanying passions. In citing his practice of using English words in what amount to French expressions, she notes a distinct mark of his style that he will subsequently cultivate. But more importantly, she delineates quite precisely his effort to capture a social whole that is America, as well as the innumerable tributary cultural currents that render it close to indefinable. What she doesn’t quite see, though, is that for Kerouac the deracination of the many component cultures of the United States and more broadly America (which in his view includes parts of Canada and Mexico) is the enabling condition of their vagabondage and convergence in the heterogeneous festival that he seeks in his writing. Le Maître passes over the funeral of the father in the novel, George Martin, in part of one sentence, although it is a stunningly lyrical passage that closes this panorama of life in the United States (480–98). She doesn’t note the role of the funeral in the plot, the death of the father indicating the final connection to the territory of origin only to require its renunciation—nor that the plot is effectively an allegory of settlement, scattering, and deracination. In her effort to bring the nomad cultures of Kerouac’s America back to the survival of the identity of the fathers, she overlooks the fact that the father’s death directly precedes a new affirmation of life in the joy of travel, the latter bearing metaphysical and spiritual significance. Of course, hindsight makes it easy to identify such omissions; her review is clear-sighted and indeed comes close to discerning two poles that continue to operate throughout Kerouac’s work, the mournful knowledge of the loss of origins and the ecstasy of wandering that this loss precipitates.

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The reality of storytelling Most literary-critical treatments of Kerouac’s work give little attention to The Town and the City, regarding this apprentice novel as not a “real” part of his work, mainly for two reasons.15 The first is that it precedes his experiments with spontaneous prose, or at least the hurried writing by which he initially composed On the Road in 1951—hence, supposedly, it doesn’t reflect the full-fledged, “authentic” Kerouac. The second is that it tells a “fictional” story whose characters are invented, only partially based on real persons, in contrast to his fiction from On the Road forward, which tells stories drawn from experience and whose characters usually correspond with real persons. Readers and critics find verification for these reasons in Kerouac’s own statements, such as the following from the introduction to Lonesome Traveler (1960), presented as a résumé with a narrative section: “First formal novel The Town and the City written in tradition of long work and revision, from 1946 to 1948, three years, published by Harcourt Brace in 1950. Then discovered ‘spontaneous’ prose and wrote, say, The Subterraneans in 3 nights—wrote On the Road in 3 weeks—”16 Although here he simply draws a distinction between a more conventional literary practice and his subsequent pursuits, in a 1959 interview he makes a stronger judgment of his early work: “I spent three years writing The Town and the City. That was my first book, a novel-type novel, with all traditional characters and development and everything like that…. The Town and the City was mostly fiction. Fiction is nothing but idle day-dreams. Bah! The way to write is with real things and with real people. Just like a story-teller, just like Homer probably did, or Shakespeare did.”17 Despite the ease with which these statements may lead to notions of the difference in quality between the “true” Kerouac of spontaneous prose and the “false” one of traditional character development and revision, there are several problems with such an understanding. The first is the importance it places on Kerouac’s own word about his work, a reliance on proclaimed authorial intention that literary theorists at least since Wimsatt and Beardsley have cautioned against.18 Although I would never insist that the author’s statements are irrelevant to the evaluation of her or his writings—to the contrary, in subsequent pages I will often rely heavily on Kerouac’s own comments and observations—one should certainly take them with circumspection: I regard the writings rather as autonomous, and the author’s other words, to greater or lesser degrees, as part of the same literary corpus. In the case of Kerouac, there tends to be a blurring between his literary and “other” writings—several volumes of his letters and journals have been published, with more on the way, and critics and biographers alike rely on a plurality of the texts when making statements about either his life or his work, seeing these two as closely intertwined, as though he

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were telling the same truth at all times.19 Kerouac is among a small number of authors of whom biographies have distinctly overshadowed critical works.20 This emphasis on his life stems, of course, from statements such as the above, and also from the nature of his writings, mainly insofar as they are an attempt to move beyond the increasing organization and ordering of postwar social life, with its distorted representations of people’s interests, priorities, and desires. He carries out this attempt by making his writing an urgent part of life, a motion that functions in tandem with life’s own motion, rather than a representation removed as something subsequent and supplementary. The idea that he continually tells the literal truth in his “real” writing, then, is based on his own statements that in them he tells the truth, not fiction; at the same time, these statements are judged true because of the veracity of his writings. In other words, this idea is tautological. But there are more reasons to be suspicious of it. In the second of the above two quotations, the distinction Kerouac makes is not, as it might seem, between texts that clearly tell the truth and texts that recount fiction or untruth. Rather, it is between two kinds of storytelling: he illustrates his statement on the importance of writing “with real things and with real people” by adding, “Just like a story-teller, just like Homer probably did, or Shakespeare did” (my emphasis). Now, Kerouac had studied with intermittent enthusiasm in Columbia University’s Great Books and English curricula, excelling in particular under the instruction of Mark Van Doren, one of the twentieth century’s preeminent Shakespeare scholars, whose opinion of his student remained high enough that he later recommended The Town and the City to the major publishing house that accepted it.21 When Kerouac cites Homer and Shakespeare as storytellers to illustrate what he means by a kind of writing that tells the truth, rather than fiction, about “real things” and “real people,” he certainly doesn’t mean that Homer and Shakespeare offered literal and factual representations of real life in their work—nor that he himself is writing texts that more closely resemble memoirs than fiction. Rather, though there may be certain, even major modifications of real events in the kind of literary works he is advocating (as there are in all of his own), he is proposing a notion of storytelling that doesn’t distance itself from reality through excessive conventionalization—one that takes reality as its necessary starting point and responds primarily to it.22 His discovery of spontaneous prose in the early 1950s (a topic I will explore further in Chapter 3) has everything to do with diminishing the importance of fiction dominated by a conventionalism of representation in favor of a literary expressiveness that responds closely to the complex, surprising, ever-shifting make-up of reality, hence revealing the latter more effectively.

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Moral expression The division, even conflict, between representation or mimesis and expressiveness, the latter an involvement with the texture of the work of art itself that reduces the hold of conventionality, is as old as Western aesthetic theory and remains at its heart. Kerouac describes the transition in his writing from the prominence of one to that of the other. The prevalence of representation—as he says, “all traditional characters and development and everything like that”—draws firmly on the tradition that takes shape with Aristotle’s Poetics. In the Greek philosopher’s classification of the different poetic arts, the effectiveness of their mimesis (usually translated as imitation) is the sole criterion.23 Tragedy holds the superior position in the principal division between drama and epic: this is because of its greater unity of action, its stronger capacity to function in morally exemplary fashion—that is, its more effective mimesis (26.1461b–1462b). Aristotle in turn ranks the six different parts of tragedy, privileging plot (muthos) and assigning spectacle (opsis), the visual material of the performance, to last place for being the least artistic part, since it achieves its effect through its power to draw attention (6.1450a). Character (ethos) is in second place, a close correlate of plot (61450a–b). The more episodic construction of the epic, its less unified action and character development (15.1454a, 18.1456a, 26.1462a–b), is a feature that places its attraction in the striking nature of the actions it depicts, its sheer rush and density of events, its attention to circumstantial detail—all of which give it an appeal comparable to that of opsis, the seductive spectacle, although Aristotle assigns importance to the relative unity of epic narrative. Even in his youthful stories, Kerouac was drawn to depicting situations that departed from ordered presentation so as to focus on the appeal of difficult and complex reality, per the advice of his literary hero William Saroyan not to “pay any attention to the rules other people make.”24 Nonetheless, while writing The Town and the City he came to the decision to bring more plot structure to the passionate descriptions in his work-inprogress. In his journal, slightly varying the Aristotelian terms, he explicitly invokes the distinction between epic and drama, which he understands as a distinction between expressivity and conventionalism of representation. His entry of November 7, 1947, describes his decision as a breakthrough that allows “mastery of my art, instead of slave [sic] to it.” He cites his high word count of 2500 for the day’s session of only a few hours—notably one of the factors, rapid composition, that would become important to him with his discovery of spontaneous prose: Technically, the great change is from the epic-lyrical feeling for life to the dramatic-moral, without abandoning the lyrical altogether, this goes in

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the writing. The result has that invisible power in it, the power of moral drama, technically the narrative power, with less emphasis on descriptive moods, descriptive obsession (the obsession to sing with the right hand and not let the idle left hand know too much.) This proves that I still can’t, and won’t, explain this fine change.25 Kerouac here addresses his struggle with the Aristotelian poetic hierarchy: although, to the chagrin of moderns for whom the poetic genres are the epic, lyric, and dramatic,26 Aristotle omits the lyric mode from consideration, Kerouac associates epic and lyric writing because of the descriptiveness that signals their departure from the ordering of narrative. After elevating the epic or mainly expressive, descriptive, lyrical, less plotted mode to prominence in his novel, in his aim to present a panorama of American life on the model of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, he will rather emphasize a dramatic or tragic turn, ordering the descriptions to the purpose of moral consideration—he draws on the “invisible…power of moral drama,” de-emphasizing spectacle or expression. That is, he accepts the hierarchy, the superiority of drama over epic, and the correlative of the moral structure of plot over the expressivity of lyrical, spectacular description that draws from the vagaries of reality. Still, he intends to incorporate the latter, allowing it to burgeon on its own strength. The principal aesthetic difference Kerouac announces in his 1959 statement is that, in moving to a mode of storytelling that lowers the emphasis on characters and their development (dominated, that is, by plot or narrative), he has given description or expressiveness a more important place in his writing. He accords equal footing to the two poles of the Aristotelian hierarchy by providing the examples of Homer, the West’s model epic poet, and Shakespeare, the West’s model dramatic author. Kerouac indicates that his writings have become the effect of spontaneous prose: at once a lyrical engagement with reality and a storytelling of reality, his writings admit of both drama and epic, morality and lyricism, representation and expressivity—as do both Homer and Shakespeare, he implies, whose storytelling exceeds the classification that Western poetics tends to place on each of their genres. As Jacques Rancière suggests, the challenge to the Aristotelian privileging of representation over expressiveness is the key conflict of artistic modernity, beginning with the eighteenth-century creation of the field of aesthetics (especially with F. W. Schelling and G. W. F. Hegel), a development accompanying the recognition of the autonomous work of art, of the liberation of art from the requirement to represent things and people in the world. This is the conflict between what Rancière terms the older poetic “regime” and the newly introduced “aesthetic” one.27 One of the problems with artistic representation up to this point is that it functions morally and hierarchically: to be dignified as a work of art, tragedy must represent noble persons and depict their struggles

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as exemplary, correlatively filtering its depiction as it systematizes the image of reality. Upsetting the Aristotelian hierarchy is part and parcel of the democratizing currents in the West whose power surges in the eighteenthcentury revolutions, which are attended by an increasing proximity of art to reality. This vast change entails an equalizing of access to both the production and reception of art, an equalizing of representation within the work of art—for example, the rise in the eighteenth century of the drame bourgeois and the romantic poets’ focus on different social classes, but also a search, beginning with romantic poetics, for a language that stands on its own, apart from its relationship to representation.28 Rancière presents Flaubert’s Madame Bovary as exemplifying an aesthetic turning point. The shift isn’t simply evident in the plot/character theme of the compulsive adultery of Emma Bovary, an upwardly mobile woman of the peasantry (such an off-limits topic in literature that in 1857 it merited a famous trial), but also in Flaubert’s saturation of his narrative with descriptive texture, a focus on the minute details of everyday life and the sensations they induce. The latter feature manifests in the static moments that exceed narrative structure and movement. Rancière presents this lyrical expressiveness as foregrounding the modernism of literature and painting, which will give primacy to expressivity in the form of abstraction, liberation from representation.29 In this schema, Rancière is close to Auerbach, who nonetheless finds the terms representation and mimesis adequate to designate the depiction of reality through the enormous changes that separate the ordering of classical poetics from the realism that begins with the nineteenth-century novel.30 The conflict of aesthetic modernity is the continuing struggle against the persistence of the Aristotelian hierarchy, coupled with the effort to tell stories, as Kerouac has it in his 1959 statement, about real things and real people. So with the word “bah” Kerouac dismisses his own prior aesthetic, not strictly speaking for its falsifications in contrast to the supposed truthfulness of his current approach. Rather, in affirming the attention he gives to both expressivity and representation—his pages are filled with explosive lyricism, and even at their most experimental they tell stories involving people and things and in which events transpire—he is accusing his poetics at the time of The Town and the City of imposing limitations, of hierarchizing the two aesthetic poles, hierarchizing reality in turn, and hence restricting the entry of reality into his prose through appeal to moral authority. The domination of plot in The Town and the City is hardly complete: it is filled with passages that stunningly indulge in lyrical description. This is what Le Maître most strongly praises in the novel, as does Charles Poore, who in his New York Times review notes the author’s “magnificent grasp of the disorderly splendor and squalor of existence.”31 The novel embodies a writing that, in its expressive texture, is closer to Kerouac’s later prose than his 1959 claim suggests. Part of my interest in The Town and the City is to

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illuminate further his spontaneous prose by showing that there’s a lot more to it than writing carried out too fast for reflection and with an absence of revision, that to a degree it already occurs in his first novel. It has everything to do with his understanding of how writing allows the emergence of reality to the greatest degree possible, especially aspects of social and material reality that would otherwise remain hidden. Kerouac’s journal entries make it clear that, while writing The Town and the City, he is grappling with the aesthetic that informs spontaneous prose. Although he declares his interest in ordering his narrative with a moral purpose, he treats morality as a quite complicated matter. Morality may well order and hence hierarchize the reality of this fictional world, but he wishes to transport the moral framework as close as possible to the bruteness of reality. He begins his entry of June 19, 1947, as follows: “Read Tolstoy’s moral essays and I writhed and wrestled to the conclusion that morality, moral concept, is a form of melancholy. Not for me, not for me! Moral behaviour, yes, but no concepts whatever. There is a lugubrious senility in morality which is devoid of real life” (Windblown, 9). He describes his struggle for a morality of immanence rather than of transcendence, for a morality emanating from the movement and diversity of “real life” rather than being extracted and abstracted from reality and made into concepts, universals, held at a remove from the world and as authority over it. What brings him to “writhe and wrestle” is that, in trying to carry this morality, any morality, to his novel, as he will make a firm decision to do in November, he is imposing it on the matter of his book, despite his best intentions transforming this matter into a moral abstraction. In attempting to resolve the dilemma of admitting the plenitude of reality into prose while still maintaining a moral disposition, he turns to some of his most esteemed literary models: Let’s have a morality that does not exclude sheer life—loving! Poor Tolstoy, anguished because he started rich and profligate—yet when a Count retires to the peasants, it’s really of some account to the world (pun intended). Tolstoy must have been self-conscious of his moral importance in the eyes of the world. But Dostoevsky, Shakespeare—their morality grows in the earth, is hidden there and brooding. Dostoevsky never had to retire to morality, he was always it, and everything else also. (9—emphasis in text) This is a consequential distinction between these two forms of morality— Tolstoy’s, which falls on the side of transcendence, and Dostoevsky and Shakespeare’s, which falls on the side of immanence. Through his pun, Kerouac goes as far as suggesting not only the removal, by virtue of its being narrated, of Tolstoy’s morality from the world but also the indebtedness that it imposes on the world. The morality of Shakespeare and

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Dostoevsky, immanent to the earth, springing from reality, is nonetheless “hidden and brooding”: there must then be some artistic agency to bring it out, a condition making it impossible to dispense completely with authorial control, the authority that in at least minimal fashion stands above the text and maintains the traditions of its creation. Kerouac pretty much admits this by taking recourse, in his explorations of literary morality, to the literary fathers in whose lineage he places himself by writing a novel—as he does again in 1959, even in affirming his commitment to being the artistic messenger of “real things and…real people.” And in the 1947 journal he shows his full awareness of the inevitability of the fathers, without offering a resolution to their constant presence, indeed not seeming to want to: “The central essence from which we all draw our blood, that’s the thing, the place, the Father, the all. I mean this—and when I speak of anything, I hear the choruses of unknown past, present, and future voices uttering the words with me. The me and the all, the son and the father” (17). Whether the father is living or dead, some of him remains and at least partly dictates the words in which the world will be apprehended and expressed—this provides the words their moral edge, whatever form it may take. Here Kerouac runs into the basic dilemma of the artist who aims for a full apprehension of reality—as aggressive as the effort is, there is always some conventionality, some traditionalism, something stemming from the fathers that returns, lurking among the flows of words, an integral part of the force of their flow. His struggle becomes that of breaking free from the moral fathers by going through the literary fathers, and then selectively leaving some of the latter out. As Le Maître signals by indicating his omission of the fathers of survivance, this struggle takes place on the level of plot and character: when she remarks, “Imagine Hamlet without the father’s ghost,” she makes the comparison in order to signal the role of familial and cultural fathers, the ancestors by which Franco-Americans supposedly know who they are. Noticing this supposed lapse in his work, his lack of acknowledgment of what she regards as his essence, she chides him in parental fashion, assuming the feminine duty of enforcing the father’s will (which he will recognize in his letter to her—I will return to this point). It is just such moral direction and purpose that the allegorical dimension of Kerouac’s novel renounces, after thoroughly dramatizing the struggle with the father—that is, with a paternity that offers moral and geographic fixity, both of which turn out to be elusive. Hence, despite Kerouac’s apparent repudiation of The Town and the City, this novel represents a big part of the itinerary to spontaneous prose. In addition, insofar as his later writing doesn’t completely leave behind the moral and aesthetic struggle of the earlier work, the latter must be considered in its relation to the former.

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The narrative end of morality Kerouac reports in his journal entry of January 11, 1948, that Allen Ginsberg, after hearing his close friend read parts of the mostly finished manuscript aloud, called it “the great American novel” (Windblown, 43). Although Kerouac claims not to believe a word of Ginsberg’s praise, it’s clear that this commonplace ideal is just what he is striving for. Insofar as he pulls it off, The Town and the City is also the allegory of the author’s efforts to become American—of looking to the rootedness of a past that turns out to be tenuous, and of seeking a geographic and moral position that will be the book’s completion, the projection of full entry into American English and American literature of this son of immigrants.32 Both the composition of the book and the America that its narrative yields turn out to be made of the very rootlessness that the project was ostensibly designed to overcome. The first sentences of the book stage the tension between stability and motion that characterizes the narrative as well as the allegory, and that Kerouac will continue to work with for his entire career. He writes, “The town is Galloway” (3). In starting the sentence with the same noun with which he begins the title, he points to one of a pair of locations; since the title warns that another place, the city, is coming, the location of the novel is instantly disrupted, not allowed to subsist in stability. But the brevity and declarative nature of the sentence indicate a lack of disruption, a lack of complexity, and instead a stability and fixity. Even the name of the town, however, begins to undo this quality: although the narrative identifies Galloway with Lowell by describing the surrounding geography in the next sentence, the name change, the fictionalization itself, removes the town from Lowell. The word Galloway, borrowed from a part of Scotland, also has one syllable of Lowell in it, low, which indicates the geographic position of powerlessness that the next sentence will place this town in, as well as the notion that it is connected to roots. The French roots that Le Maître accuses Kerouac of hiding are in fact hidden in the first syllable, Gal, which is also the first syllable of Gallic or Gallia. But the last syllable, way, suggests that the roots of Gallia and Lowell have gone away, gone on their way, on their road. That is, the rootedness and fixity that the word and sentence strive for give way to motion or instability. And that is what the second sentence, in both content and construction, does to the first: The Merrimac River, broad and placid, flows down to it from the New Hampshire hills, broken at the falls to make frothy havoc on the rocks, foaming on over ancient stone towards a place where the river suddenly swings about in a wide and peaceful basin, moving on now around the flank of the town, on to places known as Lawrence and Haverhill,

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through a wooded valley, and on to the sea at Plum Island, where the river enters an infinity of waters and is gone. (3) The length of this sentence stands in contrast to the brevity of the first, whose stability it overwhelms and undermines. The meandering nature of the sentence, which adds clause after clause opening mainly with participles to indicate continuous action, figures the flow of the river in a way that might be facile if it didn’t perform on the text the very motion it describes. The river begins at its sources, traces a path through the geography of the terrain it traverses, and hence leaves its sources behind, just as the second sentence leaves behind the cultural source, the supposed rootedness of the town. The river’s disappearance in the sea is also what happens to cultural origins through movement, the geographic and temporal shifts that the novel will recount. Kerouac here uses language to figure motion in a way that begins to demonstrate an idea marking all his subsequent work: that language itself is motion, that language is involved in the displacement from one location to another, one culture to another, that language changes with its own motion. Kerouac indicates movement by the notation of geographic features: their durability—“rocks” and “ancient stone”—contrasts with the swiftness of the river, “an infinity of waters,” such that the latter becomes a classic figuration of time and the constancy and inevitability of change. This image may be traced to Heraclitus’ “As they step into the same river, different waters flow upon them,” and is popularized in Roman antiquity through Ovid, the translations of whose work make it a commonplace of Western literature beginning in the Renaissance.33 In the third sentence, Kerouac leaves little doubt that the river is a symbol of culture and its inexorable changes by naming the source of the Merrimac: “Somewhere far north of Galloway, in headwaters close to Canada, the river is continually fed and made to brim out of endless sources and unfathomable springs” (3). The flow of the river renders the sources distant, and in so doing it makes even the stability of Galloway still more tenuous. Barely disguised are his own ethnic roots, in Québec, the Canadian province to the north of New Hampshire—from the perspective of the present they are dispersed in a murky past. The river’s unsubtle symbolism is nonetheless apt for the way that he will depict ancestry, family, rootedness, change, and migration throughout the book. In this and subsequent novels, roads will have a comparable function, serving as conduits from one culture to another—the path to exile, but also to the discovery and even production of the new. The Town and the City is very much a moral tale, as Kerouac says in his journal. He hews closely enough to the model of the classical tragedy that he divides the book in five parts, more or less corresponding to the five acts of a tragedy. The first introduces the family members and their

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pursuits; in the second the older children grow into adulthood and begin to leave home, and the father, George Martin, loses his business, a major event that contributes to the family’s loss of stability. In Part Three, rootedness is shaken with the departure from the old family home; this is followed in Part Four by the parents’ and several children’s move to the city, the site of dissipation. The father’s death and funeral in Part Five cap the tragedy. However, the plot of The Town and the City doesn’t follow the pattern of a disturbance giving way to a restoration of the moral order; rather, it concerns the failure of morality itself, its tragedy, which Kerouac ties to the severance from roots that the father’s death finalizes. Part of the failure is that of the narrative structure, which Kerouac inundates with peripatetic descriptions as he engages in the conflict between two models of poetics. This narrative vagabondage accompanies the increasing dispersion of the family—hence the shift between poetic approaches, eventually leading to the decline of the dramatic-moral one, mirrors and figures the family’s moral scattering.34 The story is a version of Kerouac’s own strained relationship with his rootedness. As he tells Le Maître in his letter, in writing “a universal American story,” he gave the family an ethnically ambiguous name: “I called the family Martin because that can also be a French name… Norman. It was one of the first personal clues I wanted to establish” (229—suspension points in the text). He borrowed it from Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–97), Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin, a Carmelite nun in Normandy, originally from Brittany, like his family’s French forebears (Johnson, 11–12; Jones, 60). Although Kerouac distances George Martin from the Catholic Church through the character’s skeptical statements to a priest, hence adding further uncertainty to ancestral rootedness and paternal authority, there are other ways in which he connects the family to Catholicism, specifically the medieval Church of which the Québécois clergy claimed to be the most authentic representative (see above, Introduction, 12). The youngest member of the Martin family, Mickey, contemplates his relationship to ancestry and descent, to rootedness and whatever may follow it. His given name, Michael, suggests the archangel Michael, who in the Old Testament appears to Daniel as the emissary of God to the Jews (Daniel 10.13-21), and in the New Testament casts Satan out of heaven (Revelation 12.7-9), the story that Milton elaborates in Book 6 of Paradise Lost. In the places in the The Town and the City where Mickey is named as Michael, he submits himself to God through a childlike identification with the “Child Jesus” (171, 178). Mickey, then, is the one who raises the issue of morality and makes its principal question that of the relationship to God. But his name also ties him to medieval France—the Mont Saint-Michel, an island hill just off the coast of Normandy (the region where Kerouac places the origin of the name Martin) on which stands a late medieval fortress-abbey, one of the

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prime emblems of French militant Catholicism, bearing the name of the archangel. It is near the border of Brittany and less than sixty kilometers from the Breton city of Saint-Malo, a major port of embarkment for early migration from Québec.35 So Kerouac not only announces his narrative as a Christian moral tale but also makes it a somewhat hidden story of Québec, Québécois Catholicism, and its links with medieval France. That is, the story itself is partly rooted in the morality transmitted through ancestry, but in an oblique way that makes the ancestral ties hazy and distant, likewise the relationship to morality. The roots are in fact traceable in the novel, but as Le Maître notices, they’re not evident: one of the main reasons for their obscurity is that by nature they’re woven into other elements, a texture that makes problematic any notion of their unadulterated transmission. The Town and the City tells the story of an admixture of sources and roots that proceeds to a shaky social and moral configuration (the town) that will in turn give way to its own dispersion (in the city) and finally to oblivion. By pushing forward the hybridity of cultural contact, Kerouac’s narrative effectively welcomes the new configurations. Whether they result from his attempt to write mainstream, potentially bestselling fiction that addresses a “universal American” experience or not, the fictionalization itself is a hybridization, which in this case assembles disparate real elements so as to convey a truth about that reality. In addition to the Norman origin of the family name, Kerouac makes the mother, Marguerite Martin (née Courbet—named after Gustave Courbet, the nineteenth-century exemplar of realist painting famous for spurning the standards of classical order), the daughter of French-Canadian immigrants (more Americanized than his own parents, who had immigrated early in life with their families from Québec). Her first name comes from Goethe’s Faust (Jones, 60), a text Kerouac first read in high school and to which he continually returned, especially in writing the moral tale of Dr. Sax (the subject of Chapter 4 below). Both parents have come to Galloway from Lacoshua, New Hampshire, a fictional town whose name combines Nashua, where Kerouac’s parents’ families initially settled and that in the twenty-first century remains a Franco-American population center, and Laconia, a town on Lake Winnipesaukee, which is fittingly the source of one of the major tributaries of the Merrimac. Most of the Martin children have names with close French cognates: Peter (Pierre—which his friend Alex Panos calls him) (180), Francis (Francis or François), Joseph (Joseph), Michael (Michel), Charles (Charles), Julian (Julien—Francis’s twin who died, obviously patterned after Kerouac’s own brother Gerard who died at age nine, whose given first name was Francis), Rose (Rose), Ruth (the one Martin name with little Francophone resonance, though its ethical dimension is patent), and Elizabeth (Elisabeth). All of these are also saints’ names, some the names of French kings from the Middle Ages or early Renaissance, and often enough they come with notable characteristics.

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Peter, for example, by the end of the novel seems poised to found a new cultural movement with spiritual overtones, in the wake of the martyrdom of his poet friend Alex, who dies from combat wounds in Italy (438–9); Francis, whose name says France (like the name of François Ier or Francis I, the Renaissance king who consolidated royal patronage of the arts), who speaks French, loves French literature, and is also a writer; Charley is the soldier who sees combat and dies at Okinawa (478–9), recalling the medieval kings named Charles, especially Charlemagne, who waged war to preserve and expand Christianity.

Writing the road My interest is less in this conventional use of telling names than in the fact that these indicate Kerouac’s incorporation of a moral framework deriving from Catholic and Québécois, ultimately medieval French, roots. At the same time, Kerouac dilutes the moral framework that the names suggest through his pursuit of complexity of character, which he accomplishes through relentless, itinerant description. That is, he continues the poetic conflict between the dramatic-moral and the epic-lyrical that he announces in his journal, allowing the latter to thwart the full triumph of the former. His very procedure involves a poetics of distancing, dispersion, and admixture with regard to familial, ancestral roots and the accomp– anying morality. Much of the book is about displacement—sometimes the pains that it inflicts, but more often the pleasures it entails. Movement occurs festively in the novel, a celebration of both the vastness of the United States and the exuberance of prose. What Kerouac begins with the flow of the river he continues with the extension of the road. Toward the end of Part One—the end of the tragedy’s exposition, which gives way to the plot development of the beginning of the family’s undoing—the first announcement of vagabondage occurs in connection with Joe Martin, the oldest son and the third oldest child, behind Rose and Ruth, as well as the most restless of the family. The job he gets at age twenty is the emblematic occupation of twentieth-century American itinerancy: And young Joe Martin at this time was driving great trailer-trucks on the route up to Portland, Maine, over nighttime highways that roared into dawn from powerful motors and huge revolving hissing tires, along blazing macadams that stretched miles ahead all bright from lights and neon roadhouses, highway lamps, gas stations and diners, rolling on through the coastal night in thundering breakneck speed. (64)

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The cinematic quality of this sentence—its description of the truck on the road, intercut with detail “shots” of both in quick succession—dynamically presents motion. The syntax itself is the channel of movement, conveying its elements in their separation and at the same time encompassing them. Here Kerouac presents travel, for the first time in the novel and the first time in his published work, as the inevitable outcome of the tenuousness of a family’s moral and geographic settlement. As this moral framework dissipates, a new nomadic morality and identity emerge. The sentences relating travel themselves become roads—written language doesn’t merely communicate but also embodies motion. This is a syntactic function that will drive Kerouac’s stylistic choices in the experiments that follow The Town and the City. Even in his first novel, Kerouac strives for a prose that descriptively and expressively captures the natural and social reality of an expansive America. Occasionally in the book, he achieves this. In one of the “rising actions”36 of Part Two, the road becomes one of the primary modes of experiencing the United States. Again, he relates the point of view of Joe Martin: There were dim lights burning far off on the highway, on the river. There were lights even beyond those, stretching miles off in the night; he wanted to go there, to see what was there. There were lights like that stretching across the country, across all states and cities and places, and things happening everywhere even now. “Even now, even now,” he kept thinking. There were bridges swooping across the rivers and Mississippis, cities at night casting halo-glows in the sky seen from far-off, there were giant water tanks waiting by the railroad tracks in Oklahoma, there were saloons with checkercloth and sawdust and fans overhead, there were girls waiting in Colorado and Utah and Iowa towns, there were crap games in the alley and a game in the back of the lunchcart, there was soft odorous air in New Orleans and Key West and Los Angeles, there was music at night by the sea and people laughing, and cars going by on the highway, and soft neon lights glowing, and an old shack in Nevada seen across the wastes. There were men drawling in Louisiana, Negroes whooping with laughter and flashing knives in backstreet Savannah, construction jobs blazing in the Missouri sun, there were the morning hills of Pennsylvania, a small cemetery on the slope-slide, towns in the valleys, the gaunt hill-boys, and Ohio once more. Joe had to go see it all, even now, even now. (97–8) The notion of “even now,” suggesting the capture of an American panorama in a single view, is just what this passage does. Though unfolding as several sentences, it functions as a composite syntactic unit, beginning and ending with a personal point of view that the extravagant prose exceeds and leaves

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behind. This is the “epic-lyrical” mode, prose encompassing a wide array of places, persons, and events while allowing them to subsist in their singularity through a syntax, connected mainly by commas and conjunctions, that refrains from totalizing them in a moralizing arrangement. Kerouac also conveys the multiethnic composition of America, taking the road as an invitation to leave the culturally settled quality of the place of rootedness. The road, again, is inevitable as this settlement becomes shaky: the road is the conduit of exile from settlement, nonetheless offering the festivity of contact, admixture, and hybridity. Roads are everywhere in The Town and the City. Usually they take members of the Martin family out of town, somewhat less frequently they bring them back. When roads lead back home, sometimes home has been transformed into a new site of unsettlement, as well as a place to make new discoveries—it can’t remain the same because it was always a site of unsettlement, of only relative and transitional stability. Roads are the lines of the motion of unsettlement—ancestral, cultural, geographic, moral—that lead to sites that may offer new settlement or simply more motion. As the narrative proceeds, through a multiplication of its roadsentences it also becomes a road, bearing the motion of the deracination of morality that it recounts. Québec, the lost home Kerouac contemplates, is in the background, somewhat hidden: trains pulling out of Galloway are often enough going to Montreal (7, 15, 216, 222); French Canadians, or simply “the French,” are mentioned more frequently than any other ethnic group (23, 168–70, 177, 187, 241); Francis, whose name says “French,” is drawn to French literature (which newspapers in both Québec and FrancoAmerican New England claimed as their own). The one French sentence spoken in the novel comes from the mouth of Wilfred Engels (whose name obviously derives from that of Frederick Engels), an older gay man who befriends Francis and who diminishes the importance of national borders through his commitment to international socialism (to which Kerouac was drawn in the 1940s): “Comment!—On lit le français dans les petites provinces des États Unis?” (“What?—There are people who read French in the backwaters of the United States?”) (111—my translation). This utterance (which Le Maître criticizes for its removal from Franco-American reality) has to do with the sudden recognition of the multiple cultures that traverse an apparent bastion of American settlement. Wherever roads lead in The Town and the City, their increased use signals an increase in unsettlement and a greater distance from the stability of the moral framework. George Martin, the father and so the ostensible conductor of morality, loses his business mainly at the hands of unscrupulous competitors—curiously, Kerouac leaves out the Great Depression as a factor in the family’s growing separation, concentrating instead on the decaying morality of the community. This loss is the last “rising action” of Part Two that brings about the family’s departure in Part Three from the

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comfort of its old house (239). This in turn opens the tragic climax of the family’s disunion, which precipitates the parents’ move to New York. A major narrative thread in this tale of the failure of morality is the father’s experience of the betrayed American promise, losing his business, his old home, and finally his settlement in Galloway. The war, which Kerouac presents as an immense assault on civilization and humanity, is one of the prime causes of the family’s break-up and the father’s concomitant loss of position. The roads leading away from home are avenues of dispersion and of the failure of paternal authority, since they map a geography that, in its expansion to a global scale, stymies any sense of organized unity: Joe was in England, across the sea of night in England, ancient unknown England. And Peter was coming and going on a ship in the Mediterranean sea, off North Africa, off the Carthaginian rocks. And Rosey, big genial yet woebegone Rosey, was in Seattle, a nurse in an Army hospital, and where was Seattle, how far across that wide darkness? Ruth was in Los Angeles, a WAC, and she was going to marry a soldier boy from Tennessee, she wrote and told her father. And Lizzy—poor fierce child of terror—was in San Francisco; in what chain of lights at night, in what sea-fog and night-fog was she? And Francis—across the pin-point of lights of Chicago, near now, silent in the murmurings of the night, silent Francis. Where were all his children? (333–4—emphasis in text) And in the first sentence of Part Four, the start of the “falling actions” in the tragic plot, Kerouac explicitly names the war as the cause of familial displacement and a transformation of the very possibility of settlement: “The Martins of Galloway, uprooted by the war, had moved to New York City” (343).

Dispersions New York is where the downfall takes place, as George Martin loses his professional standing and his family scatters further. In conventionally middle American fashion, Martin denounces what he sees as the root of moral decay, his prime example of which is a gay coming-of-age novel: “It’s all these foreign ideas!” (410) He equates migration with the burgeoning lack of moral meaning he views around him. In a slight reaffirmation of Québec as the distant homeland, Marguerite Martin paints a picture of Franco-American peasant settlement: “I don’t know…, but the best kind of life, as far as I’m concerned, was the life we used to live on my grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire. That was before my

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father died, before I had to go to work in the shoe shops” (411). Even as she makes this statement, she undermines it by acknowledging that with the absence of the father, an all too easily occurring outcome, settlement disappears. Up to this point the novel has gone out of its way to situate such an idea of moral unity as pure nostalgia, an ideal that was fictional from the start. This distance, this failure of the unity offered by paternal authority, is figured in George’s long bout with stomach cancer. As he approaches death he acknowledges this failure, not just his own but also that of the moral framework he believes once governed the world by asking “his own mother and father long dead” as well as God for explanations: And he talked to God, sometimes with heated familiarity and argumentative fury, he asked why things had been made so hard for men, why, and if there was no why, then what it was that was so strange, beautiful, sad, brief, raggedly real, so hurt and inconsolable. He asked God why he had been made by Him, for what purpose, for what reason the flower of his own face and the fading of it from the earth forever; why life was so short, so hard, so furious with men, so impossibly mortal, so cruel, so restless, so sweet, so deadly. (470) His questioning suggests that he entertains no hope of an answer, that the lack of moral framework in the world is proof of God’s distance, of the slightness of the hold of paternal authority on the flux of worldly events. This struggle, which morality loses, is at the heart of the poetics Kerouac articulates in his journal: a moral structure that strives to bear on an enormous series of events, running against the limit of the elaborate life-course of said events. Kerouac’s first novel is the morally inflected narration that announces its own failure, finally opening to a poetics whose purpose is to admit with minimal restriction the resilient complexities of reality. The narration reaches achievement, then, in the death of the father, which Kerouac presents as an unmomentous event, taking place in the routine of daily hours: “George Martin had died as though in his sleep, so quietly that no one had even guessed. And what Peter had imagined to be his snores had really been the lonesome death rattle” (476). Peter’s proximity to George, along with his effective neglect of the moment of death, underscores his status as Oedipal actor, the son who finally participates in the death of the father in order to enact rebellion: He could not believe it. What had killed his father, in God’s name? He had not done it himself, it was not true that he had done it himself! A thousand times it seemed he had done it himself, but it was not so! Who

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could say that he had done it himself! How would he ever learn that he had not done it himself? (477) Peter’s guilt is plain in this rhetoric of denial. His failure to be at his father’s side at the moment of death points to his filial waywardness, his having drifted away from the father’s expectations and hence not maintained familial morality. This reaction suggests something broader than the classical Oedipal relation, since it stems from Peter’s participation in the enormous social change that renders untenable the very system of transmission of paternal authority. He neither deifies the father nor assumes his authority, but simply turns away. Unlike Oedipus, Peter doesn’t meet blindness or death, nor any version of them such as thwarting or emotional paralysis; rather, he faces a vast but fragmented life that he must reconfigure by removing himself from settlement, setting himself in motion.37 The novel’s tragic death is less that of the father—his demise doesn’t occasion a return of the moral order or the advent of a new one—than that of tragedy itself. The father’s funeral bears out this understanding. The ceremony is a return to the sources in Lacoshua, the combination of the geographic source of the river in Laconia with the French-Canadian node of Nashua. It is the place where the family finds its connection with ancestry and earth, to its morality in the deepest sense, the communal and spatial structure that defines lives as they proceed in a temporal and historical continuum whose duration is close to that of the United States: “the misty lands and farmfields and pine woods of the old New Hampshire earth from which the Martins of two centuries had risen secretly, hidden and unknown, enveloped and furious, to live and work and die in the brooding presence of themselves and the earth, in the dark atmospheres of their own moody dream of things” (480). At the same time, the burial is the interment of this morality. It is the last occasion on which the family reunites, so it functions as a ritual that leads out of close ties to ancestral groundedness. The terrain is one that most of them will never see again—even Joe Martin, the wanderer longing for settlement, decides to take out a G.I. loan to buy a farm outside Galloway (492), the family’s initial site of unsettlement, rather than here in Lacoshua, the territory of the Martins’ ultimate yet lost rootedness. What remains in the narrative following the funeral is dispersion: Peter, the son closest to the father’s death, goes on the road. This is not simply the conclusion that introduces On the Road, the follow-up novel that Kerouac conceived before completing The Town and the City;38 it also affirms the need to leave behind the morality of family-ancestry-territory and to look forward to a new, as yet unformed morality. “When the railroad trains moaned, and river-winds blew, bringing echoes through the vale, it was as

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if a wild hum of voices, the dear voices of everybody he had known, were crying: ‘Peter! Peter! Where are you going, Peter?’ And a big soft gust of rain came down” (499). The assembly of family and community calls to Peter from behind, asking him what morality he will seek to replace it, and there is as yet no reply except movement on the road. “He pulled up the collar of his jacket, and bowed his head, and hurried along” (499). Whatever replaces the morality of paternal transmission will derive from the extendedness of roads and rivers. And this is also the poetics toward which Kerouac is working at the end of this narration of the failure of imposed moral narrative.

Uneasy settlements Of necessity, then, Kerouac leaves out of The Town and the City an appeal to the authority of his Québécois ancestors: he begins the story at a remove from them, fictionalizing his links to them in the hidden Québec-ness of the Martin family, Galloway, and Lacoshua. Since part of the allegory of The Town and the City is Kerouac’s own troubled assimilation to Americanness, he remains ambivalent about his ties to his heritage, searching for an egalitarian relationship with it that would allow it to become part of the hybridity that he values on the literal and figurative American roads. The very project of The Town and the City involves a wavering between reverence for the ancestors and the drive to leave them behind.39 It thus constitutes the prelude to the epic that Kerouac repeatedly said he was writing, the story of his own family whose fictional but momentous status he recognized by calling it the Duluoz Legend, using the surname that during the 1960s he settled on for his recurring narrator and main character.40 It is just this wavering that Le Maître, an exactingly insightful critic, notices in Kerouac’s debut novel, and just what she responds to by assuming a maternal stance and hence the right to direct him to the morality of the Québécois fathers. In his reply to her review, he shows his passionate concern for his origins in the Franco-American community of New England as well as his distance from it at a time that the project of survivance was losing force—that is, he elaborates on and effectively defends the very wavering for which she chastens him. His letter to her expresses his pleasure at being honored among the people to whom he felt a close familial connection: “What amazed me most about your review—which I read and reread in Mexico City all summer—is the beautiful and elegant French tone that made it seem as though a very aunt of mine had reviewed the book” (228). He signals that it isn’t simply in the community but in the French language that he feels at home, a sense he took with him in the form of her review to the U.S. expatriate community in Mexico City where he was a

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frequent guest. He recognizes her maternal disposition toward him, as well as her maternal function in the transmission of morality, by comparing her to an aunt on the point of her superb French. Yet when he writes of “that horrible homelessness all French-Canadians abroad in America have,” he acknowledges that his feeling of being at home amounts to realizing that there is no home. In affirming his connection between his stay in Mexico City and his awareness of the exile of the Québécois community—his own wandering south of the border that mirrors his community’s having come south of another border—he makes explicit the relationship between his fascination with the road and the geographic displacement of his people. Also notable is the close connection he draws between geographic and linguistic exile—along with the suggestion that, though he is distant from the French language in his avowed inability to write it, it is nonetheless in that language that he might find a reprieve from exile, the comfort of a transported remnant of settled morality. The language is mobile, part of the displacement, but it also becomes the mobile home, so to speak, of the person and the community in exile, a vehicle of American nomadism. Kerouac informs the grande dame of Franco-American journalism that, as a writer, he wishes to contribute to the community and its linguistic identity, hence to overcome his avowed inability to write in French: “Someday, Madame, I shall write a French-Canadian novel, with the setting in New England, in French” (228—emphasis in text). He points to a literary homecoming to both his native New England and his native French—the word someday places it in an indeterminate future, which will presumably come after further wandering and the discovery of a new morality that would allow him to put Franco-American identity on an equal footing with its U.S.-American counterpart and these two major divisions of himself in harmony with each other. That is, his own engagement in survivance through writing currently suffers from the displacement that it purports to address, that “someday” it will overcome. He is continually aware of his displacement from French—which doesn’t for all that allow him to be at home in English, a language, he tells Le Maître, that he learned only at the age of six or seven (228). This sense of distance and exile is the ground of a bold claim about his identity: “All my knowledge rests in my ‘French-Canadianness’ and nowhere else” (228). One shouldn’t overlook the complications of this statement: it closely follows his words about the “horrible homelessness” of French-Canadians in the United States, so his suggestion is that, whatever rootedness he may find, his identity is permeated with the rootlessness that marks Franco-American identity— hence his choice to portray a classically deracinated American family in The Town and the City. He brings his sense of moving between languages into his poetics: “The reason I handle English words so easily is because it is not my native language. I refashion it to fit French images. Do you see that?” (229)

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Although, as he says at the beginning of the letter, “I have no proficiency at all in my native language, and that is the lame truth” (227), it’s also true that English is the language in which he has a consistent sense of “horrible homelessness” (228). His description of linguistic itinerancy approaches what Derrida has termed “the monolingualism of the other,” a state of affairs in which “I have only one language and it is not mine”:41 since Kerouac has no choice but to speak and write in English, in order to be read but more broadly because it permeates the surrounding culture and hence suppresses his native French, English comes to him as a language that belongs to another, that isn’t and can’t be his, but that is nonetheless his only one. His challenge to English involves pushing against its exclusivity, an exclusivity whose “lame truth” is that he has “no proficiency” in French: the circumstances of his birth make French the language that is closest to him but at the same time, so to speak, unspeakable. With regard to his question of whether she sees what he’s doing with the two languages, Le Maître notes in her review that Kerouac’s English is permeated with French. But at the same time he admits, in response to her accusations, that The Town and the City reflects his assimilationist wish to disguise his origins, a wish that French Canadians fulfill with relative ease: “Isn’t it true that French-Canadians everywhere tend to hide their real sources. They can do it because they look Anglo-Saxon, when the Jews, the Italians, the others cannot…the other ‘minority’ races” (229— suspension points in the text). He suggests a kinship, by virtue of their shared non-Anglo-Saxon minority status, among these different groups that is already becoming important in his writing. “Believe me, I’ll never hide it again; as I once did, say in high school, when I first began ‘Englishizing myself’ to coin a term (Me faire un anglais)” (229). He signals as foreign even the expression he uses to describe his prior assimilationism, using a nonstandard term that nonetheless offers a precise translation—an illustration of his use of English words to fit a French image. His poetics concerns such linguistic intersections, which reflect distances even within the English language as its foreign contacts and sources emerge into view— at the core of this poetics is linguistic and cultural in-betweenness. Already in The Town and the City, his writing shows a capacity to reveal the many cultural confluences of the United States that might otherwise remain hidden. In the years that follow, this capacity will become one of the main purposes of his writing, first leading him to On the Road.

2 On and off the Franco-American road

Kerouac’s interest in writing a Franco-American novel accompanied his awareness of the difficult space between survivance and assimilation—in his earlier years, before the rapid decline of survivance following the Second World War,1 this space was a part of life in his community. In a letter in late 1950, he told poet and chronicler Rosaire Dion-Lévesque that in his novelin-progress he would address the “French-Canadian story in America”: Dion-Lévesque renders this phrase as “le fait franco-américain” in the entry on “Jean-Louis Kérouac, romancier [novelist]” in his 1957 Silhouettes franco-américaines, a midcentury “Who’s Who” of French Canadians in the United States.2 The two novels Kerouac was working on at the time were On the Road and Dr. Sax, the latter (composed in 1952, published in 1959)3 depicting Franco-American life in Lowell. While completing The Town and the City in late 1948, he imagined that Dr. Sax would be his second book;4 but within a year he had given priority to On the Road (Windblown, 225), in April 1951 famously generating the scroll version of that novel in a three-week burst. Despite his claims following On the Road that rewriting wasn’t part of his writing process, this intensive session, as Joyce Johnson and Isaac Gewirtz have recently documented, was preceded by prodigious note-taking and drafting.5 And as early as 1981, Tim Hunt offered a superb critical analysis of the composition of On the Road, identifying five different versions dating between 1948 and 1953.6 The only reason Hunt didn’t examine more versions, as Johnson and Gewirtz did, is that the relevant documents were at the time unavailable for consultation. Since the Kerouac Papers, housed in the New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, were opened to the public in 2006, among notable discoveries is that Kerouac also wrote several more versions of On the Road in French. These offer evidence that

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his reflections on his French-Canadian background, including the fact that French was his first language, are part of his elaboration of a poetics of exile bearing on the composition and style of his writing, on the way that his texts will approach the reality that they address and depict. In Québec the interest in these writings has been immense, since they attest to his wish to become “a genuine French-Canadian writer,” as Montreal journalist Gabriel Anctil has observed.7 One of these manuscripts is La Nuit est ma femme (The Night Is My Woman), whose title varies on the associations Kerouac makes in that of a very early work, recently published, The Sea Is My Brother.8 The French text tells the story of Michel Bretagne, a French Canadian in the United States struggling with who he is and what language is properly his own.9 His surname signals the French name of Kerouac’s ancestral region, Brittany, and his first name repeats the Saint Michael connotation of Mickey Martin’s name. On the first page Kerouac provides the alternate title “Les travaux de Michel Bretagne,” “The Labors of Michel Bretagne,” which suggests the main character’s spiritual tasks on earth. He also details the many jobs that Michel takes, so the word “travaux” is a double entendre that seriocomically proposes the equivalence of menial labor and earthly duties—it also resonates phonetically and graphically with the English trials. He dated the notebook in which he wrote this short novel “Winter–Spring 1951,” and the date he began it is February 1951: shortly after his letters to Le Maître and Dion-Lévesque, then, and just before the major aesthetic breakthrough of his career, the writing of the scroll manuscript of On the Road.10 It isn’t accidental that Kerouac made this breakthrough at the time of his most sustained efforts to write in his native language. He was strongly interested in understanding his relationship to French, and just as much to the English that he continued to experience as foreign. In La Nuit est ma femme, his poetics aims for a utopian linguistic space where the two meet. The French is nonstandard, as it mostly is elsewhere in his work; it also contrasts with the polished French he sometimes wrote in his journals several years earlier.11 Kerouac constructs it so as to duplicate the French he knew in Massachusetts (sometimes called “joual,” though the use of this term, designating the popular nonstandard French of the Montreal region, tends to efface the historical and local specificity of Franco-American Massachusetts): doing so signals the distance between this dialect and standard French, and hence emphasizes the former’s testimony to exile. His renditions also offer a model for the sounds, rhythms, and vernacular qualities of the English style he is aiming for. This French is fluent and readable, once one discerns the patterns of Kerouac’s departures from convention. The text contains a few nonstandard vocabulary words and usages: some of these are borrowed from English (according to custom at the time in both Québec and the United States), and most may be found in a dictionary of Québécois French.12 Kerouac varies spellings in order to



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reproduce sounds, developing a consistent phonetics that draws on both English and French convention; he moves the two languages toward each other so as to draw American English out of its institutionalized, assimilationist standards. One of his main grammatical irregularities is the use of the verb avoir (“to have”) as the sole auxiliary to form the composite past tense, whose function overlaps heavily with that of the preterite in English, at the expense of être (“to be”): the American word ain’t, which combines “am/are/is not” and “has/have not,” sometimes conveys this grammatical feature effectively. This substitution is common in some spoken Québécois French (for example, in the dialect properly called joual), and continued in use in those pockets of southern New England where French was still spoken until the 1970s or so.13 As did the people among whom he grew up, Kerouac assigns some words nonstandard genders, sometimes switching from one to the other. The language itself is integral to the story; and importantly, Kerouac shifts to first-person narration, acknowledging his effort to keep himself less hidden and creating a character closer to himself in his new fiction. Michel recounts his distance from his origins, his struggles for settlement, and the pain and sadness these cause him. He goes on the road, pursuing an itinerary occasioned by the necessity of leaving behind his place of origin and seeking a new place that proves elusive—but this trek offers him the chance to encounter the varied cultures of the United States. Kerouac draws heavily on autobiography for this writing; in all his works following The Town and the City he does so, but La Nuit est ma femme is a case in point for why the author should always be understood as engaging in fictionalizations. Although he has now withdrawn at least somewhat from narrative that functions as moral blueprint, he is still on moral quests, making points with his writing and not merely reporting.

Language in migration Kerouac begins the short novel with Michel’s sadness, which stems directly from his being a French Canadian born in New England, in exile from his homeland and with a shaky, divided relationship with his native language. The voice Kerouac aims for is that of a French-Canadian peasant, more tied to the earth than himself, who has, like himself, acquired an elite education. The simplicity and deliberate colloquialism of the French convey a nearness to this particular version of it and a distance from the more elaborate and grammatically regular official mother tongue of Québec and France. The sense of distance and alienation extends to Michel’s personal relations— he describes an inability to join in the communion of laughter, not only because nothing strikes him as funny but also because his sadness allows

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him no hypocrisy. In this relationship to French, his native language offers him the best expression of this sadness: it is the futile opportunity to renew his link with what he has lost. His anger and his dreams frequently take place in French because of his hope of overcoming frustration in a wishedfor return to the mother tongue and motherland, and he always cries in French because his relationship to it is marked by the sadness he lives in. The narrative is fragmentary and meandering, appropriately for presenting the fractured identity of this vagabond French Canadian (I follow Kerouac’s use of the term Canadien français rather than Franco-américain). Drawing mainly on autobiographical details, Kerouac ties the task of writing to the condition of exile, indicating that the English he has used in his work has only furthered his exile—it has kept the French language distant from him and hidden his French-Canadian self: J’ai rêvez trop longtemp que j’etait un grand écrivain. J’appri ça dans les livres. Y’avait un temp que j’pensais chaque mot que j’ecrivai etait immortelle. Ça c’est possible dans les jeunes. D’abords j’ai usé des grand mot “fancy,” des grosse formes, des “styles” qui avait rien a faire avec moi. I dreamed for too long that I was a great writer. I learned that in books. There was a time that I thought every word I wrote was immortal. That’s possible in young people. At first I used grand “fancy” words, big forms, “styles” that had nothing to do with me. Kerouac explains that this writing—it’s safe to assume that he’s appraising his work in The Town and the City—obscured the basic realities of FrenchCanadian culture. Striving for literary greatness in English, for immortality, deepened Michel’s sadness and sense of distance from his home. To express the everyday details of life, Kerouac/Michel writes simple, declarative, colloquial phrases in the French that is both intimate for these qualities and distant for its removal from standard French. This distance is precisely that of languages from their standard versions and from each other—exile takes place in language: J’ai jamais eu une langue a moi-même. Le Francais patoi j’usqua-six angts, et après ça l’Anglais des gas du coin. Et après ça—les grosses formes, les grands expressions de poète, philosophe, prophète. Avec toute ça aujourd’hui j’toute melangé dans ma gum. I’ve never had a language of my own. French patois till I was six, and after that English from the kids on the corner. And after that—big forms, a poet’s, philosopher’s, prophet’s grand expressions. With all that, now I’ve got it all mixed up in my noggin.



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A person’s removal from any one language by being caught between two, the one required in the country of exile such that the other must be given up, conveys a sense of exile. Kerouac presents his ambition to become a writer of note, adopting the language, rhetoric, and moral disposition by which his work might enter the literary canon, as a profound and perhaps the greatest part of his effort at assimilation. It is through this effort, he says, that he became distant from the French he knew. But through Michel he characterizes himself as no closer to metropolitan and literary American English than to the French patois that he had to leave behind, but whose importance he affirms by writing in it. Kerouac is announcing, in the tentative, experimental fashion of fictional narrative, that if in his writing he really will address and depict the FrancoAmerican story, if he will write a French-Canadian novel, he must renounce the ascendancy to the literary canon that an affirmation of assimilated Americanness would enable. The above-quoted passage directly continues the part of his letter to Le Maître in which he specifies the technical operation of his poetics, a refashioning of a language that is “not my own,” English, “to fit French images.”14 The condition of being between two languages is a “mixup,” he says, just as in La Nuit est ma femme Michel says it leaves everything “toute mélangé,” “all mixed up,” in his head. (This anticipates a widely quoted sentence from On the Road, which the 1957 version preserves intact from the scroll: “I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”)15 But in the letter he also discusses how he will bring this hidden, distant French into his writing in English: he effectively engages in translation so that French bends and alters English, transforming it into a language in which previously obscured realities may emerge. The problem is strikingly similar to the one Kafka stated with respect to his relationship to German, as Deleuze and Guattari paraphrase it in their definition of a minor literature: “the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing otherwise.”16 Kerouac, writing in response to the imperative of bringing Franco-American reality to light, is aware of English as the language in which he and his people have remained hidden, and of French as the hidden language that will hinder his people from entering dominant culture. Hence he makes, again in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, a “minor utilization”17 of the major language, moving away from syntactic and lexical convention in order to counter its exclusion of vital, complex segments of reality. With La Nuit est ma femme, Kerouac begins the parasyntactic reworkings of English that mark his subsequent writing. As Johnson points out, in the 1951 draft of On the Road and subsequent versions, Kerouac maintains “the ingenuous-sounding forthrightness of the Michel Bretagne voice as well as the overtones of its cadences and the tinge of melancholy that washes through it even at the moments when its energies seem highest” (390). The rhetoric by which he depicts the complex, hidden cultural

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variations of many parts of North America, a rhetoric that many readers have nonetheless found “as American as Apple pie,” Johnson notes, is integral to a voice “that had been born in French” (391). And the text of On the Road, an outcome of this rhetoric, retains traces of the French in which he conducted his experiments. In what has prompted many to dismiss the book as bad writing, on a regular basis he writes unidiomatic sentences, which with a little inspection turn out to be pushed by French syntax and vocabulary. For example, the expression “I figured to worry about that” (OTR 1957, 102), though one doesn’t say it in English, borrows from the French “Je me suis figuré,” which may be followed by an infinitive. Or, in Sal’s words to Mary Lou, “Wait until we be lovers in San Francisco” (132), the use of the subjunctive reflects French grammar: “Attends jusqu’à ce que nous soyons amants à San Francisco.” Or when an Okie woman declares her affection for Dean, “She said Dean reminded her of the husband gone” (215), the sentence imports the phrase “le mari parti.” Kerouac takes advantage of his linguistic position as an outsider to English, the speaker of a language removed from its metropolitan version by the quakes of civilization and empire. He brings the uncountable effects of these shocks to light through transformations of English. If he begins in “le Francais patoi,” the French-Canadian French that in 1941, at the age of nineteen, he describes as “one of the most languagey languages in the world,” full of “words of power,” “a huge language,”18 he is already working in a language that by its nature refuses fixed forms and also spawns expressions for the new realities that it encounters in migration. His literary experiments are a matter of bringing to the literature of American English this malleability and unending invention—properties of an everchanging, transterritorial vernacular, “the language of the tongue, and not of the pen”19 as he says. Rather than classifying this characterization as affirming what for five decades theory has termed “logocentrism,” one would do better to view it as a challenge to the integrity of standard written English. At no point does he yield the specific role he accords to writing: it continuously evades institutionalization by responding to the changes and discoveries of a spoken language that moves at a distance from the cultural metropoles. Pursuing this writing program after The Town and the City, he will keep moving away from the linguistic regularity that entails a moral stratification of language and reality. The experience of exile that Kerouac relates in La Nuit est ma femme involves a constant preoccupation with loss, which at its extreme becomes death, the ultimate transformation. As in The Town and the City, he presents the loss of language, territory, and culture as most intensely concentrated in the death of the father. Although the father in La Nuit est ma femme dies chronologically later than most of the story’s events, in the narrative sequence itself Kerouac places it earlier, so the travel that he recounts, the pursuit of unsettlement, occurs in its wake; he presents



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Michel’s itinerancy as part of a condition in which he foresaw the death of the father and hence as inevitable. The death marks the moment of the break with the old morality and the quest for the new, a movement in and acceptance of unsettlement.20 The main experiences of travel, the events that the narrator reports, entail encounters with the different cultures that make up America, the transformation from region to region. Another transformation is that of the narrator from Michel or Mike to Jack or Ti-Jean, the latter the Québécois diminutive of Jean, “Li’l Jean,” that Kerouac’s mother called him and that in many of his novels his narrator calls himself. Although this change may be easily explained by the rough draft status of the single manuscript of La Nuit est ma femme, and might be taken as confirmation that the text is thinly disguised autobiography, one should also regard it as, more interestingly, part of the constant shifting that the story relates and the unsettlement of identity that it depicts through both narrative event and narrative structure. After all, a principal aim of writing a novel as a single draft, the ideal of the spontaneous prose that Kerouac is on the brink of formulating, is to capture the unexpected vagaries and alterations of life, to remove them from the ordering that selective, morally inflected narrative might impose on them. The travel that the narrative follows and engages in is a transformation of the self into something other that takes place through the encounter with different cultural identities— this travel is in fact a recognition of the inevitability of such change, of the self’s lack of fixity. During Michel’s first departure from probationary admission into bourgeois American life, he leaves college and takes a bus south. He presents this break, and travel itself, as entirely coincident with a decision to become a writer (50). That is, the major transformation of Kerouac’s narrator occurs through his decision to wander and write, to discover through these activities the vital and hidden aspects of American culture.

The beginnings of the road As part of his preparation for On the Road, and as an engagement in writing his promised Franco-American novel, La Nuit est ma femme makes evident the close connections in Kerouac’s poetics between his unsettled Franco-American identity and his ancestral ties: the road is the uncertain way back to cultural origins as well as the inevitable path of exile, and writing is both depiction and extension of cultural vagabondage. In light of this manuscript, critics, scholars, and other commentators should simply stop regarding On the Road as a mere memoir or autobiographical novel representing a bohemian’s or drop-out’s or countercultural hero’s peregrinations. It is, rather, an exercise in a poetics of exile—the result of cultural

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displacement that becomes the quest for the many cultural displacements that constitute the United States. The road is both literal and figurative: it is the way to at least start gaining access to these unsettled settlements and to bring contact with them into writing; and it is the writing itself, which in its itinerancy maps the territory that it explores, anticipating the work of such critical geographers as Doreen Massey.21 Before Kerouac embarked on his first long hitchhiking trip in July 1947, the one he recounts toward the beginning of On the Road, he had already assigned in his writing a major symbolic significance to the road. In The Sea Is My Brother, which he wrote in 1943, the biggest transformation of the two main characters, Wesley Martin and Bill Everhart, in many ways opposites who converge, takes place on a hitchhiking trip between New York and Boston.22 Even earlier, for a college writing assignment in 1940, his first year at Columbia, Kerouac wrote a story called “Where the Road Begins.” On the surface a classic “my first experience at college” assignment (the typescript bears several instructor’s comments in pencil),23 the text nonetheless merits consideration for the remarkable way the eighteen-yearold Kerouac lays out his “philosophy of the road.” This conceptualization remains more or less intact through at least the publication of On the Road seventeen years later, and he continues to elaborate it with regard to identity, movement, and place until his last writings. In this paper he ties his writing practice to travel through an exercise of style, awkwardly but hardly without skill. His use of modifiers is liberal; frequently, as is the case a few years later in The Sea Is My Brother, they are grabbed at and poorly chosen; but often enough also, through such a compositional procedure, he strives for the passion and precision of description that mark all the works to appear in his lifetime, the prose that was a tenacious attempt at approaching and revealing reality. The paper’s narrative opens in the second person and moves briefly to the first, suggesting Kerouac’s interest in presenting someone who seems at once familiar and less familiar, close and somewhat distant—a persona who changes when he takes the road away from home, only to discover on returning that home has also changed. The story is only partly autobiographical: the main character has left home for college at eighteen, whereas at seventeen Kerouac went away to spend a year at the Horace Mann School in New York, paid for in connection with his football scholarship to Columbia as preparation to begin the university curriculum—so the text at least somewhat hides him. He refers to the persona as a “little madman,”24 both underscoring the boy’s youthful susceptibility and using the term “mad” that in his later work designates those who feel the need to reject culturally homogenizing morality. This boy discovers that, after the uncertainties of college in the city, his home will simply no longer offer the shelter of moral guidance. The latter is especially embodied in the father who greets him at the station, “a stout stone of integrity” (59), the rocklike



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fixity of the past and tradition, fast revealing themselves as irretrievable. The road functions as the conduit back home—but it also leads away from home. In its own movement in time, home can’t be home and perhaps never was, hence necessitating further travel: I hope, little madman, that you realize that the destination is really not a tape at the end of a straight-away running course, but that it is a tape on an oval that you must break over and over again as you race madly around. And whether you give up the race after circumventing the swarming oval once, or whether you continue through the marathon alleys of life—whichever you do, little madman, you shall always return to the place where the road began. (59) Even though it borders on cliché, the phrase “the marathon alleys of life,” the type of figure that is pretty much de rigueur in the genre of the freshman composition paper, suggests the lengthy but hidden routes that will later fascinate the author. The passage already states in so many words Kerouac’s notion of unending exile and shows traces of the poetics he assembled in order to articulate it.

Writing the road By the time Kerouac drafted the scroll of On the Road, April 2–22, 1951, he had long treated the road as the very affirmation of a life necessarily unsettled—a life that, provisionally seeking return to the rooted conditions of its distant origin, becomes vagabond in the world. Hence it discovers all manner of unsettling material and cultural differences, which nonetheless demand a morality reformed to accommodate transformation. And stemming directly from this metaphysical status of the road is writing: Kerouac will not only reproduce and convey the experience of the road but also engage with the movement of language, bring unsettlement into his vocabulary, his sentences, and the narratives they form. As such, his writing inevitably moves away from the homogeneity of dominant culture. The particular geography in which he begins conceiving the perpetual motion of exile is that of Québec, the French-speaking territory simultaneously receding from and returning to France, and that of Francophone New England, returning to and receding from both Québec and France. In the motion of exile, this geography extends to cover the cultural variety of the United States and other areas of North America, namely Canada and Mexico. As “Where the Road Begins” confirms, even as an adolescent Kerouac understood the road as closely connected to writing. This is also

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the context of his 1947 cross-country hitchhiking trip to meet Neal Cassady in Denver: the purpose of both the trip and the ensuing novel is to explore the cultural changes that one experiences in migrating across America and to reveal the sites of the component cultures in detail, the latter situated in the prose that travels on and conveys the road. Kerouac composed On the Road on a series of sheets of Japanese drawing paper varying in length from twelve to seventeen feet (three and a half to five meters) that he had found in the apartment of a friend, Bill Cannastra, who had recently died in a gruesome subway accident. He likely fed each sheet through the typewriter and subsequently taped them together to produce the 120-foot (36.5-meter) scroll.25 This procedure enabled him to write speedily (fueled by coffee, not benzedrine) as well as to visualize the convergence of his writing and the road. As he wrote to Cassady, “Went fast because road is fast…rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road.”26 In the novel, Kerouac compares this process of composition to the road, borrowing the image of the writing sheet to describe the motion of travel and implicitly comparing the car to a typewriter: “The magnificent car made the wind roar; it made the plains unfold like a roll of paper…” (234; the phrase is the same in the scroll, 330). The car becomes something like a new medium, the technology in which this cartography of America emerges.27 With regard to Kerouac’s claims that rewriting only does damage to writing, Helen Weaver reports that he once said, “Writing comes from God. Once you put it down it’s a sin to go back and change it!”28 His poetics of exile, which places existential importance on the road, necessitates quick composition: writing works in tandem with the simultaneous cultural migration and recovery that it depicts, and hence, as Kerouac writes in the opening statement of Visions of Cody, it is “like Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed.”29 Nonetheless, not only is it the case that the 1951 scroll manuscript of On the Road was part of a process that he had begun several years earlier, but also that the 1957 published version, on which so much scorn has been heaped for its ostensibly rapid composition, is the result of extensive rewriting. Contrary to legend, this rewriting didn’t merely involve alterations, mainly stylistic and tending toward bowdleristic, imposed on an unwilling author by Viking Press; rather, most of the changes between the first and last versions, which redirect the narrative in a number of key ways, were made at Kerouac’s initiative—albeit frequently in consultation with editors—and all with his knowledge (Gewirtz, 109–47). Reacting to the scroll that the author had just unrolled in his office in April 1951, Robert Giroux, the editor who had handled The Town and the City for Harcourt Brace, told him, “How the hell can the printer work from this?”30 In anger Kerouac replied, “The Holy Ghost wrote it,” following this meeting with a note that said “You have offended the Holy Ghost”

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(Johnson, 399–400). Kerouac was usually serious when he made such quasi-theological statements: he considered his method of composition, designed to reveal a complexly elusive America through participation in the movement of migrations, as tantamount to divine vision. However, soon after completing the scroll, he began retyping it on standard typing paper.31 By the fall he was changing details and adding episodes that, according to Johnson, “he would never have been able to successfully incorporate into the manuscript he’d completed in the spring because the new voice that had emerged in his writing was so rich and different in the way it sounded” (Johnson, 415–16). By early 1956, he had completed several different drafts (Gewirtz, 112–18). The process of rewriting eventually produced a whole new book, Visions of Cody, which he considered to be a further version of On the Road—to the point that when he was a guest on The Steve Allen Show in 1959, one of the passages he read was actually from the manuscript of Visions of Cody, a piece of which he had apparently taped inside his copy of the bestseller.32 Rather than solely or even primarily the result of an impulsive burst, On the Road is a work in continual progress during whose composition Kerouac reduced the importance of the distinction between writing and revision.33 This is the case for most of the prose he published following The Town and the City. The notion of writing “on the run,” then, has more to do with the fact that his writing is movement—that his manuscripts undergo regular alteration, as part of his refusal to separate and abstract them from the reality that they engage—than with some notion of simply dumping words. Writing quickly is certainly part of this process, but it is by no means the whole of spontaneous prose—I will return to this topic in the next chapter. Nonetheless, each of Kerouac’s published works took the shape in which it appeared mostly at his decision, even if he made the latter under deadline pressure or according to an editor’s counsel. Insofar as his writing methods question notions of steady authorial control over both text and subject matter, his work complicates notions of authorship and encounters the set of issues that criticism addressed more effectively forty or fifty years ago than it does now, in such classical treatments as Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?”34 Although at times Kerouac insisted on the integral autonomy of his role as a writer, the very process of rapid composition suggests an interest in removing the arrangement of prose from the author’s conscious dominion. His habit of writing manuscripts anew even after their acceptance for publication undermines the sanctity of the œuvre achevée or accomplished work. Nonetheless, because each of the books that appeared in his lifetime did so at a chosen moment of its composition, it’s justifiable to privilege the published version; but the continuity of each with other versions, notes, letters, journal entries, and so on demands that rigorous analysis at least partly consider each work’s extended network of texts and paratexts.

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Hence On the Road is primarily the 1957 published version; but barely in a secondary position are the 1951 scroll (published in 2007), the other drafts, and a host of additional documents. According to his account to Cassady, Kerouac began the manuscript as a story dealing with “you and me and the road…Plot, if any, is devoted to your development from young jailkid of early days to later (present) W. C. Fields saintliness.”35 (In Shakespearian fashion Kerouac often holds clownish and farcical figures to be those who most effectively reveal reality.) A consistent element of this mimetic development is the relationship of the main character to his father. In the scroll this character is named Neal Cassady, becoming in the second typescript (which Gewirtz dates to late 1955 [112]) Dean Pomeray, and finally, in the typescript completed in 1956 but probably begun as early as 1953 (which, following Gewirtz, I will call the “third,” in quotation marks), the basis of the 1957 publication, Dean Moriarty. The father, also named Neal Cassady/Dean Pomeray/Dean Moriarty, deteriorates from respected barber/tinsmith to bum riding the rails around the country, living on the street or in a skid row hotel when he’s not in jail. (Also in the second and “third” typescripts, Kerouac settles on the name Sal Paradise for his narrator.) A repeatedly stated motive for the travel the two undertake is to search for the father, to restore him to dignity, to recover the lost unity of family life. A little past the novel’s midpoint, when in a nighttime rain they’re discussing prior and upcoming travels, Dean says to Sal: “You know I recently wrote my old man in jail in Seattle—I got the first letter in years from him the other day.” “Did you?” “Yass, yass. He said he wants to see the ‘babby’ spelt with two b’s when he can get to Frisco. I found a thirteen-a-month coldwater pad on East Fortieth; if I can send him the money he’ll come and live in New York—if he gets here. I never told you much about my sister but you know I have a sweet little kid sister; I’d like to get her to come and live with me too.” (251) The ostensible purpose of embarking on the road, driving or riding in a car at high speed in order to experience the vastness of the country, is to reunite the family, dispersed across generations, to bring the father back to see his new grandchild. The effort even includes the sister, who was never a full participant. In the course of the novel—this is one of the points the narrative makes—the project proves futile, but it nonetheless leads to the exposure of the marvels of the landscapes and social realities of America. In rewriting the novel, Kerouac slightly alters this plot element, mainly to underscore the futility of the quest. The scroll and the 1957 version



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share fifteen different passages addressing Old Neal Cassady/Old Dean Moriarty36—apart from the ending of the novel, some of the last words of which affirm the irrevocable failure to find the father back. Unfortunately, since Lucien Carr’s dog ate the last few feet of the scroll, no one will ever know whether Kerouac wrote this ending in the scroll or added it in the first rewrite.37 In any case, his one addition regarding the search involves Dean’s wish to leave behind the provincialism of his father, who emblematizes the sedentariness of the home culture, the Okie farmers, not long out of their Depression-era migrant status but now geographically and culturally sedate. To a scene about halfway through the book in which Dean has taken charge of bargaining the price of a used car for the family with whom the two protagonists spend time, Kerouac adds the following declaration from Dean: “Oh these dumb dumb dumb Okies, they’ll never change, how com-pletely and how unbelievably dumb, the moment it comes time to act, this paralysis, scared, hysterical, nothing frightens em more than what they want—it’s my father my father my father all over again!” (216—emphasis in text). From early in the novel, Dean is the contrary of a frightened person: rather, his life is an affirmation of desire, “a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy” (7). His Okie heritage, that of a migrant peasantry that also craves the stability of the land, is part of what leads him to the road—he is unsettled in his quest for settlement, and settlement is always elusive, partly because his own unsettlement drives him away from Okie stagnation. In this case, Dean has presented the single mother of the Okie family a car at a reasonable price: but she’s more concerned about the money than the car, refusing the very instrument that makes going on the road possible. Dean can’t accept this kind of settlement, the immobility of his father. So in this addition to On the Road, the search for the father of its own nature becomes futile—the father, anchor of settlement, becomes the block to engaging in the motion of the quest. This addition simply underscores what is pretty apparent from the beginning, the failure of nostalgia for anchored living and anchored morality: the narrative repeatedly expresses the idea that continual movement, continual exploration of new and untested configurations of morality, are necessary to life—“the road is life” (212). And since the road is also writing, On the Road itself is a quest for a poetics that accommodates this geographic and moral motion—a poetics that refuses the stability of the moral fixity transmitted through the father. In this respect it is similar to The Town and the City, except that it starts by presupposing the absence of fixity with which Kerouac’s first novel ends. His attempt to write On the Road in three weeks, to reproduce the experience of speeding on the road away from a failed settlement and toward a new one that remains elusive, is a quest for a newly configured poetics. This poetics also eludes him—as is evident in the rewrites, which further emphasize the absence of the father and moral fixity. In its peregrinations the narrative leads to a refusal of

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the limits imposed by moral and aesthetic sedentariness, opening itself to the unknown and the untried, to geographic, moral, epistemological, and aesthetic movement that is never content to settle for a configuration of limits. On a regular basis, the narrative presents travel that goes to the limits of dominant white culture in America, by both exposing ethnic and cultural heterogeneity within the United States and staging a confrontation between the dominant culture and one that is radically other. As part of its diminution of moral and aesthetic structure, the narrative itself travels away from epistemological complacency—like The Town and the City, it stages the failure of a morality and of an aesthetic based on heritage, except that, again, it begins with this failure and pursues its consequences rather than tragically arriving there only at the end.

To and from Franco-American identity The geographic, moral, and narrative explorations that Kerouac engages in while writing and rewriting On the Road are also those which characterize his relationship to his French-Canadian background, as evidenced in The Town and the City, his letter to Le Maître, and La Nuit est ma femme. Indeed, explicitly revisiting this relationship turns out to have been an integral part of his rewrites of On the Road. While working on the novel, Kerouac wrote another text in French: a notebook dated December 16, 1952, contains more than thirty pages of a manuscript called Sur le chemin, “On the Road” in French. But instead of the more obvious phrase Sur la route, which has been the standard title of the novel’s translation since its publication by Éditions Gallimard in 1960, Kerouac uses the word chemin, which first occurred somewhat earlier in French (in the eleventh century) than route (in the twelfth) and signals a more out-of-the-way thoroughfare.38 The choice of the older word reflects Kerouac’s pretty standard, mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century view of Québécois French, that it is closely related to the medieval version of the language, more venerable than what is spoken in France. In addition, calling the road a chemin suggests, according to the word’s definition, that it meanders more than a route, allowing for extensive digression as well as experience of the less recognized places. Tied to this reach to the past is the phrase le chemin de la croix, “the Way of the Cross,” underscoring the spiritual quest that permeates Kerouac’s vocation as a writer. In light of all his preoccupations, it’s no surprise that his title also alludes, through the Italian cammin, a cognate of chemin, to the first line of Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/In the Middle of the journey of our life.”39 Of course, the name of the Italian-American Sal Paradise is another nod to Dante.



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Sur le chemin tells a story quite different from that of On the Road, involving the convergence of two major and more or less opposing currents of Kerouac’s life: its central event is the 1935 meeting in New York City between the French-Canadian Leo Duluoz, who drives from Boston, and Dean Pomeray, a drunk who drives from Denver.40 Duluoz is the family name Kerouac uses in most of his novels to designate his main character/ alter ego Jack or Jean Duluoz; he borrows his own father’s first name, Leo, for the father of this family; his use of “Dean Pomeray” for the two characters based on Neal Cassady, father and son, is in keeping with other versions of On the Road. On their respective trips, Duluoz is accompanied by his thirteen-year-old son Ti Jean and Pomeray by his nine-year-old boy Dean. In the Bowery, the Pomerays are greeted by Old Bull Balloon, who has found them a place to live, for which Leo will provide the keys on his arrival. There is a suggestion that the Pomerays will at least for a time share living space with the elder and younger Duluoz, Dean and Jean like brothers or at least cousins—something Kerouac and Cassady didn’t do as children, as they didn’t meet until they were in their twenties, after Leo Kerouac had died. Old Bull Balloon is a barely disguised rendition of William Burroughs (in other writings Kerouac uses the same name for the character based on Burroughs). Kerouac writes this text in a French similar to that of La Nuit est ma femme, colloquially and with off grammar and spelling; he structures sentences more according to English grammar and uses more English words, especially when the father, Leo, speaks. Old Bull Balloon, it turns out, is a French Canadian from Québec, an older relative of Leo—in his fiction Kerouac makes family connections among friends and fellow writers, staging a wish for the return of lost fathers. Also by creating an extended French-Canadian family, which through their living situation includes the Pomerays, Kerouac extends the migration of the French Canadians from their provisional settlement in New England out to other parts of the country. As per his pattern, the scattering occurs for the purpose of reintegration, but reintegration nonetheless becomes further removal from the settlement of the homeland. Leo and Ti Jean’s car trip takes them away from their home in Massachusetts, across Connecticut, and to New York, the place where Kerouac, when he moved there for his year of prep school before college at Columbia, advanced his discovery of the America that fascinated him. Leo and Ti Jean are first going to meet relatives in Chinatown, a part of New York connoting the ethnic and cultural heterogeneity that drew Kerouac first to the city and later to many parts of the country. In presenting the Duluoz-Pomeray meeting, Sur le chemin effectively repeats and elaborates the opening event of On the Road, in the scroll manuscript “I first met met Neal” (109). (The repetition is Kerouac’s: Howard Cunnell wisely chose to preserve it, because “it beautifully suggests the sound of a car misfiring before starting up for a long journey” [102],

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as well as, I’d add, the multiple ways that Kerouac ultimately presents and fictionalizes his meeting and relationship with Cassady. In the 1957 version the phrase reads “I first met Dean.”) In the case of both On the Road and Sur le chemin, this is the first encounter between Kerouac’s narrator and the character who guides him in the discovery of America. Sur le chemin, then, presents a departure from French-Canadian ancestry—the father initiates it, moving outside the rootedness he usually embodies for Kerouac, but at the same time continuing the displacement inherent in his identity. In the meeting with the older Dean Pomeray, the fathers will affirm the vagabond character of the America they live in, which favors transregional and transethnic contact—this is the America that Cassady and Burroughs represent to Kerouac, an expanse that at least initially appears inexhaustible. The Pomerays, migrants like the Duluozes, take the latter out of the settlement that remains to them in their New England communities by offering them this expanse: “Imagine tué drivez toutes ce chemin la de Denver a NY,” disa Leo a son fils, “ses des gran distances a travers les espaces profondes de la terre, sa, c’est pas comme nos petit voyage a Vermont la dans Nouvelle Angleterre.” “Imagine you drove all that road from Denver to NY,” said Leo to his son, “those are great distances across the deep spaces of the earth, and that’s not like our little trips to Vermont up there in New England.” Like On the Road, Sur le chemin leads its main characters from the settlement of a certain ethnic and cultural heritage, a delimited space, to the unfathomable openness in which heritage is lost. But through this openness, which also affects consciousness and cognition, unanticipated discoveries become possible. Kerouac himself regarded Sur le chemin as a vital step in rewriting the manuscript of On the Road:41 in a January 10, 1953, letter to Neal and Carolyn Cassady, after saying that he wrote the novel in five days in Mexico, he states, “It’s the solution to the ‘On the Road’ plots all of em.”42 Although he doesn’t elaborate on this point, given the story elements that he provides to Neal—“a novel about me and you when we was kids in 1935 meeting in Chinatown with Uncle Bill Balloon, your father and my father and some sexy blondes in a bedroom with a French Canadian rake and an old Model T”43—it would seem that the fathers are important, as is the security of the past before the war. The Ford Model T that the older Dean Pomeray drives, a car produced between 1909 and 1927 (Leo Duluoz drives a 1934 Plymouth), belongs to this nostalgic past. That the young boys Jean and Dean end up with “sexy blondes” suggests that, in the cultural mix of New York, they are reassured by the motherly flesh of these



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grown-up women and at the same time brought out of settled childhood. Sur le chemin presents the fathers as cultural anchors who also lead the boys away from the cultural past, toward each other, toward the sexualized masculine bonding from which they will derive the strength to go on the road themselves. In On the Road, besides somewhat amplifying the plot element of the search for the father, Kerouac adds the following passage concerning the relationship between Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty: “in spite of our differences in character, he reminded me of some long-lost brother; the sight of his suffering bony face with the long sideburns and his straining muscular sweating neck made me remember my boyhood in those dye-dumps and swim-holes and riversides of Paterson and Passaic” (7). Kerouac emphasizes the fraternal aspect of the relationship between the two men, a bond with pronounced corporeal, even carnal dimensions that recalls the stability of childhood in the very person who will lead Sal away from settlement.

The strange American paradise In addition to Sur le chemin and La Nuit est ma femme, another manuscript in the Berg Collection, five pages that Kerouac titled “On The Road, écrit en Francais,” is dated January 19, 1951—hence it is the first of his efforts to write a French-Canadian novel, which he undertook just after his letter to Dion-Lévesque and several months before writing the On the Road scroll. The story it tells, however brief, makes it evident that he was conceiving On the Road as the sequel to The Town and the City: these pages continue the saga of three of the Martin boys, Peter, Joe, and Mickey, who have become full-fledged French Canadians and speak Kerouac’s Massachusetts French.44 All three of the French texts testify that Kerouac at least started to make good on his declarations about writing a French-Canadian novel, and that doing so was of great importance to the book in which he mapped the America he discovered in his wanderings—wanderings he presents as integral to the French-Canadian condition. His statement to Le Maître regarding his lack of proficiency in French, which these manuscripts belie, underscores the sense of both geographic and linguistic exile that he brings to all his writings.45 In composing the French texts, Kerouac was on the road to On the Road, traveling between French and English, between Québec and the United States, not at home on either side of these pairs. The place he tells Le Maître he wishes to return to writing about, FrancoAmerican New England, is a home in exile, an intercultural zone closely connected to what Mary Louise Pratt has termed a “contact zone,” one of the “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of domination and

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subordination—such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today.”46 In On the Road, Kerouac maps the broad contours of the United States as a series of contact zones, of mixes and clashes of unruly cultures that through various tactics strive to elude domination and homogenization. When he writes to Le Maître that “the reason I handle English words so easily is because it is not my own language” (229), signaling how he is becoming a writer in English by a path resistant to aspects of assimilation, he points to exactly this character of specific cultures in the broader United States. His literary experiments are a nomadic voyage into English, an alteration of it into something foreign of which its ideologically conditioned nativism defers recognition. Rather than indicating his transformation into a native English speaker in uniform American culture, these experiments instead mark him as a vessel carrying foreign elements into this language and culture in order to underscore the foreignness that the latter hide. From his perspective on the mixed nature of cultures, he brings his understanding of the importance of relinquishing the roots, the fathers, the ancestors, the integrity of the home culture, since such relinquishment is precisely what occasions the vitality of wandering. The mea culpa47 of his letter to Le Maître, involving a longing to recover the origins that Franco-American survivance so vigorously promoted, is something to which he regularly returns in his work, usually discovering that the origins are no longer there to be embraced and hence that further wandering is necessary. His awareness of the tension between trying to recover and departing from an integral notion of origins stands out in a consideration of a few of the changes he made between the scroll and the published versions of On the Road. The first of these is the opening sentence, which in the scroll reads as follows: “I first met met Neal not long after my father died” (scroll, 109). These words amount to a précis of the end of The Town and the City, in which the death of the father is the occasion for wandering, since in the new novel Cassady embodies the itinerancy of America: in writing “I” as his first word, Kerouac affirms the shift to characters closer to himself— closer to a self that emerges in the wake of the death of the father, in a narrative about absent fathers. And this insistence on such a self is even more pronounced when Kerouac rewrites the manuscript, taking more distance from the father by omitting him altogether: “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up” (OTR 1957, 1). By replacing the death of the father with the separation from the wife, Kerouac attests to the lack of dependency of the present-day discovery on a relationship with fathers; he instead characterizes wandering and the masculine bond it entails as the function of an end to a conventional household. In close connection with Dean, the wandering self takes shape, as the first-person narrative signals, especially since its first word is “I.” Kerouac replaces the configuration of culture as a transmission of past heritage through the fathers with one



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entailing dissemination through broader social relations—his vagabondage is precisely anti-Oedipal in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, as they recognize in his work while insisting on its limitations.48 In extending the migration of his people by making it an American itinerancy, as well as narrating in the first person in recognition of the autonomy of the self, Kerouac embraces rather than laments the deracination that enables the festive multiculturalism of America. A second notable change is that of the narrator’s name from Jack Kerouac to Sal Paradise. Although this emendation underscores the fictional nature of the main character (Sal is a translation of Jack, in the word’s several senses), despite the first-person narration Kerouac continues to disguise his French-Canadianness. But he does so only partially, revealing the heterogeneous composition of U.S. culture that is emerging as the lesson of his relationship to his community. The character is clearly identified as Italian-American: Sal’s aunt speaks to him in Italian (107), in a passage only slightly changed from the scroll in which Jack’s mother speaks to him in French (211) (though in both versions Kerouac assimilates foreignness by providing the aunt’s/mother’s words only in English). Sal’s full name as provided in this passage, Salvatore (“Savior” in Italian), is a transparent affirmation of the messianic qualities Kerouac believes that great writers have; it also confirms the road as a version of the Way of the Cross. The name Salvatore Paradiso restates Kerouac’s declaration of the beatitude of his generation. But along with Italianness, he sneaks in a little FrenchCanadianness: the last name isn’t Paradiso but Paradise—Englishized while at the same time approaching the French Paradis, a common name in Québec,49 also regularly occurring in the Franco-American areas of New England, where many have anglicized it as Paradise. Johnson proposes an additional source for the choice of the surname Paradise: François Paradis, one of the main characters in Louis Hémon’s novel Maria Chapdelaine, internationally one of the most widely read works of Québécois literature of the twentieth century. Although Hémon was from a prominent French literary family, he lived as an adventurer in the Québec wilderness, writing the novel in installments. It first appeared as a serial in the Paris daily Le Temps in early 1914, in a single volume in Paris in 1916,50 and again in 1921, simultaneously in Paris, New York, Montreal, and Toronto in both French and English translation,51 becoming an international bestseller. It would have, as Johnson points out, been known universally in the Franco-American communities of New England, certainly by newspaperman and avid reader Leo Kerouac (18), especially since it depicts the trying and devout life of the peasantry north of Québec City that many hailed from. François Paradis (“who reminds me of Jack,” writes Johnson, recalling their two-year relationship in the late 1950s [17])—is a nonconformist among these peasants, preferring the nomadic life of a coureur de bois, an independent tradesman of the forest; he even

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meets his death on the road, in a snowstorm that makes him lose his way in the woods. If Kerouac didn’t know the novel directly, it’s barely conceivable that he was unfamiliar with its 1934 film adaptation by Julien Duvivier, one of the most prominent French directors of the 1930s, in general release in the United States in September 1935: François Paradis is played by Jean Gabin,52 an actor of antihero roles with whom, according to Gerald Nicosia, Kerouac identified and whose movies he made a point of seeing.53 Although firmly establishing Kerouac’s sources is of limited interest for a critical understanding of On the Road, this one suggests that Sal Paradise contains far more of the author’s Québécois peasant background and the yearning for vagabondage he derives from it than has been previously understood, and that he’s making a quiet tie with the French culture that remained a major source of identity-bolstering for Québécois on both sides of the border in the first half of the twentieth century. Because Kerouac tended to hear things simultaneously in English and French, as in the case of beat and the French béat,54 “blissful,” it’s easy to discern in his narrator’s name sale paradis, “dirty paradise.”55 Kerouac/Sal repeats this notion with the words “the ragged promised land, the fantastic end of America” (83) with which he describes Hollywood.56 This double entendre, signaling the utopian savior who’s also dirty, extends that of beat/ béat, according to which the blessed are precisely the downtrodden. It also elaborates and extends the connotations of the phrase reportedly at the origin of the name Sal Paradise, “sad paradise,” words that Kerouac misread in Ginsberg’s manuscript of the 1947 chapbook Denver Doldrums.57 The dirty paradise is also the one greeting immigrants who might have inflated hopes for their voyage to the United States. Through the cartography he draws in composing On the Road, as a scroll that figures and also becomes a road, Kerouac aims to redeem this unfortunate paradise. Moreover, the very notion of a beaten-down, wandering savior draws on the Québécois narrative of the difficult migration to New England as a mission directed by God for the purpose of bringing the authentic, pre-Revolutionary, medieval Catholic faith to those south of the border who have fallen prey to material interests. In this understanding, the French-Canadian colony, “abandoned by its mother, conquered, invaded by foreign elements, submitted to all the regimes that were going to absorb it,” on the road to New England became the “messenger of France and God!”58 Of course, Kerouac alters this notion considerably: his religious thinking is imaginatively syncretic, removed from and critical of absolutist Catholicism, but in this Québécois source one may fully discern a version of the idea of the abused and beaten wanderer who actualizes the spread of holiness and beatitude. Kerouac’s own movement away from Québec transforms the mission he is on, secularizing it and undoing the hierarchy of its authority. Kerouac brings these notions of cultural discovery through expansive wandering to the narrative of On the Road, which turns out to be a search



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for America around borders between regions, such as Mexico and the United States or different geographic sectors of the latter. One of the first sites of such discovery is Des Moines, a place called “monks” in French, a station of the way, where on awakening in a hotel room Sal has “the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was,” a rebirth as “a ghost” with “a haunted life”—haunted by the past of vanishing cultures as he crosses this regional boundary on “the dividing line between the East of my past and the West of my future” (15).59 Transitions often take place near rivers such as the Hudson, the Mississippi, or the Rio Grande; in multiethnic, multilingual spaces, including the African-American section of Denver, the French Quarter of New Orleans, Mexican communities in California; in shadowy underworlds and energetic jazz venues. They entail the mixing of immigrant and other culturally distinct communities; they sometimes show signs of the U.S. legacy of slavery and of the many migrations that have traversed the country, leaving cultural and linguistic traces. In “a little Frisco nightclub,” Slim Gaillard, “a tall thin Negro with big sad eyes,” “grabs the bongos and plays tremendous rapid Cuban beats and beating bongos yells crazy things in Spanish, in Arabic, in Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, in every language he knows, and he knows innumerable languages” (176–7). The notion of “beat” becomes one of nomadism, a drumbeat motion60 feeding ecstasy and traversing the limitations imposed by sedentary, stratified culture. In these zones, few obvious signs of Kerouac’s Québécois identity remain: in a way, then, he continues to hide himself, but at the same time the distance he takes from his origins attests to the degree to which On the Road is a result of his poetics of exile, an attempt to bring his writing practices to bear on an encompassing vision of the United States that doesn’t take root in any one region or group. In the picture of the country that he paints, there emerges a cartography of contact zones that take shape through movements of migration and along the roads passing through them. These movements undermine distinctions between zones and instead offer large spaces of heterogeneous culture. The motion of writing that materializes as the roll of paper manifests itself on the level of the sentence: as he already began to do in The Town and the City, he ties together disparate geographic zones through a cartographic syntax that conveys their contact, interaction, and mutual permeation. The following is only slightly changed from its initial composition in the scroll: Cheyenne again, in the afternoon this time, and then west over the range; crossing the Divide at midnight at Creston, arriving at Salt Lake City at dawn—a city of sprinklers, the least likely place for Dean to have been born; then out to Nevada in the hot sun, Reno by nightfall, its twinkling Chinese streets; then up the Sierra Nevada, pines, stars, mountain lodges signifying Frisco romances.… (60; corresponding passage in the scroll, 159–60)

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The words convey both movement and locale. Through brief descriptive phrases the text emphasizes the differences between these places; through syntactic juxtaposition, it runs them into each other, presenting the trajectory through them as a series of related contact zones.61

American idyll In Part One, the end of the road, so to speak—which is only the beginning of its next segment—is the Chicano community of California’s Central Valley. In this section Sal recounts his passionate yet mundane relationship with Terry, a Chicana woman he first meets on a bus leaving Bakersfield for Los Angeles and then with whom he spends fifteen days. Although many have accused Kerouac of exoticizing marginalized populations in On the Road, of writing the dreams of a white boy out slumming, a more complicated strategy is at work: the ethnic and racial clichés that he is famous for placing in his descriptions are frequently rhetorical setups preceding a harsher look at reality. As Tim Hunt points out, Kerouac created his narrator as a character with limited understanding in order to throw into relief the discoveries he makes, noting that the name Sal Paradise “calls attention to a Candide-like nature.”62 Despite perennial perceptions that the narrative voice in Kerouac’s writing is an authentic one and hence a transparent representation of the author, well before he wrote the scroll he chose a voice distant from his own precisely for the purpose of examination: in a journal entry of March 25, 1949, he writes of one of the narrators that he had experimented with (whose name he would subsequently use in The Dharma Bums), “No more Ray Smith, except in the person of the narrator—the hero’s Panza, the hero’s Boswell, the hero’s Pip—who tells the story with ravenous absorption + with great beauty (naturellement)” (Windblown, 409). Even his use of the word naturellement, in his “natural” language, is ironic because of its distance from English expression. The following passage is probably Kerouac’s most audacious use in On the Road of the strategy of the naïve narrator who sees the world in clichés that are quickly disrupted—and it has also been the occasion of most of the accusations. Sal’s wide-eyed enthusiasm is at its most patent here, directed toward workaday tasks that those engaging in them no doubt find quite unpleasant: “We bent down and started picking cotton. It was beautiful. Across the field were the tents, and beyond them the sere brown cottonfields that stretched out of sight to the brown arroyo foothills and then the snow-capped Sierras in the blue morning air. This was so much better than washing dishes on South Main Street” (96). The rest of the paragraph details the technicalities of cotton picking, as well as the resulting bloody hands and sore back. Still, Sal pushes against this reality by romantically



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rejoining to his own empirical observation, “But it was beautiful kneeling and hiding in that earth” (96). He describes the beauty of assuming a reverent posture amid these rough labor conditions—here and in many other places he wavers between recognizing the harshness of reality and retreating from it in a romantic, downright spiritual dream. This narrative logic is one of Kerouac’s approaches to the idea of a sale paradis—dirty places become paradise through the utopian and beatific act of dreaming, the dream taking place in the prose that links itself to the cartography of motion through the country. Rachel Ligairi sums up the criticism, which goes back to shortly after the novel’s publication, of Kerouac’s use of racial cliché in On the Road: “[H]is stereotypical idealization of people of color elides the hardship associated with minority life in pre-Civil Rights America and perhaps even reenacts colonial patterns of paternalism.”63 In the cotton-picking scene, there is indeed an elision of hardship, but it’s incomplete. The episode continues by somewhat surprisingly (in the dreamy context) signaling racial antagonism: Sal speaks of how the Okies, lower-class, or more properly peasant-class whites, migrant workers themselves, the more enfranchised Caucasian counterparts of the Mexicans with whom things seem otherwise peaceful, “went mad in the roadhouse and tied a man to a tree and beat him to a pulp with sticks” (97). Without stating the color of the victim, Sal indicates that the Mexicans have reason to be afraid, and that he himself “carried a big stick with me in the tent in case they got the idea that we Mexicans were fouling up their trailer camp” (98). The phrase “we Mexicans” is striking, since it comes at the moment when Sal underscores the antagonism: if he “becomes Mexican” by virtue of working among Mexicans and loving a Mexican woman, he also does so by virtue of finding himself on one side of a looming racial conflict. He explains, “They [the Okies] thought I was Mexican, of course; and in a way I am” (98). These words are part of both Sal’s and Kerouac’s negotiation of identity: as someone of ostensibly more southern European origin, Sal is probably somewhat darker than Caucasians of northern European descent; he is keenly aware of being marked as Mexican by the white men, an object of their violence, the insecure whiteness of his “race” notwithstanding. Kerouac has Sal say that he is Mexican “in a way”: neither he nor Sal takes the latter to be literally Mexican, with all the hardships it would entail in predominantly white U.S. society, but rather as someone transported or translated to Mexican status. “In a way” also means “on a road,” so this transformation occurs on the way that Kerouac has marked as spiritual: being Mexican “in a way” is participating in the movement of both writing and cultural shifting through contact zones, a spiritual matter that Kerouac’s notion of the road enacts. Although the road is also both Sal’s and Kerouac’s “way out” of the brutal realities of living as a member of a minority underclass in the United States of the postwar, pre-Civil Rights

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era, the path to disengagement, it is also the “way in” to establishing at least some contact between white and non-white sectors of society, a secularized communion. Kerouac’s writing hence becomes a way of opening literary discourse to the apprehension of nondominant social realities. The gravity of the phrase is suggested by its history in the manuscripts: in the scroll he simply writes, “and I am.” The phrase “in a way” doesn’t appear until the “third” typescript: in the second typescript he types and then later strikes the words “and I am”; in the “third” he also types them, and then finally he or an editor pencils “in a way” among the final revisions.64 Whatever Kerouac was thinking as he wrestled with the phrase (a speculative matter of almost no interest to criticism), the evidence shows the labor of deliberation concerning the way that Sal Paradise is to be Mexican. Here Kerouac takes recourse to his own ethnic, cultural, and religious background, effectively rendering Sal as a translated version of himself, and any serious appreciation of this part of On the Road must take account of this background: Kerouac’s French-Canadian community had not long before been mainly composed of migrant workers in a border zone; many of them, including his parents, came from peasant families in a culture that retained aspects of the old seigneurial system, in the late nineteenth century only recently reformed.65 Especially given the discrimination the French Canadians faced from an Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority, both in Canada and the United States, Kerouac’s relationship to the Mexican farmworkers of California is one of entirely justified, if necessarily limited, sympathy and empathy. When Kerouac writes in his letter to Le Maître about French Canadians’ ease of assimilation “because they look Anglo-Saxon, when the Jews, the Italians, the others cannot” (229), he reveals an awareness of his whiteness that stems from knowing how close his people are to not being white, of the degree to which whiteness is a mask. Although skin color has made racial assimilation easier, as a French Canadian Kerouac remains, like the Italians and the Jews, off-white.66 The off-whiteness that Kerouac explores in much of his writing confronts the limitations and exclusivity of the experience of whiteness.67

American dreams It is nonetheless understandable that many critics have been troubled by Kerouac’s invocation of racial cliché in On the Road. In the scene among California farmworkers, Kerouac dips into plantation fantasy by depicting African-Americans who “picked cotton with the same God-blessed patience their grandfathers had practiced in ante-bellum Alabama” (96). What patience could slaves in the antebellum South have had, other than that required by the protracted wait for freedom, which Sal’s idyllic image



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scarcely seems ready to grant? The importance of this sentence is suggested by the fact that it persists with only the slightest modification through all three major drafts of the novel (scroll, 197; OTR2, 91; OTR3, 102). It is part of Kerouac’s fundamentally realist technique of deploying dreamlike clichés in order to bump them against reality, hence revealing their limits and throwing the entire dream-world into relief. However, in this particular case, Kerouac’s main accomplishment is to bulk up Sal, the dreamy, Candide-like naïf, who here comes off as much too youthful. The whole cotton-picking scene becomes Sal’s occasion to dream, futilely, of becoming the Great White Father: “I looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved. No one was paying attention to me up there” (97). Sal’s dream is impregnated with his own limitations, with his lack of means to change the harsh conditions of the lives of migrant farmworkers that he has now partially experienced—but here, he goes no further. Yet in the long run, it is through such experiences, even as Sal mixes them in his account with fantasy, that he becomes more aware of the limitations of his own access to whiteness, and more generally of the restrictions that whiteness places on access to its privileges and the price it demands for enjoying them. Kerouac continually takes Sal deep into the utopian dream of a society in which such exclusions and antagonisms may be overcome, while at the same time leaving him with the knowledge that in U.S. society these present constant and usually brutal obstacles. Sal’s disposition is best described as one of racial uncertainty, a lack of settlement in the whiteness he knows he largely belongs to, an integral part of the cultural uncertainty that Kerouac’s work readily explores. In another passage that has attracted a great deal of critical attention, Kerouac places Sal in the African-American quarter of Denver. This city is one of the major stops on the traversals of the country that On the Road presents, a site of the fleeting settlement of the distinctly off-white counterculture of which Sal is becoming a part—as he says earlier in the novel, “a new beat generation that I was slowly joining” (54). At the opening of Part Three, Kerouac introduces this passage through a repetition of the Great White Father fantasy. This notably occurs in the American heartland, ostensibly as far as possible from border regions and hence contact zones—only to give way to the contact zones and cultural permeations that reveal themselves as the heart of America: “In the spring of 1949 I had a few dollars saved from my GI education checks and I went to Denver, thinking of settling down there. I saw myself in Middle America, a patriarch” (179). Patent is the clash between the reality of having nothing to live on but government payments for military service, a benefit whose purpose is to broaden social and economic enfranchisement for those who might not otherwise have it, and leaping into the role of patrician. That this recourse to fatherhood is part of an unreal dream is underscored by the recurrence of the moral chord of the narrative, the search

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for the father, which directly introduces Sal’s walk through the AfricanAmerican neighborhood: At dusk I walked. I felt like a speck on the surface of the sad red earth. I passed the Windsor Hotel, where Dean Moriarty had lived with his father in the depression thirties, and as of yore I looked everywhere for the sad and fabled tinsmith of my mind. Either you find someone who looks like your father in places like Montana or you look for a friend’s father where he is no more. (179) Sal characterizes the search as the path to the plenitude of identity, on which he will walk his way out of speck status, but at the same time it is a fleeting, unfulfillable fantasy, just like that of the Great White Father. Old Dean Moriarty, who allegorically and through resemblance stands in for other fathers, is “sad and fabled,” already the legend of a lost hero, not to be found here or anywhere else—Sal freely admits that the quest will never reach its end, and hence that what matters most is the unexpected encounters one has on the way, on the road, those allowed by an evasion of the very structures of paternal transmission. This is where Kerouac, in the second and “third” typescripts of the scroll, adds the controversial passage (OTR2, 183; OTR3, 201). Its status as revision (he adapts a journal entry from August 30, 1949—Windblown, 215) suggests that it offers an enhancement of the moral ordering of the narrative, the story of departing from the paternal system, the movement out of the enclosure of the family into the realm of the social, and hence also into the questioning of the social hierarchy that in the United States is heavily governed by race: At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. I stopped at a little shack where a man sold hot red chili in paper containers; I bought some and ate it, strolling in the dark mysterious streets. I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a “white man” disillusioned. All my life I’d had white ambitions; that was why I’d abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley. I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there, occasionally the dusky knee of some mysterious sensual gal; and dark faces of the men behind rose arbors. Little children sat like sages in ancient rocking chairs. A gang of colored women came by, and one of the young ones detached herself from motherlike elders and came to me fast—“Hello



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Joe”—and suddenly saw it wasn’t Joe, and ran back, blushing. I wish I were Joe. I was only myself, Sal Paradise, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America. (180) This passage is an intricate mix of the romanticization of distinctly racialized others and the positive recognition of these others’ ability to stand outside the rarefication of strictly hierarchized white society. Kerouac’s reliance on the primitivist cliché of “happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes” allows it to collide with the realism that emerges in the details of the description. The passage is thus also a recognition of the limits of whiteness, which it illustrates through the tenuousness of the cliché and the latter’s lack of power to contain what it ostensibly refers to. The “white ambitions” of which Kerouac/Sal speaks, the social, economic, and cultural ascendancy that much of his life has been about, is also the acceptance of these limits and even the renunciation of more than a glimpse of the fulfillments that might thrive beyond them. The reactions from critics to this passage have been surprisingly varied. In a widely cited essay from 1961 on Norman Mailer and hipster appropriations of African-American culture, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” James Baldwin quotes it as a case in point. Mocking Kerouac’s frequent use of mad to describe the social disposition of his generation, Baldwin says of the passage, “Now, this is absolute nonsense, of course, objectively considered, and offensive nonsense at that: I would hate to be in Kerouac’s shoes if he should be mad enough to read this aloud from the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theater.”68 Mainly directing his text against Norman Mailer, whom he otherwise admires, for writing the hipster wannabe manifesto “The White Negro,” Baldwin chides his friend for promoting “so antique a vision of the blacks” (296). In his own piece (whose title notably comes from an old designator of off-white ethnic groups), Mailer goes so far as to speak of the necessary prevalence of “psychopathy” in “the Negro,”69 stemming from the need, in the face of violent social repression, for black men to simply take the objects of their (especially sexual) desire. Mailer presents such ostensibly “Negro” behavior as a model for the white hipster dissatisfied with the sterility of his society (the author is almost exclusively interested in male desire). Baldwin is hardest on Mailer for wanting to ingratiate himself with “so many people inferior to himself, i.e., Kerouac” (296). Nonetheless, Baldwin follows his low-key wish for violence against Kerouac with slight sympathy: “And yet there is real pain in [the passage], real loss, however thin; and it is thin, like soup too long diluted; thin because it does not refer to reality, but to a dream” (298—emphasis in text). Baldwin doesn’t see Kerouac’s use of a utopian dream image as anything but the feeble affirmation of the

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limitations of whiteness—the image of the sensual, sexual, and otherwise pleasurable energy of black society, for Baldwin, is nothing but a white cliché, and he has scant patience for Kerouac’s poetic use of it. Indeed, he has no interest in Beat poetics, summarizing all of it as “their pablumclogged cries of Kicks! and Holy!” (296) In another essay, in the Beats that he criticizes Mailer for admiring, Baldwin finds only a superficial parasitism of privilege, a collection of “uptight, middle-class white people, imitating poverty.”70 This is, of course, with regard to Kerouac and several other Beat writers, such as Diane di Prima and Gregory Corso, a mischaracterization—an unfortunate one, especially since Baldwin, among the most insightful and incisive of twentieth-century writers on race, is attentive to the processes by which many non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants to the United States were admitted into whiteness. In the introduction to the 1985 collection in which “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” is reprinted, The Price of the Ticket, he affirms the moral imperative of doing “your first works over”: “Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.” He continues, “This is precisely what the generality of white Americans cannot afford to do,” since hiding origins—Baldwin’s examples are immigrant changes of name in order to appear more Anglo-Saxon—is how “one becomes a white American.”71 Such a renunciation of the past, such a refusal to recognize having once been nonwhite, even through ancestry, in exchange for the privileges whiteness accords, is a price of no less value than one’s humanity: “The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white—: and, in the main, nothing more than that, or, as he was to insist, nothing less. This incredibly limited not to say dimwitted ambition has choked many a human being to death here.…”72 It is ironic that Baldwin uses ambition to designate the drive to become white, since he means much the same thing that Kerouac does with the phrase “white ambitions.” Likewise, Kerouac/Sal is talking about the price he paid in order to enter full-fledged white society, to obtain the elite higher education that was his first major opening to becoming a writer wishing to memorialize his people, and about his continuing negotiations to discover a poetics in which that is possible— to “travel his road again,” if I may borrow Baldwin’s words. Musician and composer David Amram, who worked with Kerouac on several projects in the late 1950s, reports that Langston Hughes, Amram’s collaborator on the cantata Let Us Remember (1965), praised the author for “refus[ing] to be a white Uncle Tom for the New York literary establishment.”73 This observation suggests that Kerouac placed limits on his own acceptance of white rarefication—according to Amram, doing so through gestures such as not hiding either his Massachusetts accent in English or his Québécois accent in French.74



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Baldwin’s principally ethical and correlatively aesthetic objection keeps him from seeing the limitations of whiteness that Kerouac is able to signal poetically through a certain placement of a dream, that of a world beyond whiteness that has avoided the requirement of renouncing pleasure. In another essay in the collection, “Color,” Baldwin also addresses the restrictions on pleasure in white society, contrasting it with the apparently greater enjoyment that people experience in black social settings. Taking as a prime example the differences between black and white nightclubs, and affirming that in a Harlem establishment people have “more fun” than in a downtown setting, he writes, “[I]t is because Negroes are yet so shackled in this world’s chains, and because the world looks on them with such guilt, that they seem freer in their pleasures than white people do. White Americans know so very little about pleasure because they are so afraid of pain.”75 There is no good reason to claim that Kerouac, in his description of the African-American section of Denver, isn’t recognizing this very set of conditions and proposing the utopian dream-image of “happy…Negroes” as a further criticism of the restrictions of whiteness. Some writers on race have noted the critical gist of this passage. In Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver terms the passage “remarkable,” seeing in it a clear and powerful statement of collective rebellion by some whites against the violent restrictions of dominant white society.76 Linda Martín Alcoff, quoting the first version of the passage from the 1949 journal entry,77 states that Kerouac “is characteristically ahead of his time. [He] was aware of the racialized others, whom he recognizes in their unified nonwhiteness, but unlike many other whites (at least, Northern whites), he was also aware of his own whiteness and able to articulate the contours of its segregated subjective life in his comment that even ambitions have a racial identity.”78 Alcoff goes on to describe Kerouac’s strategy of depicting the contact that rattles the firmness of white supremacy, a confrontation between an imagined nonwhiteness (which she places in the author’s body) and the reality of the nonwhite bodies that he encounters.79 Such permeation of bodily and racial borders, revealing white supremacy as particular and limited, is what Kerouac looks for and valorizes throughout On the Road, in the contact zones that the road of necessity leads to. In the episode in the San Joaquin Valley, the zone coincides with a broad border region, the site where the peoples, cultures, and histories of Mexico and U.S.-controlled California meet and intermesh. But there are contact zones throughout the country, a suggestion that soft borders and their crossings are a regular occurrence in the United States, that U.S. culture is deeply heterogeneous. In On the Road, challenging the binary notion of periphery and center, Kerouac maps an America that everywhere fuels cultural fermentation.

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Mapping cognition These zones prepare for the finale of the novel, the trip to Mexico that the trajectory of Part One prefigures. The contact zone between the United States and Mexico, which includes parts of each country, presents the greatest challenge in On the Road to the ideology of complacent, sedentary culture. The broadness of the zone, beginning in San Antonio with such signs as houses and streets indicating a cultural shift, is underscored by the six pages that the narrative takes to traverse it. “‘Ah,’ sighed Dean, ‘the end of Texas, the end of America, and we don’t know no more’” (273). Dean presents the border crossing as the terminus of all that has become familiar to him and Sal, “America,” and even as the end of their ability to know and recognize what lies ahead. The narrative continues with clichés that prove inadequate to dominate the reality that they confront. Sal describes Laredo as a “sinister town,” filled with crime because of its proximity to the border and the presence of contraband. They are nearing a cultural change: “Just beyond, you could feel the enormous presence of whole great Mexico and almost smell the billion tortillas frying and smoking in the night” (273). This sentence contains a contrast, that between the unfathomable size of Mexico that can be described only in vague terms—“enormous,” “whole great”—and the particular detail of “the billion tortillas.” Although it isn’t inaccurate to speak of tortillas as a widely prepared food in Mexico, focusing on it as an identifying marker makes the description a cliché because it ends up conveying almost nothing about the place to which it is assigned. Sal attempts to master the apparently unknowable vastness of Mexico with the word billion, which becomes much less significant when attached to this detail. The set of clichés that Kerouac deploys through Sal and Dean in this scene, building up expectations of entering another world, is in rapid, kaleidoscopic clash with reality. Despite the build-up, the physical passage from U.S. to Mexican territory occurs quickly, in a single sentence relating nothing remarkable: “But everything changed when we crossed the mysterious bridge over the river and our wheels rolled on official Mexican soil, though it wasn’t anything but carway for border inspection” (273). The clash in this description is between the phrases “everything changed” and “wasn’t anything but”: if nothing actually happens when everything changes, then the change is the result of cognitive expectation based partly on reality but failing in the face of reality. Next, Sal’s narration provides less a cliché about what Mexico looks like on first view than a delineation of the process by which a cliché is made: “To our amazement, it looked exactly like Mexico” (274). It looks exactly like Mexico because it conforms to preconceptions, and it is a surprise that the enormous change they await at the border doesn’t come. The cliché at issue is produced in



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contact with the mundane details of everyday life in Mexico, which the cognitive process of narration immediately gathers into the familiar image by which it then apprehends Mexico. Kerouac doesn’t elaborate these details other than to say that Mexico “looked exactly like Mexico”: the point of the passage is to demonstrate the collision between preconception, which draws mainly on cliché, and reality. The surprise is that there’s no surprise, that the distinctness of the two cartographic zones falls away in the extended border zone in which cultures interweave, passing through and affecting each other. The in-betweenness of a contact zone, its hybridity and hence partial familiarity, is what makes at least first knowledge of it possible; with apparent inevitability, this quality also prompts those attempting to know it to resort to clichés as a way of addressing what they encounter, since the reality before them resists the hierarchization and ordering of representation. Several times Dean repeats the idea of a total transformation, even as he acknowledges the continuity of their quest: “Now, Sal, we’re leaving everything behind us and entering a new and unknown phase of things. All the years and troubles and kicks—and now this! so that we can safely think of nothing else and just go on ahead with our faces stuck out like this, you see, and understand the world as, really and genuinely speaking, other Americans haven’t done before us…” (276—emphasis in text). The unknown intensifies in non-U.S. space and becomes a blatant challenge to their cognitive apparatus, which up to this point has remained in a mesh of clichés, narrowed though not completely enclosed by it. Further into Mexico, the cultural difference becomes more pronounced as contact with reality strips away the clichés. But even as he combines empirical description with rhapsodic poetry to convey the ecstasy of expanding cognition, Kerouac continues to invoke commonplaces: Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellahin Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya (the long fingernail of China) to India the great subcontinent to Arabia to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico and over the waves to Polynesia to mystic Siam of the Yellow Robe and on around, on around, so that you hear the same mournful wail by the rotted walls of Cádiz, Spain, that you hear 12,000 miles around in the depths of Benares the Capital of the World. (280) Although in this passage he articulately challenges the paternalistic U.S. stereotypes of Mexico through lyrical description that characterizes global culture as an affair of those populations that persist on the edge of the

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grasp of Western empire, in doing so he blithely draws on the resilient imperialist topos of primitive indigenous peoples. Nonetheless, he turns the topos against its own main thrust: the phrase “the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity” is a designation that points to something exceeding the subordination of U.S.–Western cognition. This is especially the case since Cádiz, among the oldest cities in Europe, has seen countless settlements and migrations, and also since the “capital of the world,” Benares, is the most sacred city in Hinduism: it is a centralizing metropolis that has little to do with the centralizations of Western capitals, and as such works against their stabilizing and ordering impulses.80 Kerouac communicates the experience of discovering the tight limitations of one’s knowledge, recognizing one’s own incapacity to apprehend the great majority of cultural phenomena in the world without resorting to cliché and commonplace81—this is how “we would finally learn ourselves.” His citation of the considerable distances from one place to another, which dwarf the apparent expanse of the United States and even the cartography of traveling from that country to Mexico, gives an impression of the extent of these phenomena. Rather than lumping together “the rest of the undeveloped world,”82 the list of diasporic and indigenous peoples around the globe that likens them to “Fellahin Indians” functions similarly to Kerouac’s syntactic linking of disparate locations in the United States: when the globe is conceived as a whole these groups have a broad rapport with each other, but any contact occurs along a continuum that valorizes difference by placing them in widely different locations. Whatever unity may be discerned in the great variety of groups challenges the cartographic and cultural unities of the nation-state and imperial domination. Kerouac borrows the term Fellahin (or Fellaheen), Arabic for “peasants,” from Oswald Spengler’s highly influential, between-the-wars work The Decline of the West: however, he alters Spengler’s use of it, and in so doing criticizes the priority that the German writer accords to the unique world-historical effectiveness of nations. Spengler terms “fellaheen” those peoples who follow the collapse of a high civilization or culture. They are related to the primitive peoples who come before the formation of a culture in a kind of resurgence of the latter, though the fall of civilization renders them anomic: Spengler characterizes fellaheen life as “a planless happening without goal or cadenced march in time, wherein occurrences are many, but, in the last analysis, devoid of significance. The only historical peoples, the peoples whose existence is world-history, are the nations.”83 The end of a civilization, argues Spengler in this work mapping the downfall of the West, occurs in the rise of the fellaheen mentality that tends toward abandoning the nation, favoring the cosmopolitan reconciliation among nations: “The born worldcitizens, world-pacifists, and world-reconcilers…are the spiritual leaders of fellaheen” (185—emphasis in text). From a fellaheen people another



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civilization and set of nations will eventually arise, but in the meantime, “The practical result of world-improving theories is consistently a formless and therefore historyless mass” (185—italics in text). In valorizing the Fellaheen, in regarding them as “the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world,” Kerouac presents them rather as channeling energies of humanity, as the conduit of its creative and productive powers that in narrower conceptions, here namely Spengler’s, would belong to so-called “civilized” peoples. In Kerouac’s usage, even the word “primitive” takes on an altered sense, pointing to the fragility of restrictive white American civilization. The effect of his valorization of the global Fellaheen has more to do with raising the question of the arbitrary and artificial character of nations than with homogenizing non-Western peoples. He makes contact with the Fellaheen as well as, in his literary cartography, with a part of himself: in the notebook in which he wrote Sur le chemin in Mexico in 1952, he also sketched the genealogy of the Duluoz, the fictionalization of his own family, referring to his lineage as “Fellaheen.” This designation acknowledges his family and community’s status as a population that has emerged from the imperial conquest of Québec, first by France in its westward expansion, then by Britain, whose domination contributed heavily to reducing the French Canadians to the status of peasants or Fellaheen.84 One result was that the Québécois were set along the energetic path of exile and nomadism. In conceiving of cultural and ethnic scattering in this way, through his own Québécois experience as a model, Kerouac anticipates an important tenet of diaspora studies, which challenges both localizing and universalizing notions of populations.85 According to this reconfiguration of the Spenglerian notion, Fellaheen peoples constitute a variegated cultural vitality that contributes to the sense of enormity running against the imperial mask and gaze that Sal (less so Kerouac, as the orchestrator of this rhetorical performance) dons to a degree. The passage continues with a physical description that Sal overtly offers as a critique of U.S. stereotypes, images made of a determined set of signifiers: “These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore—they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it” (280). The antiquity that Sal attributes to the Mexicans is a reversal of imperialist paternalism—though not a repudiation, the effect is to convey the awareness of a U.S. cognitive apparatus that up to this point has been largely self-assured. Sal makes this discovery in the course of his own nomadism, which allows him to leave the confines of U.S. culture and ideology and to encounter the nomads who are makers of global culture. Kerouac’s idea of the latter is the opposite of Spengler’s: in achieving technological ascendancy over the earth through

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the cultural energy of nations, “Faustian man,” according to Spengler, puts his civilization at risk. Kerouac’s criticism of Spengler is more pointed in Desolation Angels, another novel that features encounters with peasants on travels in Mexico and Morocco. These Fellaheen have in common that they’re cultural resisters to the ravages of history as dominated by the West: “In fact [Tangiers is] exactly like Mexico, the Fellaheen world, that is, the world that’s not making History in the present: making History, manufacturing it, shooting it up in H bombs and Rockets, reaching for the grand conceptual finale of Highest Achievement (in our times the Faustian ‘West’ of America, Britain and Germany high and low).”86 He makes it clear that he is addressing a certain history, that dominated by the imperial West and molded by it toward destruction: this dubious history proceeds through the technology that, rather than constituting progress, he compares through alliteration and the dual meaning of H to the corrosive compulsion of heroin. The Fellaheen participate in, if not this superficial, present-day history, the far more consequential history of the globe. Later in the paragraph from On the Road, Kerouac makes the same point about the Fellaheen of Mexico, pitting their cultural anchoring against the frivolous and fleeting triumph of imperial wealth: “As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the desert of ‘history.’ And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment.”87 Contrary to their Spenglerian role as amorphous remainder of fallen civilization, Kerouac’s Fellaheen are its cultural energy and a possible source of redemption: once “destruction comes to the world of ‘history’ and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before” (280), they will offer a locus of the revelation that the ascendancy of imperial nations is just a petty portion of the far grander movement of global culture in time. The present revelation or apocalypse manifests itself to Salvatore, the messianic writer with somewhat hidden ties to the clash between the French and British Empires for domination of North America. The settlement and conquest of Québec were part of the same general movement of European colonization that, wherever it has gone, has left Fellaheen populations: in this part of On the Road the Fellaheen are visible in the Indians of Mexico, descended from the civilization of Aztecs, the fathers of America, in contrast to the usurping fathers from Europe.88 Both Kerouac and Sal begin their wandering in response to the sense that the Western culture of the fathers no longer offers firm roots, if it ever did; wandering results in an encounter with a different group of fathers whose connection to global nomadism signals the way out of the cognitive strictures of facile settlement. These newly perceived but much older fathers are in effect anti-fathers with respect to the imperial ones: they invite the itinerancy that affirms the vitality unavailable in rooted culture.



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The process of cognitive disruption intensifies as Sal and Dean travel further into Mexico. Empirical description itself, which has so far seemed unable to escape from recourse to cliché, loses coherency. In a passage that Kerouac added to the second and “third” typescripts, Sal relates the experience of an encounter with reality that eludes cognition to the point where objects and persons remain scarcely intelligible: I saw streams of gold pouring through the sky and right across the tattered roof of the poor old car, right across my eyeballs and indeed right inside them; it was everywhere. I looked out the window at the hot, sunny streets and saw a woman in a doorway and I thought she was listening to every word we said and nodding to herself—routine paranoiac visions due to tea. But the stream of gold continued. For a long time I lost consciousness in my lower mind of what we were doing and only came around sometime later when I looked up from fire and silence like waking from sleep to the world, or waking from void into a dream.… (284–5) Sal presents the experience as perhaps a marijuana-induced hallucination but suggests that much more is at issue. The dreamlike series of perceptions calls into question the distinction between waking and dreaming life, and hence between empirical observation and mental vision or imagination. The normal organs of perception, the eyeballs, become less relevant as the vision bypasses them; little remains of the cognitive apparatus, which has until this moment been unable to apprehend any unfamiliar object or person without trying to make it familiar through recourse to cliché. The experience shatters cognition in a brilliant, undifferentiated visual stream—made of gold, the very material that initially occasioned the European conquest of Mexico. But in fairly traditional fashion Kerouac removes gold from its narrow use, here and in other books assigning it an aesthetic and even spiritual function,89 hence transforming the narrow experience of U.S. tourists into an expanded faculty of knowledge. The passage also bears Christian messianic connotations: among other things, it echoes the arrival of the heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation  21.18, which is “pure gold” (Bible, New Testament 318). In accord with his syncretism, it is also the “golden eternity” of his Buddhist Scripture of 1960, which he defines in the opening poem as “One-Which-It-Is-ThatWhich-Everything-Is.”90 But he depicts the revelation as an earthly, secular revealing of reality, an end-time of the limitations of sedentary U.S. culture, one in the series of apocalypses of history that will give rise, through the surges of the Fellaheen, to the next. In the much longer first version of the passage that he includes in the second typescript, Kerouac in fact presents the experience as divine revelation, a direct manifestation of God; the

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secularization is more in line with the cultural project of the novel. The oneiric operations become fully activated in a kind of “effective dreaming”: Sal’s cognition is transformed, and the text itself then works at undoing its own systems of representation in their dependence on cliché. As it does in the extraordinary novel in which Ursula K. Le Guin introduced the term, The Lathe of Heaven, effective dreaming here has a utopian function: it can ultimately remake U.S.-Western cognition, moving it toward a capacity to admit the vastness of global cultural variety.91 By the end of On the Road, with his apprehension of America as “all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over the West coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity” (307), Sal Paradise arrives at the beginning of such expanded cognition. Of course, the arrival accompanies the acceptance of a certain sedentariness, through the apparent triumph of “white ambitions” when Sal gets into a Cadillac with wealthy friends, only to leave a ragged Dean alone on the streets of New York (306–7). These ambitions are augmented by the fact that the Cadillac is on its way to the Metropolitan Opera for Duke Ellington’s concert, which Douglas Malcolm notes as an important moment in the historical entry of jazz into highbrow culture.92 But this renunciation of Dean is also the renunciation of the quest for the fathers, a painful but necessary step in attaining a new cognitive disposition. In an addition to the “third” typescript, Kerouac affirms the shift in perspective from a gaze toward paternal heights to an equalization of formerly hierarchized elements of the world: “And don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear?” (307). These words suggest that God, the father of all fathers and the final guarantor of morality, stands on an equal plane with Winnie-the-Pooh, emblem of childlike joy in fantastical apprehensions of the world.93 That is, the capacity to imagine as part of the engagement with reality pushes aside the subordination of reality to moral hierarchy. On the Road points to the eventuality of further cognitive and moral alterations. The closing words declare a cultural opening toward release from the confines of paternal transmission in the affirmation of the nomadic, incomplete, undestined self: “and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty” (307). With this conclusion, On the Road accomplishes Kerouac’s poetics of exile, which maps a series of American identities that resist national and territorial fixity. He raises far-reaching questions about the placement of persons and groups on one side or the other of a distinction between dominant identity and its forcefully designated others. In carrying this out, he draws on his Québécois, Franco-American background and his consequently detached relationship to U.S. culture. He develops the colonized but in-between status of the Québécois, as well as their habitation of zones



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that belong to more than one nation and hence not fully to any, extending it to an appreciation of the heterogeneous cultures of a broadly conceived America and its relation to bordering territories. At about the same time that the expression “Third World” first appeared, in a 1952 article by economist Alfred Sauvy indicting the blindness of both capitalist and communist imperialism,94 Kerouac began a book whose importance lies in its continuing contribution to the understanding of an internationalizing United States and its place in global culture.

3 Writing in real time

Beginning as a tale of travel that Kerouac develops partly through reflections on the Québécois migration and his place in it, On the Road becomes a cartography of North American and global cultures in their instability and change. The narrative reflects this transformation by revealing more and more that the initial task of travel, the search for the father, may be less important than the discoveries that the road yields to its protagonists. As the driving force, so to speak, of the trips, Dean modifies the terms for discussing the object of the quest: he names it only with the non-name of IT, and he characterizes it as involving the conditions that enable movement and change, namely time as the continuum in which they take place. He explains time in connection with jazz: as the latter takes on a more important role in the narrative, it becomes a phenomenon that marks, fills, and exceeds measured time—as they experience jazz, both Dean and Sal realize that time as they have previously conceived it is an illusion, a basic part of the limitations on their observation of the much larger matters that seize their interest. From these explorations in On the Road, Kerouac proceeds to his creation of spontaneous prose, conceiving it as a technique for revealing the relationship between time, reality, and transformation and consistently speaking of it in terms of jazz; he does so especially in Visions of Cody and the theoretical statements on his writing practice. As such, spontaneous prose also becomes his means for writing the cartography of cultures. Kerouac’s use of jazz has attracted a lot of critical attention: as with so many other aspects of his writing, some commentators are keenly interested in showing his ineptitude with regard to the subject. As I hope to show, this judgment is simply false, since it mainly depends on a reduction of jazz to its purely technical functions rather than seeing its role as cultural expression and shaping, whereas this role has long been central to critical assessments of this musical genre. Beginning in Part Two of On the Road, regular doses of jazz are increasingly part of the atmosphere. Describing a New Year’s Eve party, Kerouac

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draws on traditions of depicting this celebration as transgressive, as exceeding boundaries at the very least in sheer size, a teeming crowd crammed into tight urban constraints. Within these constraints, the party remains within social limits as a safety-valve carnival, allowing people to approach the limits of convention but at the same time to return easily to institutional life, which, through devices such as the radio, are continuously present: “Something was going on in every corner, on every bed and couch—not an orgy but just a New Year’s Eve party with frantic screaming and wild radio music.”1 As part of their quest, Sal and Dean are on the lookout for moments when they might surpass these constraints: they go to another “huge party” that has become a microcosm of the variety of experience, that embodies a joy contrasting with the mundane boundaries of its space: “Everything in life, all the faces of life, were piling into the same dank room” (126). All this culminates in the ecstasy of time spent with a new character whose actions and disposition at least point to transport beyond the limitations of social convention, in part because he lives with a staunch agent of social propriety. We found the wild, ecstatic Rollo Greb and spent a night at his house on Long Island. Rollo lives in a nice house with his aunt; when she dies the house is all his. Meanwhile she refuses to comply with any of his wishes and hates his friends. He brought this ragged gang of Dean, Marylou, Ed, and me, and began a roaring party. The woman prowled upstairs; she threatened to call the police. “Oh, shut up, you old bag!” yelled Greb. I wondered how he could live with her like this. (126–7) Sal’s wondering is of course prompted by the unnamed aunt’s aggressive enforcement of convention. Although Kerouac doesn’t pursue the point, the text reveals the fact that part and parcel of Greb’s indulgence is this imposition, which is also the patronage of his social class. Not only does the aunt’s house enclose the abode of his Dionysian life, but it also represents the wealth and status that will one day be Greb’s, the prestige and resources that will enable him to be fully accomplished. Kerouac underscores the irony of the arrangement by depicting the dysfunction of Greb’s relationship with his aunt, her recourse to the forces of social order against the ingrained misogyny of his reaffirmation of freedom. Like so many other persons and scenes in On the Road, Greb points to a utopian zone without providing a distinct indication of how to get there. But it is as much the utopian goal as the lack of direction that draws Dean and Sal, since these offer the occasion for their motion simply to continue. In Sal’s description, Greb still seems the perfect hipster aesthete, soaring up from the Western tradition, unbounded within the confines of the manor but nonetheless drawing energy from the latter’s assets:



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He had more books than I’ve ever seen in all my life—two libraries, two rooms loaded from floor to ceiling around all four walls, and such books as the Apocryphal Something-or-Other in ten volumes. He played Verdi operas and pantomimed them in his pajamas with a great rip down the back. He didn’t give a damn about anything. He is a great scholar who goes reeling down the New York waterfront with original seventeenthcentury musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting. He crawls like a big spider through the streets. His excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light. He rolled his neck in spastic ecstasy. He lisped, he writhed, he flopped, he moaned, he howled, he fell back in despair. He could hardly get a word out, he was so excited with life. (127) Fascinated with the model characteristics of this hubristic blueblood, Dean will shortly claim that Greb points to what he and Sal are looking for. Immense is the contrast between Dean and Greb: the former is a young man raised in poverty who had barely grown out of juvenile delinquency  (37) when he sought tutoring in the philosophy of Nietzsche from Columbia students (1). The contrast fuels Dean’s rapture at the Long Islander’s leisure-class life: [Dean] took me into a corner. “That Rollo Greb is the greatest, most wonderful of all. That’s what I was trying to tell you—that’s what I want to be. I want to be like him. He’s never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he’s the end!” (127) The hip-lingo expression “he’s the end” here has the additional sense of “goal”—to Dean, Greb represents the end of his and Sal’s motion, both its goal and the place where it might be able to stop. A superficial reading of the passage might have it that Dean’s assessment is one of emulation of the Gatsby-like trappings of the Long Island dwelling. But the intricacies of the novel suggest something else: Dean expresses the wish for a utopian space, a mythical American space, in which someone from his own class background may have the same privileges to pursue aesthetic interests as this bourgeois—and the corollary wish is that such freedom not be dependent on the elitism of material means, and hence that Greb not run into familial obstacles. Dean idealizes Greb because he points to the utopia toward which the novel’s movement tends. Dean’s use of the phrase “he knows time” suggests that knowledge of time is tied to the social and aesthetic freedom that Greb seems to embody. Greb “has nothing to do but rock back and forth”: he simply moves through time like the endless and goalless motion of a clock or metronome.

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“You see,” Dean adds, “if you go like him all the time you’ll finally get it” (127). The idea is that going like Greb all the time—with knowledge of time, without the all-too-mundane limitations that Dean and Sal are familiar with—will be at least progress toward the end, toward “finally get[ting] it.” In response Sal asks, “Get what?” To which Dean replies, “IT! IT! I’ll tell you—now no time, we have no time now” (127). What they’re moving toward, what they’ll discover at the end of the road or maybe somewhere along the way, as part of the motion, is IT: understanding IT, as Dean repeats, has to do with knowing time, which is also something he and Sal don’t yet do. Later in the novel Dean is more explicit about IT, but now his only explanation has to do with jazz, in a comparison between Greb and pianist George Shearing (127). The text that follows, the first of several descriptions of live jazz concerts, indicates the meaning that is accruing to the word IT. In this performance at New York’s Birdland, the music starts out as something taking place in the linear, paced motion of time and then emerges from these constraints and overwhelms the measurement, for a time (a utopian time that emerges in mundane, everyday time) abolishing it: And Shearing began to rock; a smile broke over his ecstatic face; he began to rock in the piano seat, back and forth, slowly at first, then the beat went up, and he began rocking fast, his left foot jumped up with every beat, his neck began to rock crookedly, he brought his face down to the keys, he pushed his hair back, his combed hair dissolved, he began to sweat. The music picked up. The bass-player hunched over and socked it in, faster and faster, it seemed faster and faster, that’s all. Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you’d think the man wouldn’t have had time to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea. (128) The rolling of the chords, “like the sea,” like the tide or the rhythms of time, begins in the measured tempo of the beat and then transforms it, such that physical forms occupy space quite differently, in turn altering the space and time in which the concert takes place. Kerouac uses the word beat to signify the tempo that leads to this phenomenon—in addition to the connotation of “beatific” (Dean “was beat—the root, the soul of Beatific,” he writes further in the novel [195]), he indicated later on that part of his definition of beat, in addition to the state of being beaten down, is the drumbeat of jazz.2 At the end of the passage, Kerouac emphasizes the utopian character of live jazz in the experience that follows the show, describing it as a veritable apocalypse, an end of time that leaps out of time in order to define it: “the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever” (128).



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Timing IT As On the Road progresses, both IT and variations on the phrase “we know time” more and more evidently signify utopian space. The first time Dean uses the latter expression is at the beginning of Part Two. During a visit to the home of Sal’s brother and sister-in-law in Virginia, Dean gets enthused about going on the road, an experience he characterizes as utopian: “And then we’ll all go off to sweet life, ’cause now is the time and we all know time!” (114—italics in text). Knowing time is knowing where to look for the breakthrough to utopia, which takes place in a seizure of the present moment that wrests it out of the mundanity of its progression in linear time.3 Toward the end of Part Two, when Dean and Sal are in Houston, they admire the determined motion of a young man on a motorcycle and the beauty of his female companion (158). Characteristically, Dean makes open display of his libido, in alliterative prose poetry imagining a sexual utopia in which social and psychic repression fall away: “Now wouldn’t it be fine if we could all get together and have a real going goofbang together with everybody sweet and fine and agreeable, no hassles, no infant rise of protest or body woes misconceptualized or sumpin’? Ah! but we know time” (159—my emphasis). Knowing time is the capacity to at least glimpse utopian space, to have an idea of what it would be to abandon bodily and mental constraints in an affirmation of freedom. Dean next uses the expression at another jazz concert, saying in the midst of Slim Gaillard’s extravagant improvisation that the musician “knows time” (177). Further on, in Part Three, after the acclaimed passage depicting a Dionysian scene in San Francisco in which an alto saxophonist “hopped and hopped and threw his feet around and kept his eyes fixed on the audience…, and he never stopped” (201), while traveling cross-country with Sal and several others they’ve just met, Dean remarks, “Now, man, that alto man last night had IT—he held it once and he found it; I’ve never seen a guy who could hold so long” (207). Sal asks for an explanation. “Ah well”—Dean laughed—“now you’re asking me impon-de-rables— ahem! Here’s a guy and everybody’s there, right? Up to him to put down what’s on everybody’s mind. He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it—everybody looks up and down and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He’s filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it’s not the tune that

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counts but IT—” Dean could go no further; he was sweating telling about it. (207–8—the first emphasis is Kerouac’s, the second mine) Dean presents IT as something exceeding familiar cognitive categories, “impon-de-rables,” stretching out the word to underscore its gravity. His description, indebted to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, is of a group transformation involving an escape from linear time, a line of flight in the terminology of Deleuze and Guattari, taking place by way of the music. The musician seems to be more medium than agent—he undergoes a transformation himself, with the effect that his breath ceases to be a mere bodily function and becomes a challenge to the boundaries of bodily space spreading to everyone in the room—“such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment.” Even in the telling, Dean becomes ecstatic; as he says in the continuation of his monologue, recounting to Sal the broad vagabondage of his life that he is at long last beginning to master, “NOW, I have IT” (208). As Michael Hrebeniak has signaled, Kerouac’s use of the word IT is prefigured by D. H. Lawrence in “The Spirit of Place,” the essay that opens the English author’s Studies in Classic American Literature. Lawrence writes, in terms suitable to Kerouac’s characterization of Dean Moriarty, “The true liberty will only begin when Americans discover it, and proceed possibly to fulfil it. It being the deepest whole self of man, the self in its wholeness, not idealistic halfness.”4 Lawrence here alludes to the Freudian notion of the id (in German, das Es, “the it”), the psychic agency of the drives or instincts that is kept in check by the moral agency or superego (das Überich, or the “over-I”). He sees it not simply as a release of the libido from constraints but rather as a transformation of the social and cultural agencies that enable libidinal repression in the first place. These agencies replace the complete desire of the whole human being, the great, earth-shaking drives of body and mind operating together, with the illusory desire restricted to the somatic function of sex, the only desire graspable to conscious minds conditioned in the hierarchies of Western society. “Because the deepest self is way down, and the conscious self is an obstinate monkey. But of one thing we may be sure. If one wants to be free, one has to give up the illusion of doing what one likes, and seek what it wishes done” (13). According to Lawrence, though predominant American notions of freedom are largely vulgarizations, most migration to and across America is driven by it as the urge to leave behind the persistence of the European masters; it, which “chooses for us, and decides for us,” is the new master more available in America, where the feudal, royal, or tyrannical masters have been left behind. But it necessarily entails an altered form of mastery: in a reorganized psychosocial arrangement in which desire isn’t subordinate to forces that would squelch it, it enables the emergence of the complete



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human being in the long run, at the utopian end of this progression. Hence, Lawrence’s utopian notions also have a temporal dimension, the result of Western history that moves beyond the entrenched West, though its end might never be realized.5 Although Dean and Sal sometimes seem to wish for a simple version of freedom in which they may, to put it simply, do what they want, the broader social plane on which Kerouac places their ideas of sexual liberation—as well as the struggle with the Oedipal model of social and psychic hierarchy that he carries from The Town and the City into On the Road—suggests that his writing entails more sophisticated notions. Nonetheless, in the episodes of On the Road, there are quite a few remnants of a heroic, traditionally American notion of individual conquest, freedom, and satisfaction, which Regina Weinreich captures when she writes that IT is “satisfying as a form of instant gratification, a thrill for the moment, an epiphany.”6 But the restrictions stemming from individuality, integral to the hierarchization of both society and the psyche, persist in On the Road to the degree that its narrative remains plot- and character-driven. After completing the first version of the novel, Kerouac became dissatisfied with exactly these constraints. Although Tim Hunt distinguishes the quick writing of this version from spontaneous prose,7 Kerouac’s accounts of rewriting On the Road as a completely different novel, which became Visions of Cody, suggest that spontaneous prose derives from the scroll experiment.

Blowing language In a letter he wrote to Ginsberg from Mexico City on May 18, 1952 (about a year after composing the scroll), Kerouac speaks enthusiastically of how the current version of On the Road has led him to a new way of writing: his quotations are from the manuscript that was later published as Visions of Cody, which he indicates is the more authentic text of his novel, the kind of writing he has striven for. Hoping to place it with a major publisher yet recognizing the commercial limitations of its experimental composition, he writes, “[W]e can show Road to Scribner’s or Simpson or Farrar Straus (Stanley Young) if necessary, change title to Visions of Neal or something, and I write new Road for Wyn.”8 (A. A. Wyn, the publisher of mass market paperback house Ace Books, was interested in the writing of some of the Beats, issuing William Burroughs’s first novel, Junky, in 1953.) For years Kerouac continued thinking in terms of the dichotomy between artistic and commercial literature: although the version of On the Road that appeared in 1957 was closely based on the scroll, his sneaky reading of Visions of Cody on The Steve Allen Show in 1959 suggests that he still held it to be superior to the bestselling On the Road in which he hid the text (see

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above, Chapter 2, 55). As he writes Visions of Cody, then, he is aware that the new direction of his poetics involves a broad challenge to both social and aesthetic convention—in fact, he sees these two as approaching convergence as his new writing emerges. Despite Kerouac’s affirmation that “I know you will love On the Road” (355), Ginsberg sees the fusion of social and aesthetic challenge as a drawback, replying, “I don’t know if it would make sense to any publisher—by make sense I mean, if you could follow what happened to what characters where.”9 Speaking in the voice of censorious superego, Ginsberg insists that the energy driving Kerouac, the ecstatic force of artistic desire, is where he’s going wrong. But Kerouac refuses to see it that way. He’s convinced he has found a new poetics that allows for fuller apprehension of reality than previous literary language and forms. This poetics grows from his discoveries in On the Road, where he states it as the convergence of IT, the utopian object of a desire that has overpowered repression, and the utopian time of a jazz concert. In the letter to Ginsberg, he speaks of his writing as jazz, using the image of “blowing” to describe his improvisational process as he begins his new novel, Dr. Sax (355). As for the jazz musicians in On the Road, composing an improvised variation on a theme, blowing is a highly poetic process, involving the creation of unexpected word groupings that convey phenomena in intimate contact with the psyche and that challenge the ways that the latter, through their restrictions and orderings, yield a delimited depiction of reality. Commentators have sharply disagreed over Kerouac’s knowledge of jazz:10 but whether he had a musicologist’s understanding of melody, harmony, or rhythm is considerably less the issue than whether in his appropriations of jazz he grasped an aesthetic, and whether he was effective in bringing this aesthetic to his work. Most who have criticized him have found that his appropriation borrows from African-American culture without recognizing its specificity or history, at worst as a shamelessly colonial gesture. A sympathetic treatment is Douglas Malcolm’s: “Kerouac, as a French Canadian outsider whose first language was French…, seems to use jazz to serve his purpose as an alienated white; as much and perhaps more than the music itself, it is the ideological implications of bop and its performers, as perceived by white culture, that attract him.”11 Even in light of this status as “alienated white,” it’s entirely true that Kerouac’s picture of African-American society in On the Road has little sociological accuracy; similarly, he delves into jazz mainly to suit his aesthetic purposes, borrowing from it in his development of literary devices. But my approach, focusing on the operations of his poetics, rather shifts the question to whether his use of jazz contributes to the opening of literary rhetoric—to whether this rhetoric involves a wider apprehension of social and material realities, in the midst of which are the cultural drifts of an America that functions as a transforming set of spaces. Whether he treats all of these



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realities and spaces in specific and accurate detail is a different matter. Even if he frequently oversteps propriety in his identification with nonwhite cultures through the off-white status stemming from his heritage, it’s simply not the case, as I argued in Chapter 2, that transcultural contact doesn’t occur in his literary treatments. According to some accounts from around the time Kerouac was formulating his notions, the improvisational turn in jazz that became bebop is at the very least a challenge to conventionalization, to the music becoming formulaic and predictable, and to the effacement of its particular cultural character. In an essay on Charlie Christian originally published in 1958, Ralph Ellison characterizes jazz improvisation as a process of reconfiguring the subordinate status of African-American culture in which the self enters ongoing alteration: for the musician, “improvisation represents…a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it….”12 In “The Golden Age, Time Past,” a piece from 1959 on the beginnings of bebop at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, Ellison presents the rise of improvisation in the 1940s as having everything to do with preserving the dignity and specificity of black culture in the form of its musicians’ livelihood. Especially in its technical complexity, he explains, the originators of bebop brought improvisation to the fore in order to “create a jazz which could not be so easily imitated and exploited by white musicians to whom the market was more open simply because of their whiteness.”13 In this perspective, improvisation had to do with evading the regularization of dominant culture, in the social stratification of which African-American contributions were recognized only within tight restrictions. Whatever the accuracy of Kerouac’s depictions of African-American culture, it is easy to see why such a notion of jazz would appeal to him in his own cultural situation. In his very influential Blues People, first published in 1963, LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka offers a more radical account, presenting improvisation as a broad social and political challenge, necessitated by the absolute subordination of black people from their first arrival as slaves in the Americas. Jones/Baraka addresses the division that Ellison (who subsequently wrote a harsh review of the book)14 observes within African-American society between the “blues people,” “those who accepted and lived close to their folk experience,”15 and “the middle class Negroes” who “had gotten free” of all blues tradition in their embrace of assimilation, which of course came with the dual price tag of abandoning their cultural heritage and settling for the limited worth that dominant society accorded them (176). In his elaboration, Jones/Baraka characterizes the “moderns” or beboppers as those who “showed up to restore jazz, in some sense, to its original separateness,”

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creating a “willfully, hard, anti-assimilationist sound” (181—emphasis in text) that “fell on deaf or horrified ears, just as it did in white America” (182). This affirmative resurgence of a black aesthetic impulse, a reconfiguration of the social space that African-Americans occupy, according to Jones/Baraka, is also a spatialization of the unexpected, through an admission of the irregularities of time, in the Western music that has been stabilized through its function of contributing to social ordering: “In bop melodies there seemed to be an endless changing of direction, stops and starts, variations of impetus, a jaggedness that reached out of the rhythmic bases of the music. The boppers seemed to have a constant need for deliberate and agitated rhythmical contrast” (194). Becoming vigorous as the Civil Rights Movement began to unfold, bebop contributed to a widening recognition of the cultural specificity of African-American experience. In The Shadow and the Act, his 2009 book on Ellison, Baldwin, and Jones/Baraka, Walton Muyumba understands jazz as a philosophical practice, its critical function directed toward dynamically conceiving both self and society as in motion and metamorphosis: “The improvised composition presents both the musician’s and the culture’s fluctuations…. The construction of an improvised solo is designed to articulate the music’s openness to renewal and revision while also enabling the public expression of the self as performative—both are othered in the play.”16 Muyumba comments on Jones/Baraka’s theory and practice, noting that he “draws poetry and jazz improvisation together so that he can simultaneously exercise the culture’s ‘diverse and mutually contradictory elements’ while presenting a performance of the self in transition and flux.”17 Although Kerouac might not arrive at the technical vocabulary to describe in detail the textures and shape of an improvised jazz composition,18 his understanding of improvisation in writing sets forth with remarkable lucidity the idea that it is a challenge to the stratification of society, time, and space. His interest in discovering, through exercises in improvisation, a rhetoric that creates space to admit into dominant literature previously unrecognized idioms, and more broadly social realities, reflects a detailed grasp of jazz improvisation as a social, cultural, and aesthetic set of practices. Such an understanding is also borne out in Paul Berliner’s fairly recent, much-cited treatment of improvisation: though fully recognizing its vital importance in African-American society and culture, Berliner assesses the larger cultural contributions of jazz, characterizing the music in the epilogue to his hefty tome as “a way of life”: “a particular orientation to the world of musical imagination characteristic of jazz community members.”19 He presents the improvisational character of jazz, “born of African, European, and African American musical elements,” as a musical system particularly “capable of absorbing new traits without sacrificing its identity” (489). This system refuses the limits imposed by dominant culture: “improvisers may have the sense of participating in a global discourse among music thinkers,



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negotiating musical ideas that transcend cultural and historic boundaries” (491). He sees this phenomenon as none other than an engagement with the fundamentals of cultural production, of the creative process itself, leading to questions such as “What is the human imagination? Where do ideas actually come from?” (492). Kerouac’s approach to jazz bears exactly on this forcefully challenging creativity, especially in its close relation to enabling the emergence of hidden cultural realities. Critics often cite Kerouac’s failure to examine the history of jazz and to consider its origins and functions as part of the experience of AfricanAmerican oppression; but the expectation that he do so strikes me as the imposition of a scholarly or journalistic standard onto writing that presents itself as primarily creative (again, the conception that Kerouac is writing memoirs prevails):20 such an expectation isn’t imposed on a musician in a given performance or on writers of textbooks on technique.21 Moreover, the claim that Kerouac does violence to African-American culture by appropriating jazz relies on a strange essentialism, on a notion that anything that first flourishes in a particular culture must remain immobilely linked to it. Although bebop was indeed a reinvigoration of jazz as an AfricanAmerican form, entailing a domination of black musicians unparalleled since the origins of jazz in New Orleans several decades earlier, from the beginning, notes Scott Deveaux, “[T]he bebop pioneers seemed unmotivated by racial exclusivity.”22 Deveaux describes the hiring of white musicians by such major figures as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker as “a deliberate breaching of the artificial barriers imposed by segregation.”23 Ellison presents the inclusiveness that marked the foundational jam sessions at Minton’s in Harlem—which, to assure technical prowess, followed a trial of initiation—as part of what jazz added to the ways that African-American culture emerged in predominantly white society as a highly consequential force.24 Although racial tensions certainly persisted in jazz, as they did in all quarters of U.S. social life, notable in these accounts of bebop is that part of its utopianism is the impulse to overcome these tensions and to crumble the notion of a permanently unitary ethnicity and culture with a fixed set of properties. In bringing jazz improvisation into his work, Kerouac draws on this utopianism, coming to this cultural emergence as a participant as well as borrowing from it for his own purposes. In brief and somewhat muted praise, Jones/Baraka cites his friend Kerouac as evidence of the widening compass of the effects of jazz, not only for his narrative attention to it but also for drawing on its energies in his composition. Jones/Baraka quotes the note that opens Mexico City Blues, which begins: I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday.25

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Kerouac’s notion of writing as improvisation—in which the distinction between poetry and prose effectively breaks down—entails conceiving of the writing self, by way of the mind’s interaction with its material, as taking shape through performance, in the physical act of composing the words of a text. His metaphorical use of the word blowing also has a literal dimension, since the process requires physical application and exertion, resulting in a flow of words—the words are rhythmically breathed through the body as they shape the space in which the composition and narrative take place. Although Kerouac’s practice gives priority to writing, his conception of it makes little distinction between speech and writing: he sees the latter as both a source and the melodic outcome of writing, which he demonstrates in performances of his texts.26 Very early in his career he understands such a relationship between speech and writing, as is evident in his statement at the age of nineteen that in writing he borrows from the dialectal French he has always spoken, “a huge language” that is “of the tongue, not of the pen.”27 It becomes part of his task in developing spontaneous prose to alter and remake English so that it accommodates the foreignness that is channeled through the self that he brings to writing—entirely in keeping, that is, with the cultural aesthetic of jazz in the bebop era.28 His poetics crystallizes, then, as a resistance of and challenge to the conventionalization of English whose purpose is to open it onto the inexhaustible complexity of reality, to cease streamlining and suppressing foreignness. His understanding of improvisation is the reason he integrates it into his poetics. His writing is a performance, taking shape as he composes it, and also a phenomenon of effectiveness in the world, what performance studies terms “performative writing.” Though primarily addressing critical texts, Della Pollock’s description is quite pertinent to Kerouac’s practice: performative writing “forms itself in the act of speaking/writing. It reflects in its own forms, in its own fulfillment of form, in what amounts to its performance of itself, a particular, historical relation (agonistic, dialogic, erotic) between author-subjects, reading subject, and subjects written/read.”29 When Kerouac’s writing is conceived as performance, there is considerably less need to insist on a distinction between its process and its product, since in the accomplishment of its purposes these two aspects are in effect a single one.30

Writing in motion A closely related component of this poetics is what Kerouac, following the advice of lifelong friend Edward D. White Jr., terms sketching, a writing technique in which language becomes the very interaction between reality and psyche. In the letter he explains to Ginsberg:



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Sketching (Ed White casually mentioned it in 124th [Street] Chinese restaurant near Columbia, “Why don’t you just sketch in the streets like a painter but with words?”) which I did…everything activates in front of you in myriad profusion, you just have to purify your mind and let it pour the words (which effortless angels of the vision fly when you stand in front of reality) and write with 100% personal honesty both psychic and social etc. and slap it all down shameless, willy-nilly, rapidly until sometimes I got so inspired I lost consciousness I was writing. (356) More than mere description, but rooted in and depending on it, sketching becomes part of the psychic operations of apprehending reality. In Kerouac’s view, if his writing moves with reality it engages it more effectively—hence his growing interest in writing quickly, in composing in and with the momentto-moment passage of time rather than in periods set aside for writing that compartmentalize and limit the temporal dimension of reality. To say “we know time,” as Dean Moriarty does, is to engage in this kind of writing, what is becoming spontaneous prose.31 The word IT becomes the most convenient and indeed accurate word for designating the mystery of reality, mysterious because so many habits of social life and thinking continue to obscure it. In an April 1957 letter to White, Kerouac credits him as an initiator of this poetics—for which the author has the highest ambitions, even half a year before the publication of On the Road. He commends his friend for “start[ing] a whole new movement of American literature” in 1951 with the suggestion of sketching.32 This comment is part of a decades-long conversation with White, a prize-winning architect whom Kerouac first met at Columbia, about art, literature, and aesthetics. As early as 1949, while working with Robert Giroux on editing The Town and the City and in search of a new, less conventionalizing aesthetics, Kerouac makes the following observation to White, which Gerald Nicosia has correctly identified as “perhaps the most important single statement of his literary theory.”33 Kerouac’s interest is in revealing the truth of reality, which convention, ideology, and the regularity of language tend to keep hidden, leaving the writer the task of revelation: For me the truth is not formularable, if such a word exists. For me the truth is rushing from moment to moment incomprehensible, ungraspable, but terribly clear. It rushes so fast across my disordered brain sometimes that I realize that I’m only a workman in an old motheaten sweater, complaining, sweating, hustling to catch a fresh dream, the fresh thought—a writer is a fisherman of the deep, with old, partially useful nets. All the gold that spills by my little thimble. The writer is the only guy who cares to bail and bail with his little thimble, and then in solitude hack away with the little chisel on the great iron mass….34

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Again, the important thing is that the writer recognizes that the writing process depends on a deep engagement between psyche and reality— as difficult as it may be to achieve, and as tenuous as the contact will remain—such that the psyche recognizes itself as part of reality, recognizes the movement of experience as a part, if a small one, of reality. Writing spontaneously entails an awareness of the fact that in order to capture the movement of reality—which is none other than time, but time as a duration of heterogeneous moments rather than a determinate measure with a clear beginning and end—the writer must allow language to become fully actualized as the relationship between mind and reality. The fact that sketching begins as an architectural practice, an apprehension of space, indicates Kerouac’s interest in spatializing language in order to accommodate the unexpected arrangements and occurrences that the passage of time entails. So conceived, language will overwhelm thought and reclaim its primordial openness—its refusal of formula—in the continual series of alterations that is time. Kerouac approaches certain notions from a text nearly contemporary with this writing: in his 1947 “Letter on Humanism,” Martin Heidegger speaks of “[t]he liberation of language from grammar,” one of the main tasks of poetry, a counteraction to the reduction of the world to objective reality. When narrowly conceived as technique, thought keeps reality separate from and subordinate to itself, instead of immersing itself in the world to allow the emergence of the latter’s fullness, an apprehension of Being;35 Heidegger defines Being as “It itself” (210). In his view, the availability of Being to human apprehension has everything to do with language, as he observes in the following: “Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Thinkers and poets are the guardians of this house” (217). Spontaneous prose is the recognition of mind and reality as in continual interaction, and consequently in continual alteration, from moment to moment, a phenomenon that Clark Coolidge describes as “the second to second matter transformation of world into mind.”36 In the process, mind and reality don’t remain strictly distinct. This notion leads Kerouac to the respectful critique of Proust he makes in the opening statement to Visions of Cody, distinguishing his own “remembrances” by saying that they “are written on the run”:37 treating the intense, revealing moments of time as available in retrospect rather than as they unfold is to do them an injustice, to distance them in the finitude of beginnings and endings.

The reality of words In a letter to Holmes of June 5, 1952, just three weeks after writing to Ginsberg about Visions of Cody, Kerouac pursues the idea of writing as a



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closer apprehension of reality insofar as it surpasses the temporal limitations of plot: [W]hat I am beginning to discover is something beyond the novel and beyond the arbitrary confines of the story…into the realms of the revealed Picture…revealed whatever…revealed prose…wild form, man, wild form. Wild form’s the only form that holds what I have to say—my mind is exploding to say something about every image and every memory in—I have now an irrational lust to set down everything I know….38 The domestication of both time and space through the “arbitrary confines of the story,” the establishment of a beginning and ending, only squelch literature’s engagement with reality; spontaneous prose actualizes that engagement. This isn’t an abandonment of literary form: Kerouac’s designation “wild form”—an aesthetic container of sorts, since it “holds what I have to say”—suggests that the form he chooses for his texts corresponds to and is constructed in the prose itself, not imposed from a set of formulas, conventions, or genres. That is, he recognizes that he must observe some limitations, since attempting to write down the entire flux of experience would generate an infinite text—along the lines of Borges’s Library of Babel, which, as a complete inventory of knowledge, is co-extensive in time and space with the universe, hence infinite and beyond all comprehension.39 If his mind is “exploding,” Kerouac also acknowledges that it is smaller, perhaps infinitely smaller, than the universe itself, and that his writing is bound at the very least by the size of his mind. That is, he must engage in some representation, some reduction of space. The limits go further: Kerouac affirms the irrationality of the desire to write down everything that passes through his mind. The time and space that writing demands, even the task of finding them in a hectic, mobile life, are obvious barriers. Sketching itself must keep to some kind of unity, and it is often the unity of moving from one point to another, even if these aren’t strictly speaking a beginning and an end. By making Visions of Cody a collage of sketches, Kerouac avoids unifying the text as a single narrative. However, despite the magnitude of the book’s subject matter, the narrative regularly returns to Cody Pomeray, the character closely based on Cassady: “On the Road took its turn from conventional narrative survey of road trips etc. into a big multi-dimensional conscious and subconscious character invocation of Neal in his whirlwinds,” writes Kerouac to Ginsberg (356). If the action is conceived as the life of Cassady, even “in his whirlwinds,” the book retains something akin to an Aristotelian unity of action. Of course, Kerouac counteracts this unity by assembling the book in atemporal association, following the logic of psychic processes, mainly dream and memory. In addition, he pushes against this unity by making Cody an allegorical figure of America: his name recalls William F. Cody,

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“Buffalo Bill,” who more than anyone is responsible for the voluminous mythology of American westward migration and expansion (Hrebeniak, 73). Announcing this dimension, Kerouac dedicates the initial publication of Visions of Cody in 1960 “to America, whatever that is,”40 a phrase reprinted in the 1972 complete publication, edited by Joyce Johnson. He presents America as without distinct limits, as vast and uncertain, as the space without firm identity that allows for the intersection and interaction of an indeterminate number of cultures. The prose of this book furthers the America of On the Road, simulating the geography of this space more than narratively delineating it; the writing pursues and yields unexpected, hidden spaces, of the sort that Deleuze, following Pascal Augé, terms an “espace quelconque,” “any-space-whatever.”41 In the wake of Proust, who allows the confines of temporal narrative to burst by bringing in all manner of strands of “lost time,” Kerouac extends the process into spatializations, rendering America as an exemplary place of such processes. Nonetheless, the length limitation of a publishable book—which frustrated Kerouac as early as the editing stages of The Town and the City42—are another consideration: he can only state his subject in so many words. Similarly, grammar remains a requirement: sentences must start and end—even if they run to great length, they must contain and constitute syntactic units. If they are following reality, following time and space, sentences must posit at least arbitrary beginnings and endings, progressions from one moment to another. Visions of Cody opens with the first sketch he did, the day after White made the suggestion. It stands out as the capture of a static moment as well as of the temporal motion that situates the moment: This is an old diner like the ones Cody and his father ate in, long ago, with that oldfashioned railroad car ceiling and sliding doors—the board where bread is cut is worn down fine as if with bread dust and a plane; the icebox (“Say I got some nice homefries tonight Cody!”) is a huge brownwood thing with oldfashioned pull-out handles, windows, tile walls, full of lovely pans of eggs, butter pats, piles of bacon—old lunchcarts always have a dish of sliced raw onions ready to go on hamburgs. Grill is ancient and dark and emits an odor which is really succulent, like you would expect from the black hide of an old ham or an old pastrami beef— (3) Kerouac wrote this sketch at a diner on Sutphin Boulevard, Jamaica, Queens (Johnson, 419), nowhere near the Midwestern and Western locations where Cassady had lived with his father. Through the extended simile of the description, the subjective addition of memory to the object of the New York diner, Kerouac overcomes the spatial confines of the site of sketching. He thus affirms that the object and the act of apprehension can’t



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be separated: this is just where description becomes sketching, where poetry and prose merge, where the poetic qualities of reality are thrown into relief. And it’s how Kerouac overcomes the limitations on his writing, which takes place in finite space and time yet opens onto an unlimited world. The meticulous description is modeled on a lengthy, one-take, slow cinematic pan, in which details appear plainly on screen in deep focus. Kerouac’s lifelong adoration of the cinema found its way into his aesthetics, and later in Visions of Cody he acknowledges cinema as a source of his conception of realism in prose. The first part of the section titled “Joan Rawshanks in the Fog” is a fifteen-page episode about watching a film shoot in San Francisco, organized around the star, Joan Rawshanks, a version of Joan Crawford (the film is Sudden Fear, directed by David Miller). Hunt provides exceptional analyses of this episode, signaling the ambivalence toward Hollywood cinema that Kerouac expresses through his narrator, Jack Duluoz: Hollywood is corporate and militaristic, aiming for marketable perfection (Hunt, Crooked, 155–66)43—but nonetheless, writes Kerouac, “it isn’t that Hollywood has won us with its dreams, it has only enhanced our wildest dreams, we the populace so strange and unknown, so uncalculable, eee…” (Visions of Cody, 286). Because of people’s unruly capacity for dreaming, he sees even commercial cinema as capable of pushing back restrictions on experiencing the world. Nicosia astutely takes note of remarks that Kerouac made in the wake of his work as a script synopsizer and his plans to write and sell his own scripts, while finishing The Town and the City and beginning On the Road (Nicosia, 274). Kerouac sees the power of cinema to push past moral tales of good and evil: “I don’t mean a mere Realism, something like a deepening of the facts that appear on the face of reality—that is, actuality.”44 Kerouac’s notions regarding cinema and realism are strikingly close to those of André Bazin, founding editor of the magazine Cahiers du cinéma. A contemporary of Kerouac, in the late 1940s and early 1950s Bazin was formulating the concepts that informed the film criticism he wrote prolifically until his untimely death in 1958 at age forty. For Bazin, the long take in deep focus is the shot of choice for its capacity to reveal reality; like Kerouac, he regards cinema as particularly effective at this revealing, observing that “depth of focus brings the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality.”45 Bazin praises Orson Welles and the Italian neorealist filmmakers for the tendency “to give back to the cinema a sense of the ambiguity of reality” that it lacked under the tutelage of shooting and editing conventions that divide up and circumscribe objects.46 Much along the lines of Bazin, Kerouac had the highest appreciation for Welles: in Vanity of Duluoz, in which film viewing regularly punctuates life experience, after seeing Citizen Kane in late 1941, Jack Duluoz says, “I wanted to be a genius of poetry in film like Welles.”47 However, there’s a notable difference between Kerouac and Bazin on cinematic realism. As “objective” as the camera may be (in a 1945 essay,

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“The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin puns on the French word for camera lens, objectif), and as much as it seems that with photographic technology, “[f]or the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent,”48 the limit to this valorization of an unfettered image of the world is the subjective decision-making that inflects all shots with regard to such factors as exposure and camera placement.49 In contrast, Kerouac is aware of the material limitations of image-making, an awareness he brings to the corresponding capacities of writing. But rather than restricting the apprehension of reality, the intervention of the filmmaker or author may enhance it. As he narrates the film shoot, he observes that it is precisely through handled technique that Hollywood may achieve the expressive impact of reality: Joan Rawshanks, actually in the fog, but as we can see with our own everyday eyes in the fog all lit by kleig lights, and in a furcoat story now, and not really frightened or anything but the central horror on the crowd preparatory to running up the ramp, we’ve seen that face, ugh, she turns it away herself and rushes on with the scene, for a moment we’ve all had a pang of disgust, the director however seems pleased; he sucks on his red lollipop. (282) The contrast is pronounced between the banality of watching the shoot in the crowd—“our everyday eyes in the fog all lit by kleig lights”—and the awareness of the emotional impact that this technology, in filming the elements in the scene, will induce in spectators—“the central horror,” “that face, ugh…we’ve all had a pang of disgust.” All this takes place in the smug professionalism of everyday Hollywood, as the “pleased” director “sucks on his red lollipop.” In the sketch that opens Visions of Cody, the scene in the diner, Kerouac acknowledges the limitations of his technique, borrowed from cinema, to let reality emerge untouched by human hands. He inserts deliberately personal statements, such as the parenthetical quotation that further links these details to Cody and his father, to the difficult life conditions that make homefries an exciting dietary addition, as well as evaluative adjectives such as lovely and succulent. Of necessity Kerouac presents the details in the order in which the writer sees them and chooses to present them on the page.50 A component of the subjective limitations of the writer—which one may more aptly describe as the writer’s spatiotemporal situation with respect to the details she or he is relating—is the materiality of the writing itself, the instrumentation the author employs in arranging the pieces of language in which mind and matter run into each other and obliterate any strict distinction between them. In the case of sketching, which Kerouac



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usually did in pencil, the limitation is the size of his pages, most often in a notebook small enough to carry everywhere with ease. He observes this limitation, in fact making it part of his process, most evidently in Book of Sketches, which he began in 1952. Initially writing in a series of pocket notebooks, when he typed the book in 1959 he preserved the line breaks in the handwritten texts, determined by the dimensions of the page.51 Although these breaks mark the mostly short texts as poetry—in 2006 they were published as such in the Penguin Poets series—Kerouac adds this haiku below the handwritten title of the typescript: (Proving that sketches aint Verse) But only what is52 This doesn’t mean that what follows is, say, prose as distinct from poetry, but rather that the kind of writing in these pages is a presentation of reality that is effectively part of it. The notebook is an element of the situation in which the writer finds himself, and the size of the pages demands a versification that indicates this participation. Maintaining it is a means of carrying the reality along with the words, not allowing literature to become hermetic. Kerouac further writes the book by typing it: “Printed Exactly As They Were Written/On the Little Pages in the Notebooks/I Carried in My Breast Pocket 1952/Summer to 1954 December,” he writes on the title page (xiii). In so doing, he allows the typewriter to turn the sketches into poems that preserve the visible signs of their contact with reality and that also depict the flux of language as it moves across different social and cultural spaces.53 Recognizing the phenomenon that Nietzsche identified when in 1882 he typed, “Our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts,”54 Kerouac understands thought as engaging with, integrating itself into, and functioning as part of reality, adapting and shaping itself according to the materials it encounters. This procedure stands in contrast to another set of observations in experimental poetics, that of Charles Olson in “Projective Verse” (1950): in attempting to free verse from the “closed” or “non-projective” mode in which print placed it as early as the Renaissance, Olson claims speech as the source of poetry. He insists that the physicality, the materiality of speech, is in breath, and hence that line length should be determined by the duration of a breath.55 Olson’s position isn’t nostalgic— he sees the typewriter as a poet’s means to “indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends,” to “record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work.”56 His notion of poetry as breath has everything to do with its relation to the body as situated in the physical

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world and the role of poetry in revealing reality.57 However, by locating the origin of verse in human breath, Olson isn’t accounting for the full material engagement between mind and things that takes place in writing as Kerouac conceives it, according to which reality itself takes precedence over the autonomy and willed integrity of the human being.58 Typing is an important part of Kerouac’s procedure, but it works in tandem with observing, breathing, speaking, handwriting, and ultimately printing. His conception is a capacious response to his interest in the ways that some social and cultural spaces may entirely overwhelm and obscure others; the task of his writing is to undo this suppression. Kerouac describes writing as a humbling experience, a bodily exertion before the vagaries and complexities of reality. From the 1949 letter to White: “It rushes so fast across my disordered brain sometimes that I realize that I’m only a workman in an old motheaten sweater, complaining, sweating, hustling to catch a fresh dream, the fresh thought.” He tells Ginsberg that one should “never overdo [sketching], you should normally get pooped in fifteen minutes’ straight scribbling” (letter to Ginsberg 1952, 356). In these statements, Kerouac is by no means disregarding the importance of voice and breath to poetry—his blues books are sequences of choruses and he returns to the description of writing as “blowing.” But his observation that writing itself is the site of interaction with reality is rather a recognition that speech and writing can’t be separated, that writing and speech, though distinct, mutually inform each other: rhythmical in its movements, speech relies on prior patterns, as a kind of writing, and writing responds to the newness and inventiveness, the momentary upsurge of speech. Both having specific materiality, spoken and written words can become each other. As Clark Coolidge puts it in Now It’s Jazz, a splendid book that is as critical as it is creative, about the critical force of Kerouac’s creativity, “Words, then, are fresh solids of the just heard” (55).59

Moments of language Kerouac famously laid out the “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” in the short piece of this title, initially published in Black Mountain Review in 1957, which he supplemented with “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose” a year and a half later in Evergreen Review. These are quite familiar material in scholarship, but they bear reconsideration in light of the foregoing remarks. Striking in “Essentials” is the systematic, analytical presentation of the articles, even as he proposes a procedure that, in its refusal of the prescriptive ordering of reality, could seem on superficial reading to be rejecting order altogether. He begins:



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Set Up. The object is set before the mind, either in reality, as in sketching (before a landscape or teacup or old face) or is set in the memory wherein it becomes the sketching from memory of a definite image-object.60 The elements of the procedure are mind and object. He presents the mind as capable of apprehending reality through close engagement: this conception of the mind places it in reality, as part of it. Both mind and object are parts of the process; it is not as though spontaneous prose is a mere “objective” depiction, since it involves mental operations, nor, conversely, a subjective arrangement of language, as it depends on this interaction between the two spheres. If the mind draws the object from memory, it does so in a way that respects the integrity of the object—indeed memory appears to be a reverence before objects that have come and gone in the movement of time. Kerouac then moves from a static consideration of the elements of the procedure to a basic sketch of its dynamic, addressing the dimension of time on which he places so much importance in On the Road and Visions of Cody: Procedure. Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret ideawords, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image. (69) The expression “time being of the essence” that he fits into this article suggests that speed is necessary to the process in order to keep up with the movement of reality, reality understood as involving both mind and object. Segments of time are none other than segments of reality, and the language that takes place and takes shape in the sketching process is nothing else than the revelation and actualization of reality’s challenges. The “personal secret idea-words” are those words that the writer has at his or her disposal to render the odd and unexpected aspects of reality that come forth in the process—just as an improvising jazz musician responds to the material conditions of the performance, including the physical characteristics of his or her own body, as well as the situation in which the performance takes place.61 The stress on time, as is the case elsewhere in his work, also signals the momentary nature of the procedure, its close link to the unique characteristics of a particular moment, and its lack of recourse to the abstractions of ready formulas. In order to avoid the abstractions that language can lead to, with its inevitable history of regularizing usage, he builds his explanation of the procedure in the next article, a warning of sorts: Method. No periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas—but the

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vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musicians drawing breath between outblown phrases)—“measured phrases which are the essentials of our speech”—“divisions of the sounds we hear”— “time and how to note it down.” (69) If language will not simply follow, not simply imitate or represent reality, but rather move with reality and hence be integral to the continuum of mind and reality, it won’t insist on the set of conventions that dictate its divisions, nor will it order its own space for the purpose of stabilizing the space it engages and conveys. Language will instead arrive at its segments in accord with the needs of the situation, the moment, in which the revelation of reality takes place. Kerouac isn’t calling for a complete absence of commas, which he uses liberally in this text, or even colons; rather, he asks that language observe the contours of the reality in which it takes shape and whose shape it works to reveal. Dashes allow for an assembly of tentative segments of language, a recognition of their mobility and fragility, their tendency to obscure reality if they don’t leave room for continual, temporal responses to it. This is not, however, an insistence, along the lines of Olson, that written language follow the patterns of breath: Kerouac speaks of “rhetorical breathing,” which is specific to the materiality of writing, and hence to the responses of a written language related to but not subordinate to speech. He is approximating language and the body through simile (“as a jazz musician…”) and metaphor—but he is also speaking literally, since “rhetorical breathing” is what written language, in tandem with the writer, does in its movement and life. The dash is a separation that indicates a gap between segments, the spatial response of language to reality—just as it was for Nietzsche, whom Kerouac read extensively and frequently cites in his journals. Although available translations altered the dash Nietzsche used, from his readings Kerouac likely drew notions of what language and art might accomplish. For Nietzsche, liberation from the strictures of conventional language is also the overcoming of exhausted but persistent values and the strangle of morality itself: in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, after quoting the phrase “Nothing is true, all is permitted,” words that fascinated Kerouac,62 Zarathustra’s shadow states, “Oh where has all my goodness and all my shame and all my faith in the good gone! Oh where has that mendacious innocence that I once possessed gone, the innocence of the good and their noble lies!”63 And Kerouac would have found related aesthetic notions in other writers who were fond of the dash, including Laurence Sterne, Gustave Flaubert, and Paul Valéry, all of whom he was familiar with.64 In addition, his use of dashes bears close affinity with that of one of his favorite poets, fellow Massachusetts native Emily Dickinson.65 Dickinson’s dashes push against the ordering force borne by punctuation, in



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part by insisting on a pause between phrases so that the words of a poem may lead to connotative suggestions: a dash both frees and blends the phrases on either side of it, allowing them to make contact with meanings that stand at the edge of their semantic field in an interaction that is sometimes a clash.66 For Kerouac, in the improvisational setting of jazz, the breath that precedes the next phrase or segment is exactly what allows for the upsurge of the unexpected characteristics of reality, the beginning of their knowability through the temporal and spatial motions of prose. In this text as well as in the 1952 letter to Ginsberg I discussed above, as his principal source Kerouac identifies the “trance-writing” of W. B. Yeats (“Essentials,” 70; letter to Ginsberg, 356). Nonetheless, rather than the pagan-influenced occultism of Yeats’s 1925 A Vision, which involves, among other things, raising consciousness through communication with spirits,67 Kerouac’s phrasing seems to owe more to a different interpretation of nineteenth-century French critic Hippolyte Taine’s notion of automatic writing: that of André Breton in the first Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). In connection with the kind of writing that will bring unruly thoughts from the unconscious into consciousness, Breton advocates a certain mental disposition: “Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what you’ve written. The first sentence will come spontaneously, so compelling is the truth that with every passing second there is a sentence unknown to our consciousness which is trying to be heard.”68 Even as he credits Yeats in “Essentials,” Kerouac’s wording recalls Breton: Mental State. If possible write “without consciousness in semi-trance” (as Yeats’ later “trance writing”), allowing subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so “modern” language what conscious art would censor, and write excitedly, swiftly, with writingor-typing cramps, in accordance (as from center to periphery) with laws of orgasm, Reich’s “beclouding of consciousness.” Come from within, out—to relaxed and said. (70–1) Whether Kerouac ever read Breton’s text is of no importance. Although the latter’s name doesn’t figure in the indexes of either of the volumes of Kerouac’s letters or in those of the collections of his correspondence with Ginsberg and Johnson (a strange absence given his interest in his ancestral identification as a Breton), many in his circles, writers and artists suspicious of conventional approaches, would have been aware of surrealist ideas as a necessary point of reference in twentieth-century art and literature.69 It’s entirely sound to claim that Kerouac is engaging the same set of aesthetic and moral problems as Breton: these stem largely from psychoanalysis, the same vast framework of discourse70 that Wilhelm Reich engages,

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drawing from it a view of orgasm as the ecstasy whose power overwhelms repression.71 As I signaled in Chapters 1 and 2, Kerouac’s interest in Freud is patent in his explorations of the limits of the Oedipal model of cultural transmission; his search for an alternate schema, in both geography and writing, is precisely the effort to overcome psychic and social repression with the aim of releasing reality from its instituted representations. He is far from strict in his psychoanalysis, though, as is clear from his use of the term subconscious when, in this context, unconscious would be correct. Even as he misappropriates psychoanalysis, his procedure borrows from it critically and thus scrambles some of its major categories. This appreciation of psychoanalysis as well as its surrealist reinterpretation also informs Book of Dreams.72 In an offhand criticism of communism as restrictive and unimaginative, and hence as completely missing the point in the project of uniting humanity, Kerouac writes in his foreword, “And good because the fact that everybody in the world dreams every night ties all mankind together shall we say in one unspoken Union and also proves that the world is really transcendental which the Communists don’t believe because they think their dreams are ‘unrealities’ instead of visions of what they saw in their sleep” (xv). In opposing the visions of dreams to “unrealities,” he not only affirms the status of dreams as reality but also extends their vision function to everyday waking perception, in part through the close study that results from recording them. Thus he suggests that broad awareness and actualization of this function are central to the social interconnectedness of humanity, something he views as taking place in a transcendent realm that nonetheless inhabits the material world. And he finds that dreams crystallize the passage of time, the embodiment of events in time, so that writing them brings forth the necessity of writing in time: in the preface he writes, “Everybody interested in their dreams should use the method of fishing their dreams out in time before they disappear forever” (xvii—emphasis in text). And in a 1967 letter to Calvin Hall he states, “Dreams must be recorded as they come, spontaneously” (500), a remark on the embeddedness of dreams in reality that follows these observations: “My dreams (like yours) are fantastically real movies of what’s actually going on anyway.… ‘Free association’ of dreams are really road signs showing you to another location” (500). These notes seem part of the same program that Breton announces for surrealism, as a new artistic and literary movement in addition to a cultural revolution: “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak” (14—emphasis in text). As much as Kerouac and Breton might owe to psychoanalysis for their observations on the relationship between dreams and reality, they both differ from Freud’s classical dream analysis, an axiom of which is that in every case “a dream is the fulfillment of a wish,”73 a wish that in waking life must yield



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to the demands of reality. In the utopian situation that both Kerouac and Breton propose, in which dreams are ways of bringing out otherwise hidden parts of reality, they aren’t limited in this fashion: rather, wishing itself is reconfigured—the desire it embodies is creative and can affect the shape of the world. In their retooling of psychoanalysis, the two authors anticipate the broad critique by Deleuze and Guattari, who also draw on Reich and for whom desire and its images are revolutionary—it is continuously disruptive with respect to ordering and structuring systems, and it won’t be contained by the Oedipal restrictions that psychoanalysis in effect imposes on it. Dreams are always dreams of “wide open spaces,” of liberation from the limitations of ideologically and institutionally conditioned reality.74 A major difference between Kerouac and Breton on the importance of dreams is Kerouac’s rejection of communism and Breton’s explicit support, in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, for communist revolution (136–7). However, given the quite distinct versions of communism they faced, in Breton’s case one still idealized shortly after the Russian Revolution and, in Kerouac’s, one seen with disaffected cynicism following revelations in the early 1950s of Stalinist atrocities, in practice this difference doesn’t divide them greatly with regard to the social effectiveness of art. Kerouac holds the valorization of dreams to be a means to the emergence of worldwide community, with no specifics as to its character, whereas Breton insists on the necessity of material measures to make this happen: yet both authors look to a utopian site in which dreams inform reality and reality is all the more expansive through the acknowledgment that dreaming is part of it. Whatever their differences, it is important to recognize that Kerouac implicitly aligns his work with one of the major experimental literary practices of the twentieth century in the West and its goal of an invigorated social role for art and literature.

Minding sentences Kerouac also ties his work, mainly through statements of affinity to Joyce and Faulkner, with what may easily be identified as the related, other major experimental current of twentieth-century Western literature, stream-ofconsciousness writing. Although the term has seen all manner of uses, its initial sense in literary criticism, probably originating in May Sinclair’s 1918 review of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage,75 has to do with the textual depiction of mental activity, following William James’s formulations in Principles of Psychology (first published in 1890): Consciousness…does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the

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first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.76 Exemplars of the technique in modernist fiction are, of course, Richardson, Woolf, Joyce, and Faulkner.77 In “Essentials,” Kerouac characterizes sketching as “undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words” (69); in the 1952 letter to Ginsberg he says that “everything activates in front of you in myriad profusion, you just have to purify your mind and let it pour the words” (356). Besides that thought processes are the object of writing, they arise from activity outside consciousness so as to challenge psychic and social censorship—hence the combination of streamof-consciousness writing with an adaptation of surrealist automatic writing. His decision to pursue such a combination is evident in a 1945 note on his novel in progress in which he criticizes Joyce: In brief, Joyce did not exercise creative selectivity upon the stream of consciousness. I don’t speak here of any kind of censorship, neo-Puritan or otherwise. I speak of this kind of creative selectivity, the kind that lumps the multiverse trivialities in one universal pattern, puts it in its proper place, and explores in turn more exhaustively the creatively interpretive introspective mind, the trained subconscious.78 Kerouac finds the disorder of randomness in Joyce’s presentation (with the exception of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy that concludes Ulysses, which he cheekily terms a success), not the stronger disorder that disrupts conventional language and representation to become poetic. In his view, Joyce’s mistake is a failure to engage in a program of disruption that would bring material from outside consciousness through technique or “discipline.” That is, while writing The Town and the City—whose composition, he said in a 1968 interview, involved some principles of spontaneity79—he indicates his quest for a technique that combines the effects, broadly, of stream-ofconsciousness and automatic writing. Kerouac uses this combination of techniques both to depict mental activity—to offer a representation of its movements, pauses, turns, irregularities, and so on—and to express it, insofar as it disrupts and hinders the regularities and conventions of language. The difference is that in the case of depiction or representation there is an image of the activity, and in the case of expression one sees effects in the matter of the writing: breaches in syntax that manifest themselves as dashes; altered, extravagant, even incorrect syntax that turn up as long, sinuous sentences; use of words chosen for their unusual or striking quality. An excellent example of the latter in Visions of Cody, one he was proud of, is the following phrase:



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“the charging restless mute unvoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power into the route” (391). The excess of adjectival modifiers stands in contrast to the object of description, the muteness of the road, the road that doesn’t speak without the language the writer brings to it. But at the same time the writer’s language stems from the movement that occurs on the road, movement that manifests itself as “keening”: a wailing for the loss of the dead (borrowed partly from Joyce),80 the nostalgia permeating Kerouac’s depictions of American scenes in both On the Road and Visions of Cody, but also something keen, sharp, piercing, something moving ahead and, in affirmation of life, leaving the dead behind. The motion is also a repetition, “route” a slant-rhyme with “road” as well as its French translation. This vital movement is both a pause—a “seizure”—and a bursting force: “tarpaulin power.” His pride in this sentence focused especially on the word “tarpaulin,” its most poetic word because it is semantically out of place. In the 1952 letter to Ginsberg he explains: This is obviously something I had to say in spite of myself…tarpaulin, too, don’t be frightened, is obviously the key…man, that’s a road. It will take 50 years for people to realize that that’s a road. In fact I distinctly remember hovering over the word “tarpaulin” (even thought of writing tarpolon or anything) but something told me that “tarpaulin” was what I’d thought, “tarpaulin” was what it is…. (356–7—emphasis in text) Kerouac insists on the force of the word itself, its materiality, its autonomy, its motion on the road, all of which are the flux occurring in the interaction of mind and reality that becomes writing. Writing writes words and doesn’t simply copy the world. In making the sound of the spoken word and appearance of the written word, he distances it from reference and places it in the realm of language that isn’t subordinate to either reality or thought in a relationship of representation. Recalling this letter more than twenty years later, Ginsberg explains the word choice: “Even Jack at first didn’t know why he used that tarpaulin adjective, it arrived like Shakespeare from his magic mind, but t’was the tarpaulin covering perishable lumber foods in the backs of haul trucks flapping he was referring to here.”81 A word that Kerouac treasured for its poetic force, a professorial Ginsberg places back in the realm of reference. At the same time, in signaling the omission of the chain of signification that links the word tarpaulin to objects that might have been on the road, he also explicates the word’s poetic status, its remove from direct depiction: Ginsberg further says that the sentence “brought forth informational images in unheardof combinations (Burroughs later had to cut up prose pages with a razor & rearrange reassemble his sentences to get the same unexpected mysteriously logical exactitudes, like ‘wind hand caught in the door’—) the

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rational (‘academic’) dumb or stupidly logical mind could never assemble from its storehouse of wisdom” (427). In comparing Kerouac’s procedure to the cut-up method—which Burroughs borrowed from his collaborator Brion Gysin, who in turn discovered it as a variation on the surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse game, an automatic writing that leaves word choice to chance82—Ginsberg recognizes the disruptive, even revolutionary character of Kerouac’s prose experiments. These combine a depiction of reality, “informational images,” with a challenge to the imposing conventions of representation. Starting with The Town and the City, in his practice Kerouac combines a representational with an expressive poetics (see above, Chapter 1). In not limiting itself to the representation of thought and reality, writing addresses pieces of them so as to provide an idea of their vastness and of the need to remain in motion. If writing settles on a particular image of reality, it falls into simplification and betrayal. Kerouac’s recommendation in “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” on “no revisions (except obvious rational mistakes, such as names or calculated insertions in act of not-writing but inserting)” (427) reflects the effort to preserve the image that writing makes of motion without betraying it. Kerouac allows for, even insists on, the addition of other pieces of text, also composed spontaneously, in putting a larger text together. Although in assembling a pile of sketches to compose Visions of Cody Kerouac effectively abandons linear narrative, he preserves some linearity within most of the sketches: that is, for the purpose of bringing bits of reality into contact with the text, he doesn’t altogether relinquish representation. The assembly of sketches further disrupts the linearity that takes place in individual sketches. The combination of unruly strings of words that nonetheless signify something, on the one hand, and the gaps within and between sentences and between segments of text, on the other, points to the unfathomability that thought encounters, the challenge of reality. The character of Kerouac’s texts is that of sublimity, and, to borrow from the still-pertinent texts of the 1980s that somewhat belatedly defined the postmodern, they present the unpresentable.83

Improvising speech Visions of Cody keeps tending, then, toward the anticipated discovery that drives the narrative of On the Road, the thing that Kerouac names IT. IT also turns up in Visions of Cody—briefly, maybe because the entire book, the new version of On the Road, now aims at unfathomability rather than positing its discovery as the end of the quest coinciding with the narrative. And it only comes up in connection with one of Kerouac’s principal aesthetic models, jazz:



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“What’s the IT, Cody?” I asked him that night. “We’ll all know when he hits it—there it is! he’s got it!—hear?—see everybody rock? It’s the big moment of rapport all around that’s making him rock; that’s jazz; dig him, dig her, dig this place, dig these cats, this is all that’s left, where else can you and go Jack?” (351) IT happens when music enacts a bodily transformation that erodes the social and psychic limitations of individuality along with the restrictions on apprehending reality. In this scene, reprising the San Francisco jazz show of On the Road, Cody continues, focusing on the alto saxophonist: “He’s the kid who sleeps all day in his grandmother’s,” yelled Cody above the fury, “he learned to play in the woodshed, dig him? see his kind? he’s Tom Watson that’s who he is, Tom Watson learned to blow and go continually and cast off the negatives and completely relaxed, though not hung, in, or behind, bumkicks of any kind, realizing, also, as, for instance, there’s what I’m saying, but no, wait, Jack and listen to me, now I’m gonna lay down on you the truth—but listen to him, listen to him. It, remember? It! It! He’s got it, see? That’s what it—means, or I mean to explain, earlier, see, and all that and everything, Yes!” (352) Kerouac conveys the sound and rhythm of Cody’s voice. In its manner of creating texture and meaning, this voice resembles both the jazz improvisation that it describes and the prose that it is part of and supports: tentative, multidirectional, stopping and restarting, it conveys less through clarity of syntax and meaning than through motion, assembly, and gaps— as such it expresses a definition of IT at least as much as it states one. Kerouac later credited Cassady’s letter writing—“all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed”—as a major source of the “spontaneous style of On the Road” (“Interview,” 101). He saw Cassady as in many ways an embodiment of authentic Americanness, but this authenticity subsists primarily in a use of language that allows for an openness of expressivity. The writing in question is the now-famous “Joan Anderson Letter” (102) of December 1950, which, though of great interest to Kerouac, is not quite the “holy grail of the Beat Generation,” as some of the sensationalist news accounts of its recent discovery stated,84 since it mainly exemplified something that he had for some time been immersed in elaborating. In order to capture Cassady’s speech in interaction with his own as a document of the formation of the written language of his books, Kerouac includes a lengthy passage in Visions of Cody (119–247—128 of the novel’s 398 pages, nearly one-third) that transcribes conversations recorded

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on tape over five nights. The dialogue takes place mainly between Cody and Jack Duluoz, also including Evelyn (the character based on Carolyn Cassady) and a few others (Kerouac, “Interview,” 67). This section of the book is titled “Frisco: The Tape,” and the one following it “Imitation of the Tape”—that is, Kerouac made the effort to import speech into his writing in order to underscore the latter’s role with respect to the production of words. The conversation starts in medias res and meanders in the fashion of a real-life conversation, hindering the imposition of narrative. It incorporates pauses, circumlocutions, backtracks, abrupt changes of subject, the kind of verbosity that often accompanies marijuana smoking, and at times sheer incoherence and effectively cacophony—“Babbleflow,” as Coolidge calls it, “just letting it completely go on” (55), or as Kerouac says in “Essentials,” “infantile pileup of scatalogical buildup” (69). The inclusion of this transcription, followed by an imitation that seeks to capture its textures, is part of Kerouac’s quest for an autonomy of language, that is, its liberation from the finitude of representation, by means of machinery from which subjective intervention is removed. However, even in aiming for this ideal, Kerouac acknowledges its unattainability: in the stage directions he adds to the speech—the transcript resembles a drama and so calls for certain conventions—he sometimes indicates a movement that the tape recorder obviously didn’t capture, such as Cody “demurely looking downward” about four pages into the dialogue (123). Moreover, the use of the recorder entails a moment of decision to turn it on—the segments of speech are not randomly chosen but rather circumscribed in the convention necessitated by the interaction of human being and machine. The interlocutors remain aware of the recorder; they regularly affirm that the knowledge affects their speech. Even the digressions, ostensibly parts of “natural speech,” at least sometimes reveal the instrumentation: CODY. Do whatever you say (disposable). Get high, get h-i-g-h…. See…I know you got the recorder on, if I…ah, even if I…(laughing) damn him JACK. Huh? CODY. No, that’s awright, man, that makes it alright. I just didn’t want to have you under any false impressions, you know, YOU know what I’m saying, you know because like if I acted as if I didn’t know it was on, why then, there’d be an ambiguity of…of, ah, ulterial motives, drooning, you know, ’cause you’d be in the process of getting me around under the machine and I’d be in the process of, ah, saying, like for examply, the reading of the manuscript, see, wal, hmm, wait a minute—I lost it (laughing) (131–2)



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Efforts at brushing the problem aside seem ineffective, especially since they’re captured on tape: CODY. Well, now I’ve really got to think. See the reason I don’t stop to think is because I’m aware of the machine, so I can’t stop to think— JACK. No, I know—fuck the machine, man! (194) Even Kerouac’s most ambitious attempt to push the expressivity of speech against his writing runs into at least some conventionalization, some restriction that occurs through technologies of representation.85 In the 1968 interview, Kerouac speaks somewhat disparagingly of the tape recorder technique: “[I]t really doesn’t come out right, well, with Neal and with myself, when all written down and with all the Ahs and the Ohs and the Ahums and the fearful fact that the damn thing is turning and you’re forced not to waste electricity or tape.” However, this is less a dismissal of the method—citing Marshall McLuhan on the increased importance of orality, Kerouac states that he “might have to resort to that eventually” (103–4)—than a recognition of the tension between speech and writing, of the uncomfortable pressure that speech places on writing as the latter takes its generic recourse to regularization.86 What Kerouac continually discovers in his writing, what he affirms in his poetics, is that writing can’t abandon its representational function altogether, that it must depend on the protocols of letters themselves, orthography, syntax, and semantics if it will be effective: at the same time, in its aggressive confrontation with reality, writing must be ready to stretch these toward the breaking point, to make them as flexible and open to alteration as possible. The task of writing is to accommodate the shifting forms of reality as well as to call attention to its own limitations in accommodating reality.

Writing across languages and ages Kerouac’s approach is in keeping with the cultural struggles he faced from the beginning of his writing career, in which a minor culture must find a way to bend the major culture and language in order to affirm itself. In Visions of Cody he returns to the problem through translingual writing, something he mainly avoids in The Town and the City and On the Road, novels that are more conventional and hence more compliant with the pressures of assimilation. Toward the end of Visions of Cody he places the longest passage in French in his published work, a French that challenges not only the English alongside which it appears, but also, in its irregularities, the metropolitan version of the language. This passage, about half of which I

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will quote, also contains a fair amount of nonsense, mainly inspired by the work of François Rabelais, whom Kerouac names: Rabelais responded to the increasing standardization of the French language during the century following the invention of the printing press, as well as the proliferation of books and educational institutions, by showing that language was as capable of deflecting as conveying meaning. To that end and several others, Rabelais filled his pages with scatology, sex, and dirty insults often cast as rambling colloquialisms. Kerouac introduces the parallel passage when Jack is narrating a long, disconnected description of Cody, pausing to say “let’s hear what my French-Canadian side has to say about him.” He thus signals the importance of transculturalism in relation to the figure of America that Cody is: “Si tu veux parlez apropos d’Cody pourquoi tu’l fa—tu m’a arretez avant j’ai eu une chance de continuez, ben arrete donc. Écoute, j’va t’dire—lit bien. Il faut t’u te prend soin—attend?— donne moi une chance—tu pense j’ai pas d’art moi français?— ca?—idiot—crapule—tas’d marde—enfant shienne—batard— cochon—buffon—bouche de marde, granguele, face laite, shienculotte, morceau d’marde, susseu, gros fou, envi d’chein en culotte, ca c’est pire—en face! fam toi!—crashe! varge!—frappe! mange!—foure!—foure moi’l Gavin! envalle Céline, mange l’e rond ton Genêt, Rabelais? El terra essuyer l’coup au derriere. Mais assez, c’est pas interessant. C’est pas interessant l’maudit Francais. Écoute, Cody y plein d’marde; les lé allez; il est ton ami, les le songée; yé pas ton frere, yé pas ton pere, yé pas ton ti Saint Michel, yé un gas, ye marriez, il travaille, v’as t’couchez l’autre bord du monde, v’a pensant dans la grand nuit Europeene.”

“If you want to talk about Cody why do you do it—you stopped me before I had a chance to continue, stop won’t you! Listen, I’m going to tell you—read well: you have to take care of yourself, hear it?—give me a chance—you think I’ve no art me French?— eh? idiot—crapule—piece of shit—sonofabitch—bastard— pig—clown—shitmouth—long mouth—ugly face, shitpants, piece of shit, sucktongue, big fool, wantashitpants, that’s worse—right in the face! shut up!—spit!—hit it! (varge!)—hit! (frappe)—eat it! fuck! scram me Gavin!—swallow Céline, eat him raw your Genêt, Rabelais? He woulda wiped your neck on his ass. But enough, it’s not interesting. It’s not interesting: goddamn French. Listen, Cody is full of shit; let him go; he is your friend, let him dream; he is not your brother, he’s not your father, he’s not your Saint Michael, he’s a guy, he’s married, he works, go sleeping on the other side of the world, go thinking in the great European night.” (362)



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Of the three French authors he names here, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jean Genet, and Rabelais, Kerouac gives the most credit to the latter for the language and substance of the passage: in off-French he writes of Cody, “El terra essuyer l’coup au derriere,”87 which he translates in literal word-for-word fashion as the colloquial “He woulda wiped your neck on his ass.” This is a clear allusion to Rabelais’s Gargantua (1535): in one episode, the young giant named in the book’s title seeks the very best torche-cul, or “ass-wipe,” experimenting with all manner of devices, through his inventiveness impressing his father, King Grandgousier; Gargantua finally settles on the neck of a goose for the delightful sensation of its downy softness and warm flesh.88 Kerouac writes this passage as part of the “Imitation of the Tape,” and as such it is in the form of a dialogue, an exchange between the narrator and his “French-Canadian side,” multiplied by two through the parallel translation into English. The juxtaposition of the two versions also puts them in dialogue with each other. And the entire passage conducts a dialogue with Rabelais, recalling another part of Gargantua that Kerouac explicitly reworks in Visions of Gerard, a drunken conversation of unattributed voices in which curses mix with lascivious comments and French with English.89 Kerouac’s affinity with Rabelais stems in part from the latter’s celebration of bodily pleasures, which often takes the form of carnivalesque versions of religious rites. An example is a pun by the monk hero Frère Jean (whom in a student paper from about 1941 Kerouac lauds)90 that recasts the communion, “le service divin,” “the divine service,” as “le service du vin,” “the wine service.”91 Kerouac saw such an alteration of the communion rite into a festive community event as integral to Québécois culture: David Amram recalls Kerouac saying, “Well, Davey, toasting is a part of communion. The neighborhood bars were like a second church to all of us in Lowell” (94). This rapprochement between Rabelais and FrenchCanadian culture is akin to the insistence on the close affinity between Québec and medieval and early Renaissance France, which according to the nineteenth-century clerical ideology made the French of North America the true guardians and missionaries of Catholicism (see above, Introduction, 12). But Kerouac extends this insistence to the farcical, celebratory, and carnal aspects of the late Middle Ages and early modernity. In so doing, he takes the supposedly “decayed” language of Québécois/New England patois and places it in the tradition of French literature, the very institution that supposedly guards against decay: his writing hence engages in a dual movement of dignifying the everyday language and colloquializing the venerable one, in a utopian equalization of the different linguistic registers as well as their subject matter. The authors he most frequently invoked in this effort are fifteenth-century poet François Villon,92 who wrote about sex, crime, drunkenness, learning, and social hierarchies, among other things, and Rabelais, to whose work he repeatedly compared Dr. Sax,93

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the masterpiece of the Lowell novels (subject of the following chapter). In the above-quoted passage from Visions of Cody, Kerouac makes the Rabelaisian dialogue a further occasion to fragment both his own individuality and Cody’s, turning them into beings in ongoing flux who remain engaged with and open to the reality that they move through: the bilingual dialogue takes place between several of Jack Duluoz’s “sides,” nomadic selves. Moreover, within each side of the passage, translingualism occurs: like the language Kerouac knew in Québécois Massachusetts, the French is pushed by anglicisms such as “donne moi une chance,” “give me a chance”; also by spellings that both reflect the vernacular, irregular status of the language and signal its constant encounters with English, such as “shienne” and “crashe” instead of “chienne” and “crache.” The English similarly avows its proximity to French: the translation is rudimentary, word-forword, in the style sometimes called “translationese”—like the French, it is quite comprehensible but relentlessly unidiomatic, containing phrases such as “you think I’ve no art me French?” and “scram me Gavin!,” as well as “crapule,” which doesn’t exist in standard English. Also, in its cacophonous clutter of two irregular, anti-institutional languages, the passage is a superb example of the “infantile pileup of scatalogical buildup” from “Essentials” (69), not only in describing Cody as “full of shit” but also in being full of shit itself: the words marde (transcribing the Québécois pronunciation of merde) and shit recur, and the entire segment is a sustained allusion to Rabelais, in whose texts shit is central, along with all lower bodily functions. Ultimately the passage contains a lot of words that don’t end up saying much about Cody: the Cody that’s full of shit turns out to be the text itself, Visions of Cody. Kerouac renders his writing as a bodily function that social decorum keeps out of sight but is nonetheless essential to life; his writing reveals those hidden aspects of life that give discomfort but constitute a challenge to remain open to the troublesome flow of reality. What the passage does say about Cody is that he is the sort of disconnected, unrooted, fluid creature who may apprehend vastness: despite Jack’s claim that “Cody is the brother that I lost” (318), which comes with a vacillating explanation, “yé pas ton frere, yé pas ton pere, yé pas ton ti Saint Michel / he is not your brother, he’s not your father, he’s not your Saint Michael.” Especially in Visions of Gerard, Kerouac portrays the death of his older brother Gerard at age nine as part of his loss of connection to Québec and French-Canadian culture. Here his French-Canadian side affirms that Cody, by way of whom he is discovering America, isn’t that brother—also not the father through whom culture and morality are transmitted, not Saint Michael, the embodiment of French medieval militant Catholicism. Rather, “il est ton ami, les le songée / he is your friend, let him dream”: he is the companion who will dream and hence push back the boundaries that filter and hide reality. Cody is the freely dancing creature



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who staunchly challenges the Oedipal structures governing society and culture, who also permits an opening to the discoveries that Kerouac will make in his writing. And his detour into French for the purpose of destabilizing literary English in Visions of Cody signals that these discoveries are rooted in material reality, in good part concerning the translingual, transcultural make-up of American society that dominant ideology and literary convention would obscure to the point of strangling. At the same time, Jack’s French-Canadian side takes recourse to its French side, advising Jack to withdraw from the Cody who won’t offer a connection to the past and patrimony, rather to look for these, if they are important, “in the great European night.” But in leaving him without the rootedness of European culture that a display case of well-bound books by authors like Céline, Genet, Villon, and Rabelais might convey, Cody offers Jack the revelation of reality that may frequently be overwhelming: the task of spontaneous prose, as it approaches this Cody of a huge and uncertain America, is to perform such revealing. Although it’s not incorrect to understand spontaneity as bearing on the present moment, the moment that Kerouac strives to engage with is heterogeneously composed, extending into the past without grounding itself there, reaching for the future as it opens possibilities; it also incorporates geographic spaces where multiple languages are spoken, all elements interacting and colliding. His writing participates in this activity, and in so doing it reveals the astonishing complexity of the present moment and that of the materiality of the cultures that pass through it. Beginning with a French-Canadian background that remains as seductively comforting as disruptively elusive, Kerouac extends his traversal of languages and cultures to a broad apprehension of the world. Nonetheless, at regular intervals in his career, he returns to Francophone New England as a home that in its displacement resists the status of home, a site of cultural intermeshing and agitation. In the next chapter, I will explore how Kerouac conducts his explorations through the fantastical novel of his hometown, Dr. Sax.

4 Movements of return

Shortly after finishing the manuscript that became Visions of Cody, Kerouac began Dr. Sax: Faust Part Three, the novel to which he likely refers when he writes to Rosaire Dion-Lévesque in December 1950 that his work-in-progress addresses the “French-Canadian story in America.”1 In the same May 1952 letter from Mexico City in which he enthusiastically announces to Ginsberg the completion of the new version of On the Road, Kerouac writes, “I have ‘Doctor Sax’ ready to go now….”2 That is, after his thoroughgoing exploration of the capacity of writing to engage in the motion it describes, he states his interest in returning to his novel of settlement, the book that will document the French Canadians of Lowell—already, the very idea of such a novel suggests the unsettlement of this exile community. The novel is “ready to go”: like the two versions of On the Road, it will be an exercise in motion, an immersion in writing, presumably on the basis of notes, prior drafts (there are no fewer than five partial versions of Dr. Sax in the New York Public Library’s Kerouac Papers, dating from as early as 1943),3 and memory. Memory is particularly important; he will use the sketching technique to bring out details from the past. In his letter to Ginsberg, Kerouac continues, naming one of his sources for the title character, the figure of the Shadow (also known as Lamont Cranston) from the pulp magazines and radio show, whose name indicates obscurity as well as mystery, the latter with religious connotations: “or ‘The Shadow of Doctor Sax,’ I’ll simply blow on the vision of the Shadow in my 13th and 14th years on Sarah Ave. Lowell, culminated by the myth itself as I dreamt it in Fall 1948…angles of my hoop-rolling boyhood as seen from the shroud” (355). In keeping with his notions of the improvisational character of spontaneous prose, he mixes factual details with the work of imagination, the myth- and vision-making that he has designed his writing to achieve. (He refers to an early conception of Dr. Sax from November 1948, a story of childhood in which he would “rediscover my real voice,”

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the voice he believed he’d lost while finishing The Town and the City with the expectations of the New York literary world in mind.)4 It isn’t accidental that he wrote to Ginsberg from Mexico City, the same place where in 1950 he read Yvonne Le Maître’s review of The Town and the City, in his letter to her declaring his intention of one day writing a French-Canadian novel.5 Although what followed this announcement, as I discussed in Chapter 2, was La Nuit est ma femme and Sur le chemin, it’s sound to consider Dr. Sax as an extended part of this plan. The fact that it’s mainly in English (with a series of translingual complications) is integral to the project; unlike the two French-language novels, it takes place mostly in French-Canadian New England and explores this settlement in exile. It is the first of Kerouac’s so-called “Lowell trilogy,” which includes Maggie Cassidy and Visions of Gerard, both of which he was also planning in 1952. These three books are often perceived as a departure from his preoccupation with the road, but this is a false distinction: his settled “home” turns out to be just as much permeated by exile—linguistic, geographic, and cultural—as his road novels. Despite the fact that he’s writing Dr. Sax mainly in English, in a November 1952 letter to Ginsberg he says of the process, “At this moment I’m writing directly from the French in my head.”6 The English of the novel is in regular contact with French, in keeping with the cultural intersections, overlaps, and shifts that Kerouac finds in Lowell, the hometown tied into movement. His translingualism, regular travels, and sketching all work together to produce this maelstrom of a text that more than any of his works so far is an attempt to bring writing to bear on an exposure of lived reality as apprehended through both observation and memory; and just as importantly, this reality is specifically the life of the lower extension of French Canada that was Franco-American New England.

Memories of writing At the outset of Dr. Sax, Kerouac announces the close tie between the process of sketching and the depiction of Franco-American cultural reality. To emphasize the singularity of this reality, to resist the assimilationism of representing it according to established literary protocol, he brings to the process the imaginative work of dreaming: The other night I had a dream that I was sitting on the sidewalk on Moody Street, Pawtucketville, Lowell, Mass., with a pencil and paper in my hand saying to myself “Describe the wrinkly tar of this sidewalk, also the iron pickets of Textile Institute, or the doorway where Lousy and you and G. J.’s always sittin and dont stop to think of words when



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you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better—and let your mind off yourself in this work.”7 Kerouac makes the classic declaration that he is beginning to write, in a revision of the epic invocation of the Heavenly Muse, Calliope—he calls instead on his own writing apparatus such that memory will appear to him and be recorded. Dr. Sax is very much an epic, a chunk of its plot concerning an apparent struggle between good and evil—though these categories pose considerable confusion. Kerouac draws liberally on the epic tradition, in the way that he understood it early in his career: the literary mode that participates in a rush of events by capturing the fineness of its details, the “epic-lyrical,” in contrast to the “dramatic-moral” that works from prescription in an ordering and hierarchization of reality (see above, Chapter 1, 26–7). His replacement of Calliope, one of the daughters of Mnemosyne or Memory, with his own memory and writing practice signifies a further break with the the moral order through a plunge into the realm of the concretely human. He further emphasizes the tie to the classical epic tradition through the novel’s subtitle, Faust Part Three: before writing Faust Parts One and Two, Goethe participated, during his student days, in the early romantic rediscovery of Homer. In his fictionalized autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–32), which Kerouac read at age twenty-four and regarded as a major influence,8 Goethe writes that Homer offered the young Sturm und Drang poets a source for descriptions of nature and, in contrast to “a strained and bombastic heroism” that they had previously seen in the ancient epics, “the reflected truth of an age-old present.”9 That is, through running descriptions, they found a contact with reality that raised it from the far-flung past into the living present, an opening onto the world with which to reinvigorate literature in the present. Moreover, these writers’ other major revival was that of Shakespeare, who “prepared us for worldviews and intellectual pleasures that were higher, freer, and as true as they were poetic.”10 In Faust Goethe offers, in the wake of these early literary encounters, a model for the deliberate blending and blurring of epic and tragedy that were important to Kerouac from early in his career, models for which he also cited Homer and Shakespeare.11 Integral to this challenge to generic convention, which Kerouac assumes in Faust Part Three, is the humanization of experience, specifically a recognition of divinity as immanent, following Goethe’s characterization of his tragic hero’s redemption at the end of Faust Part Two as a human matter. For Kerouac, at the same time, humanity becomes transcendent as it discovers its intertwining with divinity. Beginning the novel as a dream, and a dream of writing to boot, is appropriate for the kind of epic that Kerouac is aiming for: in Book of Dreams, he describes dreaming as a means of breaking through the hierarchies and

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exclusions of conscious life, mixing his adaptation of the psychoanalytic unconscious with rather freely used terms from Buddhist doctrines on consciousness: [T]he subconscious mind (the manas working thru from the alayavijnana) does not make any mental discriminations of good or bad, thisa or thata, it just deals with the realities, What Is. It is only with our conscious mind (the mano-vijnana) that we judge and make arbitrary conceptions, that is, that we arbitrate and lay down laws about what should and shouldn’t be written or done.12 The notion of dreams as eluding the inherent moralizing of consciousness is a variation on words from the opening sentence of Dr. Sax—“dont stop to think of words when you do stop, just stop to think of the picture better—and let your mind off yourself in this work.” It equally recalls parts of his formulation of spontaneous prose: “The object is set before the mind, either in reality, as in sketching (before a landscape or teacup or old face) or is set in the memory wherein it becomes the sketching from memory of a definite image-object,” and “Not ‘selectivity’ of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought….”13 Hence, he begins Dr. Sax as a contact between mind and reality through writing. The immediate focus of this contact is the French-Canadian community of Lowell. With the exception of the boy G. J. Rigopoulos, all the characters who initially appear amid the details of life in this industrial town are members of this community: Just before I was coming down the hill between Gershom Avenue and that spectral street where Billy Artaud used to live, towards Blezan’s corner store, where on Sundays the fellows stand in bestsuits after church smoking, spitting, Leo Martin saying to Sonny Alberge or Joe Plouffe, “Eh, batêge, ya faite un grand sarmon s’foi icite”—(“Holy Batchism, he made a long sermon this time”) and Joe Plouffe, prognathic, short, glidingly powerful, spits into the large pebblestones of Gershom paved and walks on home for breakfast with no comment (he lived with his sisters and brothers and mother because the old man had thrown em all out—“Let my bones melt in this rain!”—to live a hermit existence in the darkness of the night—rheumy red-eyed old sickmonster scrooge of the block)— (3–4) Kerouac moves his scene, as though cutting from an establishing shot, to everyday details, homing in on an event that continues to define and unify a scattering community. The French-Canadian names reflect increasing



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anglicization: Billy Artaud may once have been named Guillaume (he is based on a boy named Bobby Rondeau),14 and in the fictionalizing process he receives a last name from French experimental writing, that of Antonin Artaud. “Blezan’s corner store” suggests a neighborhood establishment linked by its location and patronage to the church where on Sundays the French Canadians meet to hear a sermon. Leo Martin bears the name of the family from The Town and the City—Kerouac makes this earlier family fully French- Canadian and reaffirms the link to paternally transmitted culture by inserting his own father’s first name, Leo. But this opening addresses the loss of the culture of the fathers as much as its maintenance: Leo’s complaint about the sermon suggests dissatisfaction with this site of community gathering and preservation. Yet it also affirms the centrality of paternal transmission: the curse in his complaint, batêge, is a Québécois euphemism for baptême, “baptism,” and Kerouac’s translation of it as “batchism” captures its relationship to the word it derives from. This particular curse refers to the central rite in the transmission of culture through the name of the father, sanctioned by the authority of the Church; its modification in both languages points to the fact that various kinds of cultural movement have made it less central and less effective, in a sentence in which Kerouac indicates cultural transformation through fictionalized, anglicized names. The French phrase itself, along with the translation, also participates in the shifts he lays out: it is in the off-French reflecting Québécois pronunciation (sarmon for the French sermon) and usage (icite for ici: cette fois-ci, “this time,” becomes s’foi icite). Although the French in Dr.  Sax may appear sloppy, he gave it close attention—its use throughout the novel indicates his interest in documenting the disintegration of a culture.15 In the English, he chooses the unidiomatic phrase “he made a long sermon,” a literalist translation of the French “ya faite un grand sarmon,” which renders the colloquial pronunciation of the standard phrase “il a fait un grand sermon”: this bending of English signals the collision of the two languages, a function of the community’s migration. The motion of French continues, as Kerouac affirms, in his head—he puts it on the page in an English that shows its proximity to French. Underscoring the migration of culture from its centralized or integral form, the first family story he tells is of a father who cast his own family out on the street, leaving them to wander without his support or guidance. Kerouac calls this refusing father “scrooge” (borrowing from a writer who famously celebrated mid-nineteenth-century Lowell),16 the one who, in monstrous deviation, disavows responsibility to the community. Immediately following this monster is the somewhat monstrous Dr. Sax, a ghostly figure in this community haunted by its own past, reminded of the past without being able to make full contact with it. He appears as a creature who moves among all elements of the community, bringing them together in a shadowy, mysterious way yet attending on their increasingly chaotic movement, their passage out of unitary, integral existence.

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Doctor Sax I first saw in his earlier lineaments in the early Catholic childhood of Centralville—deaths, funerals, the shroud of that, the dark figure in the corner when you look at the dead man coffin in the dolorous parlor of the open house with a horrible purple wreath on the door. Figures of coffinbearers emerging from a house on a rainy night bearing a box with dead Mr. Yipe inside. (4) Kerouac moves his narrative back in time to the childhood of his narrator, Jack Duluoz—also Jacky or Ti-Jean when he is thirteen and fourteen years old—before the family moved out of the primarily Franco-American Centralville neighborhood of Lowell to Pawtucketville, a little closer to downtown. Kerouac characterizes Dr. Sax as an imaginative result of the Catholic rituals he knew apparently better than baptisms: funerals, with their shrouds and dark clothing, ceremonies of the death that marks this French-Canadian community more than its births. He likens Sax to a pallbearer, assisting the community as it slowly disappears “on a rainy night,” in the darkness in which things become indistinct, shapes only as they are subject to washing away, persons with odd names who could be anyone. This Lowell—“[t]he Lowell of my mind,” as Kerouac called it, “my deepest vision of the world”17—is full of supernatural creatures, ghosts or survivants with transnational dimensions, stretching from Eastern Europe to the Amazon Valley of South America. The novel may best be described as a combination of gothic horror, pulp fiction, and magic realism. Among sources for the character of Dr. Sax are the person of William Burroughs, the character of Dr. Faust (both Goethe’s and Christopher Marlowe’s versions), the Shadow, the gigantic tales of Rabelais, and Québécois folklore, which contains many elements reworked from Catholic tradition.18 Indeed, the comfortable normality with which supernatural beings move through the world of the novel in nocturnal illumination is reminiscent of similar conditions in which creatures such as loups-garous (werewolves) operate in one of the great classics of Québécois folklore, Honoré Beaugrand’s collection La Chasse-galerie, first published in 1900. This Catholic world of darkness, magic, and funerals is also one of saints, who arrive through Kerouac’s favorite flickering, shadowy medium, cinema. Dr. Sax continues: “The statue of Ste. Thérèse turning her head in an antique Catholic twenties film with Ste. Thérèse dashing across town in a car with W. C. Fieldsian close shaves by the young religious hero while the doll (not Ste. Thérèse herself but the lady hero symbolic thereof) heads for her saintliness with wide eyes of disbelief” (4). The discovery of Dr. Sax has close ties with this early encounter with the saint who marks Jack, and who marked Kerouac, most heavily. The film in question, which later in the novel Jack says he first saw in the auditorium of the St. Louis Parochial School shortly after starting there at age six (so between 1928 and 1932),19



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is La Vie miraculeuse de Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux [The Miraculous Life of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux]. Released in 1929, written and directed by Julien Duvivier, this movie depicts the life and death of the late-nineteenth-century Carmelite nun who was sainted in 1923, whose given last name, Martin, Kerouac took for the family of The Town and the City20 as well as for Leo Martin in Dr. Sax. Duvivier was also, notably, the director and screenwriter of Maria Chapdelaine (1934), the adaptation of Louis Hémon’s 1914 novel about life in rural Québec, a book and movie that in the character of François Paradis plausibly offered a source for Sal Paradise (see above, Chapter 2, 63–4). An important part of Kerouac’s literary relationship to the Québec of his ancestral past comes through this leading figure of poetic realism, who in Maria Chapdelaine gave French Canadians their only full-scale representation on the international silver screen of the time. In the case of the Sainte Thérèse film, Kerouac attributes to it a Hollywood quality by describing an actor’s face, shaven as cleanly as W. C. Fields (one of his favorites); hence he acknowledges the illusory character of his own narrative, his memories, and the Catholicism of his childhood. This cinematic illusion is nonetheless the source of the magic and miracles that inspire awe and faith, while at the same time haunting the chaotic life of this boy caught in the displacement of the Québécois community of Massachusetts. Lowell is full of ghostly creatures as holy as they are frightening. In this world illusions fuse with reality: We had a statue of Ste. Thérèse in my house—on West Street I saw it turn its head at me—in the dark. Earlier, too, horrors of the Jesus Christ of passion plays in his shrouds and vestments of saddest doom mankind in the Cross Weep for Thieves and Poverty—he was at the foot of my bed pushing in one dark Saturday night (on Hildreth & Lilley secondfloor flat full of Eternity outside)—either He or the Virgin Mary stooped with phosphorescent profile and horror pushing my bed. (4) The cinematic image of Sainte Thérèse is translated into the reality of a religion all-pervasive in everyday life, the Québécois Catholicism that, through passion plays, many of its adherents continue to identify as medieval. The spirituality of this neighborhood (West Street, Hildreth Street, and Lilley Avenue are all in Centralville) is hardly benevolent, since Christ and perhaps even Mary become shimmering ghosts, haunting the life of young Jacky as a series of horrors. Nonetheless, some of the hauntings are happier, such as this one by a pagan-influenced figure: That same night an elfin, more cheery ghost of some Santa Claus kind rushed up and slammed my door; there was no wind; my sister was taking a bath in the rosy bathroom of Saturday night home, and my

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mother scrubbing her back or tuning Wayne King on the old mahogany radio or glancing at the top Maggie and Jiggs funnies just come in from wagon boys outside (same who rushed among the downtown redbricks of my Chinese mystery) so I called out “Who slammed my door (Qui a farmez ma porte?)” and they said nobody (“Parsonne voyons donc”)— and I knew I was haunted but said nothing…. (4–5) However medieval its sources, Jacky’s descriptive memory, in a fashion reminiscent of Nietzsche’s transvaluation of good and evil as well as Blake’s inversion of heaven and hell, makes the traditional holy figures from religious education into apparently evil ones and the pagan-derived creatures into figures of the good. As he concludes the opening passage, he ties the hauntings to the increasing movement into the past of Québécois culture: [N]ot long after that I dreamed the horrible dream of the rattling red livingroom, newly painted a strange 1929 varnish red and I saw it in the dream all dancing and rattling like skeletons because my brother Gerard haunted them and dreamed I woke up screaming by the phonograph machine in the adjoining room with its Masters Voice curves in the brown wood— (5) Several more times in Dr. Sax, Kerouac returns to the death of his narrator’s older brother, based on his own brother Gerard. Kerouac writes passionately about his brother elsewhere, notably in Visions of Gerard, where he presents the boy’s sickness and death as emblematic of the severe losses occurring in the Franco-American community as its connections with Québec fade away. In a letter to Neal Cassady he also tells the story, explaining that at the age of four he was actually happy at the news of his brother’s death: “If Gerard died it only meant he went to Canada; and God knows what else I knew about death and what I’m trying to hide this minute.”21 Dying was going to a better place, and that place was the Canada for which the community longed, its absence from which was the moribund character of its survivance. In Visions of Gerard, Kerouac depicts the boy as a saint, both Buddhist and Catholic, who has visions of heaven and the world following death that impressed the nuns at the École Saint Louis in Centralville— hence Gerard offers a connection to the Québec that is receding in time. In the above-quoted passage from Dr. Sax, Kerouac connects the memory that becomes a ghost in a dream with the recorded voice of the family’s phonograph, a means of repeating masterly, guiding voices from the past. Further in the novel, he describes the Victrola as “haunted by the



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old songs and old records of sad American antiquity” (44)—through its spectral voices, the mechanism reaches into a lamentation of the vanishing past. Gerard is the one who insists that ghosts live in the house—his own specter momentarily fuses with the shadowy Dr. Sax (35). Dr. Sax, then, is also a figure of Québécois culture who haunts the diasporic community of Lowell. Kerouac combines imagination and dream to produce a writing or recording technique that brings past reality into visibility, breaking through the ordering normality of rational representation. He states as much in the final sentence of the opening chapter, some of his most frequently quoted words: “Memory and dream are intermixed in this mad universe” (5).

Limits of the world In the novel’s exposition of interweaving territories, cultures, and languages, of a world at the intersection of multiple worlds, Kerouac creates a cosmology: he writes in order to reimagine the universe through a dream narrative. As the deployment of a fantastic world, Dr. Sax raises the problem of how fiction may contribute to an understanding of reality: fiction has the capacity to allow for the emergence of aspects of reality that may remain hidden by cultural dominations. The novel’s reflections on morality take place in this cosmology, which stands ready to alter its principles in the face of lived reality.22 Kerouac places his writing and remembering self, through the persona of his narrator, in the position of both observer and creator of the world of which Dr. Sax is custodian; the author makes Jacky’s life an essential part of creation, in both senses of the term. In an uncanny pastiche of the opening of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, Kerouac provides an account of his narrator’s birth, hence of the birth of the narration of Dr. Sax and the latter’s struggle with evil: It was in Centralville I was born, in Pawtucketville saw Doctor Sax. Across the wide basin to the hill—on Lupine Road, March 1922, at five o’clock in the afternoon of a red-all-over suppertime, as drowsily beers were tapped in Moody and Lakeview saloons and the river rushed with her cargoes of ice over reddened slick rocks, and on the shore the reeds swayed among mattresses and cast-off boots of Time, and lazily pieces of snow dropped plunk from bagging the wet snows of the hillside receiving the sun’s lost rays the melts of winter mixed with roars of Merrimac—I was born. Bloody rooftop. Strange deed. All eyes I came hearing the river’s red; I remember that afternoon, I perceived it through beads hanging in a door and through lace curtains and glass of a universal sad lost redness of mortal damnation…the snow was melting. The snake was coiled in the hill not my heart. (17)

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The repetition of red and other words in its phonetic proximity—reeds, river, rushed, rays, roars—connotes the blood associated with birth that Kerouac explicitly mentions, as well as the color of the late afternoon light in March, which extends the blood-red tint over Centralville and the Merrimac, giving the “red-all-over” quality to the entire event.23 The latter phrase alludes to the birth of Esau, the first-born who “came out, red all over”24 and subsequently, as a young man, gave up his birthright—just as the French lost their domination in North America during the Seven Years’ War, as Kerouac will recall further on. The lengthy second sentence of the passage, assembling a host of details, characterizes the birth as an event occurring in the midst of everyday activities in Centralville: the birth is linked to the later time in Pawtucketville by virtue of the encounter with Dr. Sax, who in the world of the novel defines the incipient life. As part of the cosmological importance of Dr. Sax and his mission to fight evil, the specificity of these circumstances responds to the deliberate momentousness that Goethe attributes to his own birth at the start of Dichtung und Wahrheit: On the 28th of August 1749, in midday at the stroke of twelve, I was born in Frankfurt am Main. The constellations were favorable: the sun was in the sign of the Virgin and was reaching its highest point of the day; Jupiter and Venus were looking down cheerfully, Mercury not unpleasantly; Saturn and Mars were behaving indifferently; only the moon, just turning full, used the power of its opposition all the more, as at the same time it had entered its planetary hour. Hence it resisted my birth, which could not succeed before this hour was past.25 Whereas Goethe situates his birth in the order of astrological time, Kerouac locates Jacky’s according to the Heraclitean time of the river, its rendering of unceasing change in the world, which becomes the flow of a human world yielding the waste of “mattresses and cast-off boots.” Kerouac further diminishes the criticality of the author’s birth by putting it more than ten pages into the narrative instead of at the outset. Again, the thrust of his rewrite of Goethe in this third part of Faust is to humanize the grandiosity of divinity and myth, and here he makes the birth of his narrating self a part of the human affairs of Lowell, the flows of the Merrimac continuous with the flow of tapped beer in the saloons of Centralville, the Petit Canada of the small city. Goethe’s universe contains forces for better or for worse, while Kerouac’s deploys multidirectional energies in a more shadowy relationship with good and evil. The birth of Jacky Duluoz happens among the natural and social elements through which the Merrimac pushes, manifesting its transformative power, which includes the capacity to link territories such that they overlap and blend into each other.



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As in The Town and the City, Kerouac signals that the Merrimac begins “up somewhere far north of Lake Winnepesaukee, north of gaps in the white Mountains” (Dr. Sax, 156), and also that as a river among rivers it connects continents, an idea that globally situates a community aware of its migrant status: “Follow the great rivers on the maps of South America (origin of Doctor Sax), trace your Putumayos to a Napo-further Amazon junction, map the incredible uncrossable jungles, the southern Parañas of amaze, stare at the huge grook of a continent bulging with an ArcticAntarctic—to me the Merrimac River was a mighty Napo of continental importance…the continent of New England” (7–8). By emphasizing flows and migrations, Kerouac makes time integral to the space of this tenuous community. His language in the passage on Jack’s birth not only describes but also partakes of transterritorial current in its opening phrase, “It was in Centralville I was born”: it is unidiomatic in English, responding to the French syntax that traverses the French-Canadian community, translating and gravitating toward the perfectly idiomatic “C’est à Centralville que je suis né.” (In his translation of Dr. Sax, Jean Autret acknowledges the translingual contact by providing exactly this phrase.)26 To the great importance of the river in the migration and interweaving of territories and languages, a grandeur magnified by a child’s perspective, the birth of Jack Duluoz, who will later see Dr. Sax in order to record him, is a response: “All eyes I came hearing the river’s red,” writes Kerouac—Jacky immediately sees and hears the lifeblood in which the river insinuates itself. And the end of the passage indicates that, though an innocent newborn, he is already in proximity to the evil that will occupy Dr. Sax’s attention, the Great Snake of the World coiled beneath a hill in Lowell—as a writer, he will memorialize the story of Dr. Sax and the snake.

French forces The referential content of Dr. Sax conserves the culture of a New England mill town in the first half of the twentieth century: characters range in station from middle-class to poor, there is constant interaction of immigrants from different backgrounds, especially French-Canadian, and many scenes take place in both English and French. The book is also about the force of adolescent male sexuality and its confrontations with the limits and restrictions of the material and moral world. Kerouac’s densely poetic diction brings out hidden aspects of social and psychological life in this locale. The following scene combines explosive public defecation with a discovery of outdoor fornication: “Big brother Henry shat against a tree, he actually did, squatted and aimed an explosion on a lateral line, horrible. We found fat lovers disentangling huge dimpled lady legs and hairy manlegs

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out of an intercourse in a litter of movie magazines, empty cans, rat rags, dirt, grass and straw halfway up the slope in the bushes…” (64). The novel regularly churns up various kinds of waste, those untidy parts of reality that render it especially difficult to control, as well as the bodily appetites that produce much of it: shooting excrement, strewn garbage, and the chaotic motion of sordid, clandestine sex make the borders of bodies and social entities considerably less clear-cut, posing a challenge to cultural order and to homogenization. Kerouac’s prose combines a staccato placement of words and phrases with a larger flow that encompasses them: repeating in a separate clause the act of defecating, “he actually did,” underscores the surprising quality of the event and, in thus insisting on its reality, makes its repugnance more palpable. The list of waste items around the lovers has a similar effect, indicating the illicit yet incontrovertible, discoverable nature of the coupling. This scene gives way a few pages later to a detailed description of Ali Zaza, a “moronic French Canadian sexfiend…now in a madhouse” (69), who is reminiscent of Macloune, the mentally deficient lover in Beaugrand’s La Chasse-galerie.27 Zaza masturbates spectacularly for his friends, exhibiting his “endless supply of come” (70) and hence contributing to the ferment of blurred bodily limits and the excesses and ecstasies it allows. The elusive hero himself is partly an embodiment of libidinal energy: even in present-day Montreal pronunciation, “Docteur Sax” is how one says “Dr. Sex”; the name of course also suggests “Dr. Saxophone” and the role of jazz in Kerouac’s writing. Throughout the novel the hero is set in opposition to the Great Snake of the World, unequivocally identified with Satan (222, 226) and expected to shoot out of the earth one day in symbolically obvious fashion, marking a triumph of evil. As the novel moves toward its end, the narrative several times suggests the error of regarding open sexual expression as evil. Although Jack seems to warn against the notion that good and evil are in reality closely intertwined or even an illusory set of values, he also expresses sympathy for those who hold it: Dovism was the idealistic left of the Satanic movement, it claimed Satan was enamored of doves, and therefore his Snake would not destroy the world but merely be a great skin of doves on coming-out day, falling apart, millions of come-colored doves spurting from it as it shoots from the ground a hundred miles long—most Dovists in fact were impractical and somewhat effeminate people—that is, their idea was absurd, the Snake was real enough— (230) In a likely reflection of his increasing disenchantment with political engagement, following youthful enthusiasm for socialism, Kerouac gently mocks the Dovists’ position that the Snake, at the moment of the orgasmic



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coup of evil, will reveal itself as a huge assembly of doves that through their color are also sperm, according to traditional symbolism propagating peace throughout the world in a fluid rather than imposingly phallic way. However, a bit later he mentions the “poor hapless Dovists” who “were rounded up” as a result of the Black Decree, issued by the Wizard, identified with Dr. Faustus—hence with Marlowe’s Faustus, who is much more eager to give himself over to evil than Goethe’s Faust—and blatantly termed “the Master of Earthly Evil” (50). Especially given the novel’s suggestions of an undoing of the opposition between good and evil, and a destigmatization of libidinal ecstasies, the mockery of Dovists is part of this reconciliation. Although I’d rather not reduce Kerouac’s masterpiece to a parable of adolescent male sexuality,28 the possibility of peaceful resolution also entails the opposition between libidinal energy and the social institutions that would constrain it, and the recognition in the horizons of the latter that teeming sexuality doesn’t threaten them. This set of reconciliations also turns out to be a cultural transformation, in which the unruly elements of a foreign culture in the heart of the dominant one may assert themselves so as to be recognized by the latter. The dynamic and texture of Kerouac’s prose are the means to such recognition. At the same time, Dr. Sax is a text of cultural recording—as Québécois writer Victor-Lévy Beaulieu suggests, calling it “the best documentation we possess on Franco-American life in the 1920s and 30s.”29 Of particular value in this regard is Book Four of Kerouac’s novel, “The Night the Man with the Watermelon Died” (115–51), with its lengthy passages in French, the interactions between mother and son, and the visit to the Grotto of Notre Dame de Lourdes in Lowell. Hence the book is also a testimony to and embodiment of the condition of exile and secondariness in which Kerouac’s community found itself. The second extended passage in French in this section (also in the entire novel—Book Four focuses especially on the French-Canadian community) refers to the first in the series of events that precipitated the Diaspora: the fall of Québec City with the defeat of the French Army under General Montcalm in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759. Uncle Mike, a poet, “the saddest Duluoz in the world” (118), places Montcalm alongside the great enemy of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, Napoleon, connecting them both to the family ancestry in France: “Napoleon était un homme grand. Aussie le General Montcalm a Quebec tambien qu’il a perdu. Ton ancestre, l’honorable soldat, Baron Louis Alexandre Lebris de Duluoz, un grandpère—a marriez l’Indienne, retourna a Bretagne, le pere la, le vieux Baron, a dit, criant a pleine tête, ‘Retourne toi a cette femme—soi un homme honnete et d’honneur’” (118–19—emphasis in text; below I will provide and comment on Kerouac’s translation of this passage). The Duluoz family retells not only the story of the defeat of noble French heroes by the British, but also that of their own ancestry, noble

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and French, as well as hybrid and hence Québécois by virtue of marriage with the Native population. The family held onto some version of this story for generations30 as they, along with the vast majority of Québécois, were stripped of social and economic privilege, their identity as French, and finally, following their shift to peasant status, of a strong connection with the land on which they lived. Kerouac’s gesture of casting it in local French counters this displacement by affirming the link between this place and these people, on the one hand, and the history and culture by which they identify themselves, on the other. He attributes the story to Uncle Mike, an invalid whose treatment is “legal medical tea” (118), prescription marijuana, who in his visions recounts the tragic fall of a noble people to the state of peasantry: this sick Saint Michael (a complement to the mother Angy, named for Kerouac’s mother Gabrielle-Ange, among the everyday archangels in the Duluoz Legend) passes on the news of this particular “Apocalypse of the Fellahin,” according to On the Road a repeating event in the cataclysms of world history.31 In this passage, as he has done in the texts leading up to Visions of Cody, Kerouac reproduces the pronunciation and grammar of Massachusetts Québécois French: for example, he uses marier as a transitive, nonreflexive verb rather than in the reflexive, indirect transitive form of standard French, se marier avec, and omits all use of subjunctive forms; his spelling shows the influence of late medieval and Renaissance conventions, in keeping with the pre-Revolutionary time the passage evokes, such as in ancestre and the liberal use of the letter z. In addition, in spelling the Québécois tant bien que, “even though,” he allows the Spanish that surrounds him in Mexico City as he composes the text to push its way through as tambien que. Following most of the French passages, Kerouac translates them so as to convey the character of his native language. The English is often nonstandard, and in fact nonidiomatic, but his usual word-for-word renderings into English at least partially preserve the syntax of the prior language. Here is his version of the above quotation: “Napoleon was a great man. Also the General Montcalm at Quebec even though he lost. Your ancestor, the honorable soldier, Baron Louis Alexandre Lebris de Duluoz, a grandfather—married the Indian woman, returned to Brittany, the father there, the old Baron, said, yelling at the top of his voice, ‘Return to that woman—be an honest man and a man of honor’” (119). Kerouac incorrectly translates the article in the phrase “le General Montcalm” into English, writing “the General Montcalm.” His choice of “grandfather” for “grandpère” stretches the English word to denote, like the French term, “ancestor.” He renders the Québécois pleonasm “là” as its literal equivalent, “there,” a word unsuited to English syntax in this context. He pushes the structures and stabilities of English against the presence of French, this French that has migrated from the standardized language and is already mostly lost from New England by the time he writes Dr. Sax. As Walter



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Benjamin suggests concerning effective translation, that it “does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language…to shine upon the original more fully,” proceeding “by a literal rendition of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator,”32 Kerouac’s renditions challenge the integrity of English, interrogating its claim to syntactically and lexically regular hegemony as it encircles and squeezes French. The conflict between the two languages, along with their cooperation in his text to produce a hybrid diction, is all the more patent when the author puts “original” and translation alongside each other.33 He engages in linguistic migrancy, demonstrating the mobility and fluidity of the language that would be imperial and sedentary, as it confronts a foreign language that has nomadically entered its delineated geographic space, with a view to a language in which previously unheard phrases may resound and the cultures from which they emanate be recognized.34 This procedure is integral to his challenge to dominant linguistic convention and more broadly to the representational system that excludes the unruly vitality of experience.35

Limits of the West The overriding theme of Dr. Sax is reconciliation—between the elusive past and the present, between the Québécois culture of New England and dominant U.S. culture, between French and the English that silences and effaces it, between the expressively poetic and the representational aspects of literature through which the other reconciliations take place, between the exuberance of adolescent sexuality and the institutions that would contain it, and between the morality of paternal imposition and the endless variegations of lived reality. A principal way that these reconciliations operate is through Kerouac’s rewriting of Goethe: beginning with reference to Oswald Spengler’s capacious reading of the character of Faust as a figure for all of Western culture, Kerouac then moves to a critique of Spenglerian pessimism, completing the revision he begins in On the Road by inverting the situation of the Fellaheen as the effect of cultural downfall (see above, Chapter 2, 76–8). Spengler comments on Faust’s turn to magic and a pact with the devil at the outset of the play, presenting the main character’s despair at the ultimate foolishness of “philosophy,/Jurisprudence, and medicine,/And, help me God, theology,”36 which leads him to seek a practice by which he might “perceive the inmost force/That bonds the very universe” (Faust 1.382–3), as the will to technological domination of nature: This is the outward- and upward-straining life-feeling…as expressed in Goethe’s Faust monologue when the steam-engine was yet young. The

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intoxicated soul wills to fly above space and Time. An ineffable longing tempts him to indefinable horizons. Man would free himself from the earth, rise into the infinite, leave the bonds of the body, and circle in the universe of space amongst the stars.37 In this will resides, for Spengler, the greatness of the West following the Middle Ages, a culture that has insisted on conquering the universe through knowledge and motion: “Only this our Culture has achieved it, and perhaps only for a few centuries” (504). In passages that interested Kerouac greatly in connection with his reflections on migrations and civilizations, Spengler warns that these unprecedented advances constitute the “decline of the West”: “But for that very reason Faustian man has become the slave of his creation. His number, and the arrangement of life as he lives it, have been driven by the machine on to a path where there is no standing still and no turning back” (504—emphasis in text). The ending of Faust presents the main character as engaged, toward his death, in the great technical enterprise of irrigating a previously uninhabitable area and building a thriving city: “The masterpiece of sapient man,/As he ordains with thoughtful mind/ New homestead for his teeming kind” (Faust 2.5.11248–50). Spengler views such a triumph of technics as destructive with regard to both the environment and the long-term organization of society, and hence as the greatest tragedy: The Western industry has diverted the ancient traditions of the other Cultures. The streams of economic life move towards the seats of King Coal and the great regions of raw material. Nature becomes exhausted, the globe sacrificed to Faustian thinking and energies. The working earth is the Faustian aspect of her, the aspect contemplated by the Faust of Part II, the supreme transfiguration of enterprising work—and contemplating, he dies. (505—emphasis in text) Goethe’s play underscores the displacement of traditional culture through the extermination-like killing, in the name of progress, of an elderly couple, Baucis and Philemon, who embody the old virtues of earthbound cottage industry and church-going regularity (Faust 2.5.11043–142). However, the blame for this act falls squarely on Mephistopheles, who in defending it as necessary shows his callousness: “The couple did not suffer much,/From fear fell lifeless at our touch” (2.5.11362–3). But Faust is appalled and angry at his henchman’s ruthlessness: So you have turned deaf ears to me! I meant exchange, not robbery.



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This thoughtless violent affair, My curse on it, for you to share! (2.5.11370–3) Despite his unrelenting drive to technical progress and the suggestion that brutality may be inherent in the latter, Faust’s opposition to Mephistopheles on this point suggests a less pessimistic reading of the ending of the play than Spengler’s. It’s a nonetheless cautionary one, recognizing the benefits to humanity of technical progress while being wary of its dangers. Faust’s words in response to the personification of Care suggest a moderation of “the outward- and upward-straining life-feeling”: A fool who squints beyond with blinking eyes, Imagining his like above the skies; Let him stand firm and gaze about alert; To able man this world is not inert; What need for him to roam eternities? (2.5.11443–7) Rather, a regard for the here-and-now, while the will to knowledge pushes forth, allows for Faust’s redemption and the reconciliation of the two drives he has long found in himself, which at the beginning of the play he famously describes as the “Two souls…dwelling in my breast,” one that “holds fast with joyous earthly lust” and the other that “soars impassioned from the dust/To realms of lofty forebears winging” (1.1112, 1114, 1116–17). Faust’s reinvigorated enthusiasm for the technical project (2.5.11503–10) and his last words, affirming the greatness of his contribution to humanity, “My life on earth, the trace I leave within it/Eons untold cannot impair” (2.5.11583–4), imply that reconciliation has taken place. The last part of his own personal upward movement becomes a transcendence of the diabolical powers he has embraced in order to arrive here: “Foretasting such high happiness to come,/I savor now my striving’s crown and sum” (2.5.11585–6). It is both tempting and justifiable to read Faust as a circumspectly optimistic assessment, at the start of the era of big industry and international economies, of the harnessing of infernal forces in support of collective human good in a managed social democracy.38 Kerouac’s reading of Faust, most evident in his rewriting of it as the sequel Dr. Sax, runs along these lines; hence it is part of a critique of the Spenglerian notion of a “decline of the West.” The reconciliation of opposites is a frequent theme in Kerouac’s work: his version of the Faustian “doctrine of the two souls” is the tension between the drive to settlement and the drive to wander to the limits of discernible cultural stability. He explores this theme in so early a work as The Sea Is My Brother (composed

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in 1943) in the opposition between Wesley Martin and Bill Everhart, and of course in On the Road in the relationship between Sal and Dean. But just as neither Faust nor Mephistopheles embodies merely one soul but rather different configurations of the two, Kerouac’s pairs of characters also represent the strength of one drive along with a temptation toward the other—Sal is already eager to travel when he meets Dean, and even as Dean assumes the role of guide on the road he craves the settlement of family life and maintains the search for the father. From The Town and the City forward, Kerouac’s work is about reconciling the tension between the two drives—finding a way for motion to proceed, while acknowledging the need for some stability. In Dr. Sax, both Sax and Faustus contain elements of Goethe’s Faust: Sax is an alchemist (215) who flies through the air, in the style of Mephistopheles, leading Jacky to different sites around Lowell. Whereas Faustus wants to unleash the fully destructive powers of evil on the world, Dr. Sax is committed to the welfare of humanity and, like the Shadow from whom he partly derives, he “knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men” and, with Lamont Cranston’s sinister and knowing laugh, “Mwee hee hee ha ha,” fights it.39 An explanation that Kerouac once gave of the relationship between Dr. Sax, Goethe’s Faust, and Spengler also suggests that, though admiring the latter’s characterization of Faustian man, only with reservation did he accept the account of the decline of the West. Rather, his statements in conjunction with the ending of Dr. Sax point to the novel’s reconciliations: this is in keeping with his own mission of bringing the once-fallen Québécois culture, that apocalypse that delivered him and his people to Fellaheen status, into the light of the North American day through his writing. In August 1961 he wrote the following to Bernice Lemire, in response to the questions she asked while writing her MA thesis at Boston College: “Faust Part Three” simply means this: Goethe wrote Faust Parts one and two, ending with dull Canals, and I just wrote Part Three of the Faust Legend about the soul of the West. Faust sold his soul to the devil but Sax rushed in and called Faust a bastard. Consult Spengler on the “Faustian Western Soul”…take a look at what Spengler said about Faust, and how Faust led up to Space Missiles because he believed in the “endlessness of the soul.”40 Terming the canals that Faust is digging “dull” suggests that they don’t capture the true achievements of the Faustian soul, and that Kerouac is providing a more recent version, akin to the spacecraft that Spengler predicts with the statement that man will “circle in the universe of space amongst the stars” (503). As Fiona Paton points out, the language Kerouac uses in the novel to describe the approaching devastations of the Great Snake of the World, written in the decade following Hiroshima



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and Nagasaki, belong to the era of the nuclear bomb. The first sign of the Snake’s emergence from the earth is that “The ground shuddered” (Dr. Sax, 222); the Wizard Faustus says of the Snake’s progress that “We will darken the very sun in our march,” recalling the fact that the hydrogen bomb test of 1952 produced a temperature much hotter than that of the sun’s core (Paton, 146). Like the atomic bomb, the Snake will destroy towns and cities: “Hamlets will be gobbled up entire, my boy. Cities of skyscrapers will feel the weight of this scale…” (Dr. Sax, 228). Nonetheless, even in the face of the immense destructive power of twentieth-century technology, “Sax rushed in and called Faust a bastard”—another side of the Faustian powers, those embodied in Dr. Sax, will signal to Faustus the hideousness of what he has done. No one puts a stop to Faust’s activities in Goethe’s play, but in Kerouac’s sequel good calls out evil with the aim of redirecting it—just as those parts of North American social reality that the domination of certain groups has hidden may speak out through the shaking up of literary language that it is Kerouac’s project to build. Although the Snake is closely linked to modern technics, it is permeated with medieval magic and religion: Kerouac portrays the present-day threats, following Goethe and Spengler, as the work of long-term historical development. The entire atmosphere of Dr. Sax is marked with elements reminiscent of the Middle Ages, Christian and quasi-pagan supernatural beings. The Snake itself is from the medieval and early modern iconography that depicts Satan in the Garden of Eden: “The horrid stench of the ancient Snake that has been growing in the world-ball like a worm in the apple since Adam and Eve broke down and cried” (228). This description is also in keeping with the novel’s coming-of-age dimension, the discovery of sexuality integral to the entire narrative. The Snake will emerge on the earth’s surface from the volcanic depths (the realm of Goethe’s Mephistopheles) in the castle on Snake Hill in Lowell, where Faustus lives, a site from the feudal era of the Faust legend. Also in the castle are several other feudal-era figures, including Count Condu and the Contessa de Franziano (22–3), whom Kerouac generates from popular images of vampires. In oneiric, macabre fashion, these elements recall the identification of Québécois culture, especially its Catholicism, as belonging to pre-Revolutionary France, often conceived as medieval in its social and economic structure, centering on seigneurially organized agriculture. In a pun he borrows from James Joyce, Kerouac writes of the eighteenth-century arrival on the Gaspé Peninsula of Québec of “the first of the American Armorican Duluozes” (131): using the adjectival form of the ancient name of Brittany, he connects his supposedly noble ancestry in Québec with medieval and ancient France, suggesting intersections of cultural spaces in the eastern and western hemispheres.41

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Ending in time The piety and vividness that in Book Four Kerouac attributes to the Grotto of Notre Dame de Lourdes in Lowell, his macabre version of the chapel of Baucis and Philemon, calls attention to medieval characteristics of Québécois Catholicism. Depicting this place of reverence as gloomy and haunted, Jacky’s narration of the visit, involving himself, his mother Angy, and his Aunt Blanche, underscores the morbidity of the Stations of the Cross, their insistence on death: we’re in the Grotto!—deep, too,—halfway to the first Station of the Ghost. The first of the stations faced the side of a funeral home, so you kneeled there, at night, looking at faint representations of the Virgin, hood over head, her sad eyes, the action, the tortured wood and thorns of the Passion, and your reflections on the subject become mirrored from a funeral home where a dull light fixed in the ceiling of an overpass rain garage for hearses shines dully in the gravelly gloom, with bordering dewy grassplots and shrubs to give it the well-tended look, and the drapes in the windows showing, incredibly, where the funeral director himself lives, in his House of Death. “This is our home.” Everything there was to remind of Death, and nothing in praise of life—except the roar of the Merrimac passing over rocks in formations and arms of foam, at 11:15 p.m. (125—emphasis in text) Kerouac provides descriptive details of both the meditative disposition that the Grotto demands in its presentation of the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ, the presence of these images of the ancient world by way of their medieval figuration, and the coldly still banality of the nearby funeral home, its darkness uncannily illuminated by an artifact of modern technology, an electric light. In its obsessive preoccupation with the past, the Catholicism of French-Canadian Lowell is permeated with death. The Stations of the Cross, the chemin de la croix, is the road to death, the opposite of the road that “is life” (On the Road, 212), the latter necessitated by this gloomy experience of being sur le chemin. The Merrimac, embodying the temporal transformation of environmental and cultural flux, offers the only relief. At the end of the visit, which sees the three worshippers walk on their knees to the foot of the cross, Jack remarks: “I always liked to get out of there…” (126). Outside this strictly delimited place of worship, in the often chaotic activities of Lowell, he has the chance to find life. The horror of medieval Christianity becomes especially concentrated at the end of the novel, which sees the appearance of the Snake on the surface of the earth in an event that Dr. Sax pronounces to be no less than



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“judgment day”—Kerouac spells the words in lower case, suggesting that this apocalypse is a secular departure from the one that dominated medieval European culture. However, when Jacky replies to Dr. Sax, he reinforces the cataclysmic nature of the appearance of the Snake: “I didn’t want no JUDGMENT DAY!” (236) The advent of the Snake thus threatens the end of the entire world of religious faith that hangs in the novel’s atmosphere. In his elaboration of the coming horror, Jack’s vocabulary echoes On the Road: “I said to myself, ‘This is a snake’ and when the consciousness of the fact that it was a snake came over me and I began looking at its two great lakes of eyes I found myself looking into the horror, into the void, I found myself looking into the Dark, I found myself looking into IT” (238— emphasis in text). In saying “IT,” the word for the aggregate of forces that break through imposed cultural and cognitive limits, Jack suggests that part of what the snake has come to destroy is the restrictiveness of inertial settlement—which is mostly embodied in the Catholicism of the Grotto scene. He also confirms the snake as libidinal monster—but as the powerful libido of the psychoanalytic id, which stands against the moral domination of the superego, one of whose principal institutions in the West is Christianity in its various forms. There is a strong confluence, then, of the conduits of those values that the novel designates as good and evil—just as, in Goethe’s Faust, diabolical forces may be directed to greater human good. This judgment day begins to resemble the secularized apocalypse that Kerouac depicts in On the Road, the vision of “streams of gold” in Mexico that is an earthly revealing of reality, a repetition of the fall of French civilization in North America, an end time of the limitations of sedentary U.S. culture through which it opens onto the multifariousness of what it may encounter over the globe (On the Road, 284–5; see above, Chapter 2, 125–7). It is appropriate, then, in light of what is occurring, that Dr. Sax responds to the imminent emergence of the Snake with both alchemical methods and an apparently pagan invocation: “‘Ah the Great Power of the Holy Sun,’ called Sax, ‘destroy thy Palalakonuh with thy secret works’— And he offered up his vial to the Snake” (238). Much earlier in the novel, the narrator quotes Dr.  Sax screaming “Palalakonuh beware!,” a phrase also written on the shadowy hero’s wall (31). Jack explains, “Palalakonuh is merely the Aztec or Toltec name (or possibly Chihuahuan in origin) for the World Snake of the ancient Indians of North America (who probably trekked from Tibet before they knew they had Tibetan backgrounds or North American foregrounds spreading huge in the World Around)” (31–2). In this foregrounding of a global migrant culture tenuously connected to Buddhism through the mention of Tibet, a culture that contrasts and clashes with both the cult around the Snake and the Québécois Catholicism of Lowell, Dr. Sax introduces an entirely different antiquity and medievalism, that of the cultures of North America that preceded the European conquest,

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the latter a monument to the barbarism of early modern Faustian territorial expansion. The name Palalakonuh, a variant on the Nahuatl word palancacoatl, “very poisonous snake,” as Paton reports (148), indicates Kerouac’s adaptation of Aztec myth for the purpose of challenging the restrictiveness of the persistent currents of Western culture. The narrative also explains that “Doctor Sax made a special trip to Teotehuacan, Mexico, to do his special research on the culture of the eagle and the snake—Azteca; he came back laden with information about the snake, none about the bird” (Dr. Sax, 149). At the very end of the novel, Kerouac identifies the book with the procedures of Dr. Sax by naming its place of writing as “Tenochtitlan, Ancient Capital of Azteca” (245), in acknowledgment of the civilization that pre-existed the European conquest: in this place outside the United States, which as a Fellaheen site bears affinities to Québec, he aligns himself and his book with Faustian endeavors, directing them to the greater good of shattering the limitations of U.S. cultural cognition. He turns writing, then, into an alchemical expansion of knowledge and of capacities for awareness. Necessarily, Dr. Sax’s invocation is of the Sun, a major Aztec god, against the snake. Whereas Goethe’s Faust drinks the contents of his vial himself just after announcing his intention to follow the passageway “[a]bout whose narrow mouth all Hell’s ablaze” (Goethe, Faust 1.717), Dr. Sax uses the vial to challenge Satan—that is, he uses the imperious expansiveness of his knowledge, its extension into Aztec culture, to oppose the diabolical source of that knowledge (he is “a Faustian man” [43]), its most brutal and corrosive power. But the effort fails—the Snake keeps advancing, and Sax, strangely resigned, says only, “Goddam, it didn’t work” (240); with this curse he casually signals the fact that something damned really is arising out of its subterranean realm to overthrow the being that has damned it. Nonetheless, the eagle he was unable to research as planned in Azteca makes a sudden appearance, seemingly of its own accord—just as Mephistopheles comes to Faust independently of the latter’s call. The bird, surrounded by “a great horde of white Doves”—the doves that might also compose the Snake in the confluence of good and evil—is a gigantic presence, itself an apocalyptic vision, “two or three miles wide, and with a wing spread of ten or fifteen miles across the air” (242). The bird builds the picture of the culture of the eagle and the snake, the Aztec culture in which they constitute a central symbol (Paton, 147). This ancient drama takes place in the skies above Lowell as “the Great Black Bird came down and picked it up with one mighty jaw movement of the Beak, and lifted it with a Crack that sounded like distant thunder, as all the Snake was snapped and drawn, feebly struggling, splashing sweat” (244). Although Jacky is ecstatic at the knowledge that “[t]his could not be Judgment Day!” (243)—not the final judgment, but nonetheless a more modest revelation of the workings of the world—Dr. Sax still appears



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disengaged, a curious but detached observer, already assuming the less heroic role he will play in Lowell once the Snake is no longer a threat. “‘I’ll be damned,’ he said with amazement. ‘The Universe disposes of its own evil!’” (245). The colloquialism of the first part of the exclamation bolsters the observation of the second part: as an everyday phrase, “I’ll be damned” removes damnation from a transcendent set of values, allowing it to subsist as a part of human affairs. If the universe disposes of its own evil, evil turns out not to be an implacable force, but rather an inaccurate term for some of the ordinary workings of the world—good and evil turn out to be creations of a certain civilization rather than a matter of metaphysics, and so quite different from the values defined by the novel’s Christianity, which in any case is highly sinister. This moment in the novel suggests that the events of civilization aren’t rooted in any domain beyond the world, in a hell below or heaven above, but are rather immanent to the world and take place in its passage of time. Reciprocally, in Dr. Sax the fantastical, visionary character of the material world renders it a transcendence—in his cosmology Kerouac interweaves immanent and transcendent realms. Under these circumstances, there is no more need for sequestered areas of worship that, in any case, in Jacky’s experience, don’t offer protection from horror. Getting out of the restricted and restrictive area of the Grotto, out of the fearful reverence for the Crucifixion and for death itself, for the distant but imposing ancestors, becomes possible—the Grotto is no longer a terrifying place. The outcome is that there is no more need for subordinate worship in the form of walking to the foot of the cross on one’s knees, and that what has been termed evil (such as, especially, sexuality) ceases to be a threat for the simple reason that it’s part of everyday goings-on. The restrictiveness of Western religion, rooted in the long tradition of the ancestors, transforms into an openness that admits other spiritual practices; a newly successful syncretism moves spirituality to the realm of the everyday. Kerouac’s Faust Part Three finishes with an opening of settled culture to all that its adherence to stability might previously have excluded, as well as the openness of its knowledge to the panoply of worldly experience. In response to Goethe’s tragedy, Kerouac writes a comedy in which the Wizard Faustus, rather than dying, is “dissatisfied,” in which Dr. Sax ceases to stand out as a heroic figure and “only deals in glee now” (245). As a reply to Spengler’s tragic vision, the novel is a comedy of the West, the latter redeemed by relinquishing its long-term Westernness, by yielding ground to the Fellaheen in a move that turns out to mark not its decline but rather its newfound acceptance of its role as one element among many in a world whose vastness it is at long last disposed to recognizing. Kerouac closes the novel with an affirmation of divine presence attendant on a world open to cultural and spiritual multiplicity, which he signals with an image of emerging counterculture:

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I went along home by the ding dong bells and daisies, I put a rose in my hair. I passed the Grotto again and saw the cross on top of that hump of rocks, saw some French Canadian ladies praying step by step on their knees. I found another rose, and put another rose in my hair, and went home. By God. (245) Jacky has become an early flower child, placing the church bells alongside the flowers, making them part of the environmental and cultural transformation that now predominates. A particularly ordinary and undistinguished “hump of rocks” and a lower-case cross have replaced the imposing Golgotha of the earlier Grotto scene. Jacky no longer has to worry about “getting out of there,” following the retreat of the strict distinction between the spaces inside and outside the Grotto, between the reverence due the ancestral religion and the peace available in the larger world. The French-Canadian ladies may still go there to pray, making their doleful way along the Way of the Cross, sur le chemin de la Croix, but in the light of day they aren’t cordoned off from the rest of the town or from the natural world where roses grow. Fully reminiscent of the roses at the end of Goethe’s Faust, which the chorus of angels throws down over the scene of Faust’s death as a prelude to raising him to heaven, an act that infuriates Mephistopheles (Faust 2.5.11699–824), in Dr. Sax they signal the redemption of the West from its preoccupation with the past and resultant attitude of restrictive superiority. Walking down the street, or on the road that beckons him in his exile, Jacky can go home, a home no longer haunted by the tyrannical past. The colloquialism “by God” signals the proximity of divinity, which is now both everyday and ubiquitous, transmitted through a plurality of spiritual and less spiritual practices, even through contact with a flourishing nature among the roses.

Other directions Besides the appearance of roses in Goethe, Kerouac elsewhere writes of their association with Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who toward the end of her short life stated, “I have given nothing but love to God and He will repay with love. After my death I will let fall a shower of roses”42 (for this and other connotations of the roses, see Paton, 143). At the beginning of The Dharma Bums (1958), narrator Ray Smith speaks of “the first genuine Dharma Bum I’d met,”43 who bears this status by virtue of the fact that he carries around “a slip of paper which contained a prayer by Saint Teresa announcing that after her death she will return to the earth by showering



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it with roses from heaven, forever, for all living creatures.”44 Smith introduces the “Saint Teresa bum” right after discussing his own study of Buddhism, in which the practice of charity is central. In an October 1955 letter to his future wife Stella Sampas, Kerouac indicates that charity is the tenet common to both the Buddhist and the Catholic spiritual traditions, a principle he wishes to cultivate in his syncretic studies.45 He indicates in this letter that he began his serious study of Buddhism in 1953.46 He had drafted Dr. Sax a year or so earlier, but during this time he was rewriting it—its ending affirms such a syncretism. In the novel Dr. Sax is never identified as Buddhist, but in Kerouac’s 1961 “Pome on Doctor Sax,” the shadowy hero has in his later years become a Dharma Bum, “an old bum living in Skid/Row hotel rooms,” with “eyebrows growing out an inch long, like the eyebrows/of Daisetz Suzuki the Zen Master.”47 Kerouac’s likening of Sax to D. T. Suzuki, the foremost scholar of Buddhism in the West for several decades, places his hero in the position of a sage who will help lead the way out of the provincial restrictions of Christianity. In fact, one of Kerouac’s principal aims in studying Buddhism was to effect a critique of the authoritarianism of Christianity, in other words a departure from the Christ of the Grotto on his phallic cross of the dead fathers. In a 1954 letter to Carolyn Cassady he makes this point: That book about the Aquarian Gospel of the Christ you say is a “bum steer”—I’m sure Christ never trekked to the Orient, only wish he had, one dab of Buddhism would have wiped clean from his mind that egomaniacal Messiah complex that got him crucified and made Christianity the dualistic greed-and-sorrow monster that it is, should say greed-and-piety…. Buddha never claimed to be God, or Son of God…he only said he was a man who had gotten contact with Buddhas of Old, which everybody will do eventually anyway, especially you sweet one.48 Far from rejecting Christianity, Kerouac is offering an adjustment through syncretic dialogue with Buddhism: if Jesus had gone on the road, as a Dharma bum, he would have departed from the sedentary culture of the fathers and not left behind a complex of tyrannical institutions. The fathers, “Buddhas of Old,” would be a different matter, the Fellaheen fathers of global cultural transmission in contrast to the fathers confined to a particular place whose memory imposes itself across generations. Rather than a global history divided into supposedly advanced civilization and the Spenglerian primitivism of the Fellaheen, there would be an intertwining of epochs such that different cultures might be energized by making ties to each other. Once again, Kerouac incorporates examinations of time in his reconfigurations of space. Although this critique of Christianity informs Dr. Sax, Kerouac changed his position over the years. By 1966, in Satori in Paris, he writes, “I’m not

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a Buddhist, I’m a Catholic…,”49 in what seems to be a repudiation of his prior study, though much in that short novel suggests otherwise (part of the next chapter’s subject). Throughout his work—in texts as early as his 1940 college paper “Where the Road Begins” and The Sea Is My Brother, certainly in The Town and the City, through Vanity of Duluoz—he shows a wavering between desire for the road and yearning for settlement. In Dr. Sax, this phenomenon manifests itself through the world-historical personages and forces that traverse the location of Franco-American Lowell, the latter already an unsettled settlement by virtue of the cultural and linguistic exile of its population. Even as Kerouac became, in the 1960s, more interested in fixing his origins—through stronger affirmations of Catholicism, of patrilineal ancestry, of the wish for a settled home—the fixity is regularly disrupted especially by travel and encounters with unexpected cultural differences. In the relatively late Desolation Angels, though Jack Duluoz’s mother Ange acts as a cultural anchor by providing a home life, she also becomes part of the wandering that the novel explores, further participating through her name in the outcast status that the title suggests. As in Dr. Sax, the Franco-American community functions as both the site of a longedfor home and the model of migration, the two sometimes thwarting and sometimes bolstering each other. It is especially in Satori in Paris, which he announces as the effort at full cultural anchoring but which becomes something else entirely, that this wavering is most strongly evident.

5 The roots of abandonment

Kerouac opens Desolation Angels with a meditation on the sight of Mount Hozomeen, in the Northern Cascades of Washington state near the Canadian border, visible to Jack Duluoz from his fire lookout post on the mountain whose name gives the book half its title, Desolation Peak. Beginning with the detailed description of the view into the distance, Kerouac reflects on the passage of time, the coming and going of things in the world, and the Void that ultimately underlies everything, the Mahāyāna Buddhist1 idea that nonbeing is identical with being—and that these basic operations of reality take place within consciousness. Jack announces his realization that “It’s me that’s changed and done all this and come and gone and complained and hurt and joyed and yelled, not the Void” and so that every time I thought of the void I’d be looking at Mt. Hozomeen (because chair and bed and meadowgrass faced north) until I realized “Hozomeen is the Void—at least Hozomeen means the void to my eyes”—2 The concrete reality of the sight of the mountain provides the evidence necessary to demonstrate this ontological principle, which is actualized in the ceaseless changes of consciousness, the mind, or the self. That is, the motion of the self, of Kerouac/Duluoz continuing his travels and coming to Desolation Peak, only one stop in a life defined in good part as migration, reveals the illusion of the fixity of both self and world. No identities are essential; they rather take place as passing configurations in a world that ultimately gives way to nothingness, in which no one person, thing, or event may have durable significance. Even the place that offers the imaginary promise of settlement, Québec, or more broadly Canada, is especially vague in this view, becoming “the ‘clouds of hope’ lazing in Canada beyond” (4). Kerouac suggests that this notion of the underlying nonbeing of everything, as well as the awareness of it, is just as much the occasion for

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creation as for destruction. The particular creation that takes place in the composition of the text is an almost Lucretian poem expressing love for the passing nature of everything, including the self, beginning with a haiku: Aurora Borealis over Hozomeen— The void is stiller —Even Hozomeen’ll crack and fall apart, nothing lasts, it is only a faring-in-that-which-everything-is, a passing-through, that’s what’s going on, why ask questions or tear hair or weep, the burble blear purple Lear on his moor of woes he is only a gnashy old flap with winged whiskers beminded by a fool—to be and not to be, that’s what we are—Does the Void take any part in life and death? does it have funerals? or birth cakes? why not I be like the Void, inexhaustibly fertile, beyond serenity, beyond even gladness, just Old Jack (and not even that) and conduct my life from this moment on (though winds blow through my windpipe), this ungraspable image in a crystal ball is not the Void, the Void is the crystal ball itself and all my woes the Lankavatara Scripture of fools, “Look sirs, a marvelous sad hairnet”— (5–6) Kerouac presents the endless motion of all things in the world as the equivalent of migration or “passing-through,” and he ties this notion to the Shakespearean wisdom of the fool who educates King Lear on the ultimate futility of worldly endeavor.3 Kerouac borrows from the fool’s free association, wordplay, and nonsensical formulations in order to underscore the meaninglessness of existence—the author gives meaning to this condition through a disposition of resignation and the processes of writing by way of a principal Western exemplar of writing, Shakespeare. In extending his set of allusions to Hamlet, Kerouac is hardly the first to turn the Danish prince’s existential question to ontological inquiry. But he brings the phrase “To be or not to be” into contact with his own preoccupations by transforming it into an affirmation of the identity of being and nonbeing, the central question of the Lankavatara Sutra, as he mentions. He cites the hairnet, which in this major text of Mahāyāna Buddhism is a prime example of something that seems to exist but doesn’t, that “is neither an entity, nor a nonentity, for it has both been seen and not seen,” since its hair-shaping effects are visible while its own substance remains invisible.4 He also redirects Hamlet’s tragic deliberations, changing the very precondition of tragedy, the proximity of nonexistence, into an open-ended continuity of the cosmos. This tie between Shakespeare and a major Buddhist text is part of Kerouac’s synthesizing insistence on the global nature of wisdom, the most



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important tenets being found, in his view, in all the major traditions—again he affirms, implicitly through this connection, the basic human condition of migration and vagabondage, which is the same thing as the primacy and rightness of Fellaheen culture. Appropriately, he also connects jazz improvisation to these elements of discovery through the writing process, paraphrasing King Lear’s first line in the scene with the fool, “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!”5 Lear’s winds of destruction, the will to chaos belonging to existence itself, blow through Jack’s own breathing apparatus, “winds blow through my windpipe,” playing him like a saxophone to make its composition, which in turn is the wind that Jack blows as he composes his text, his flow of words—according to this image, through his body his writing forms a continuum with the world. His improvisational composition leads to revealing the motion of all existence, the motion of the self in that existence, and the accompanying motion of matter through the body. Kerouac quips about methods of facilitating digestion—and the lack of consequence of any single action: “So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don’t be sorry—Prunes, prune, eat your prunes—And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void—” (6). Although the violence of motion through the world has apparently been attendant on a chaotic domestic situation, the realization that this chaos is only that of the world, the Void itself, is enough to allow for a new stillness as complement to movement: “I come back into the house a new man” (6). The goal of motion is settlement, but settlement isn’t possible—indeed, it makes no sense—without motion. At the end of this five-page opening chapter of the 400 pages of Desolation Angels, Kerouac reiterates the inevitable trajectory of Jack’s life: proceeding from the meditative tranquility of Desolation Peak, where the constant chaos of the universe reveals itself, the itinerary goes “down to Frisco, then L.A., then Nogales, then Guadalajara, then Mexico City—And still the Void is still and’ll never move—” (7). It turns out not only that Kerouac wavers between a will to motion and a desire for settlement, but also that the wavering itself is part of the movement he engages in, and that its constancy is, finally, the only kind of settlement available. He finishes the chapter with a summary reiteration of this ostensibly Buddhist lesson: “But I will be the Void, moving without having moved” (7). Desolation Angels is all about movement, settlement into movement, and movement that leads to unsettled settlement. The titles of the book’s divisions indicate this pattern and its dual status: the parts of Book One, “Desolation Angels,” are “Desolation in Solitude” (3–72) and “Desolation in the World” (73–241); Book Two is titled “Passing Through,” and comprises Part One, “Passing Through Mexico” (245–84), Part Two, “Passing Through New York” (285–334), Part Three, “Passing Through Tangiers, France and London”

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(335–68), and Part Four, “Passing Through America Again” (369–409). The novel encompasses and passes through many key sites in Kerouac’s global geography, concluding with a pronounced return to America, a place that is more or less home. Nonetheless, even the homes that Jack Duluoz encounters on the way remain in motion. Ange Duluoz, Jack’s mother, more than anyone or anything (in traditional Franco-American fashion)6 marks the anchoring of home in the midst of earthly chaos: speaking of friends who “make big Freudian or sociological philosophies” about young men and their mothers, Jack says, “I often wonder if they’ve ever slept till four in the afternoon and woke up to see their mother darning their socks in a sad window light, or come back from revolutionary horrors of weekends to see her mending the rips in a bloody shirt with quiet eternal bowed head over needle—” (373). Even as such a dispenser of domesticity, a utopian refuge from rather than a source or catalyst of conflict with the patrilineal order, she accompanies Jack on his travels in Book Two, Part Four, from Florida to Mexico (377–87) and California (387–407), biding patiently in the seat next to him on buses, before they live together outside New York City (409). Jack attributes to his mother one of the book’s greatest discoveries concerning the global nature of Fellaheen culture, which she makes at the sight of peasants praying. In response to Jack’s remark that “Içi les espanols sont marié avec les Indiens [Here the Spanish married the Indians],” she says, “Pauvre monde! They believe in God just like us! I didn’t know that, Ti Jean! I never saw anything like this!” Jack explains the sense of homecoming for them both in this place across the border from the United States, a mirror of ever-elusive Québec: “Now she understood Mexico and why I had come there so often even tho I’d get sick of dysentery or lose weight or get pale.” It is in motion—even the motion of bodily disturbances—that this revelation of the grand settlement of world Fellaheen culture takes place. Jack and his mother then “creeped up to the altar and lighted candles and put dimes in the church box to pay for the wax” (384), making gestures they learned in places like the grotto of Notre Dame de Lourdes in Lowell, in a more welcoming version of Catholicism than that site offers in Dr. Sax. It might be tempting to say that Kerouac follows up Dr. Sax with Desolation Angels so as to offer a fusion of the settlement of Christianity and the itinerancy of Buddhism—tempting for simplicity of formulation. It’s true that in Desolation Angels he is clear about making, through Christian universalism, an alliance between the two spiritual traditions— “the Buddha (my hero) (my other hero, Christ is first)” (290—emphasis in text)—but in each he finds both settlement and motion. He brings them into contact in order to activate the dynamic aspects of Christianity and the stationary aspects of Buddhism, with the aim of finding a place that bears the tranquility of home in the midst of the world’s inevitable movement.



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His project of writing has everything to do with creating such a vagabond dwelling, which early in the novel he characterizes as part of the Beat Generation: “It’s the beat generation, it’s béat, it’s the beat to keep, it’s the beat of the heart, it’s being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatman rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat” (137). The project he once believed that he and his close writer friends had undertaken entails being blessed as well as downtrodden—it is an affirmation of life in both its exaltation and its abjection. Even in Jack’s increasing cynicism, over the course of the novel, with respect to the Beat Generation and the insipid consumerism that rapidly becomes part of it, he continues to aver the importance of remaining in motion while seeking a home. Echoing the end of the first chapter, the final motion that the novel describes in its two concluding sentences is a departure from his peers—the beaten and beatific Desolation Angels—and a resignation to making the best of the home that’s available to him: “A peaceful sorrow at home is the best I’ll ever be able to offer the world, in the end, and so I told my Desolation Angels goodbye. A new life for me” (409). Although this home ostensibly offers relief from the turmoil of life among writer friends in the city, the “new life” of necessity entails its own wandering.

Seeking uncertainty As though it were a matter of comfort, in his writing Kerouac always returns to the quest for settlement and the movement it necessitates. Although the wandering he undertakes through his narrator passes through three continents, the will to settle returns regularly as nostalgia for Québec—and for the site of nostalgia of Québécois survivance, the mythical version of the mother country, France. In Satori in Paris, in which Kerouac relates his 1965 trip to Paris and Brittany in search of archival and physical evidence of his ancestry, this nostalgia and its role in the construction of identity receive their most concentrated treatment in his œuvre: criticism has unfortunately neglected and even discredited this short but consequential novel.7 As I will show, misunderstanding stems entirely from lack of widespread knowledge of Québécois culture, the French-Canadian migration, and Kerouac’s deep relationship to these phenomena—in other words, of a huge part of what was vitally important to the author and his writing practice. At first glance Satori in Paris might seem to fit into neither of the major conduits of Kerouac’s writing (another reason for its neglect), that of travel and that of settlement: the travel is to France, by air rather than on the road, and Paris in the 1960s is a far cry from the New York, San Francisco,

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Denver, or Lowell of earlier decades. However, as do his other novels but perhaps with exceptional effectiveness, this one combines the two prongs: the trip to France is travel away from home for the purpose of gaining a stronger sense of connection to home, or the place nostalgically experienced as such—it is an enactment of wandering in exile. And since throughout the novel the identity that he seeks through his narrator turns out to be elusive, Satori in Paris is a demonstration of the failure of rootedness and a valorization of the new configurations of identity that result from the extravagance of the quest. As such, it is part of Kerouac’s critique of the patrimonial transmission of culture—though at times it seems to embrace such transmission. It is also a virtuoso performance of spontaneous prose: traversing boundaries between territories and languages, upsetting and rejecting their hierarchies and exclusions, the text comprises transgressive, exuberant syntax, with frequent mixtures of English and French. Kerouac couches the novel as the account of a Buddhist enlightenment experience, a satori, which he accurately defines in the first sentence: “Somewhere during my ten days in Paris (and Brittany) I received an illumination of some kind that seems to’ve changed me again, towards what I suppose’ll be my pattern for another seven years or more: in effect, a satori; the Japanese word for ‘sudden illumination,’ ‘sudden awakening’ or simply ‘kick in the eye.’”8 This quest for identity is at once familiar (American) and strange (Québécois and, by way of Québec, French); introducing another element of strangeness or foreignness, a Japanese word, adds to the hybrid character of the text and hence of the identity that is its purported telos. Even the book’s title captures the mix, combining different place designators in a single phrase that moves along a trajectory through territorial and cultural differences. He combines the Japanese satori with the French capital: linking the two by the word in, he creates an English phrase that encompasses and admits cultural, territorial, and linguistic heterogeneity. His opening sentence then glosses the term satori in multiple registers: the more neutral correct definition, supplemented by and contrasted with a more everyday and affective expression, “kick in the eye.” The satori, the experience of enlightenment connected in the latter definition to blindness and its adjustment,9 will lead to the narrator’s awareness of identity: “what I suppose’ll be my pattern for another seven years or more”—the circumlocutory, deliberately colloquial phrasing indicates the uncertainty and unsettlement of the identity for which this novel is about to recount the quest. The book hence stages a performance and construction of identity. Kerouac’s use of the term satori follows an extensive, serious, and careful study of Buddhism, which he conducted mainly between 1953 and 1961; especially toward the end of this period, he drew from it a syncretism of Buddhism and the Catholicism that turned on the principle of kindness or charity common to both spiritual traditions.10 The major result of his research from 1953 to 1956 is an organized set of notebooks



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that he planned to publish as a study guide, Some of the Dharma, in which he makes, among many other things, extensive comparisons between Buddhist and Judeo-Christian theological and philosophical traditions.11 The Dharma Bums, his third published novel, has been widely recognized as pivotal in the growth of popular interest in Buddhism in the United States.12 Although his enthusiasm may have been muted, no less a figure than D. T. Suzuki met with Kerouac in the fall of 1958 to discuss the author’s writing on Buddhism.13 In 1960, Kerouac published The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, a markedly syncretic exposition of Buddhist meditations and lessons that he had written in response to Gary Snyder’s urging.14 In his introduction to this short book, Eric Mottram characterizes Kerouac’s attraction to Buddhism as an ethicopolitical choice, closely linked to the impulse to traverse geographic and cultural borders, taken against both “the dragging decay of Christian capitalist democracy and the delusions of extreme leftist reform associated with the Depression and the Thirties. In the Forties and Fifties this alternative consisted in forms of ideological refusal to be held captive to the history of the West.”15 Though not acknowledging Kerouac’s personal background as transnational and translingual, Mottram presents Scripture as the author’s “statement of confidence in his oneness with the universe of energy and form,” asking, “How could he, a man of overflowing boundaries, live in a world of boundaries held rigid with coercion from the State and its educational agents?”16 According to this assessment, Kerouac’s Buddhism offers a way of surmounting the difficulties posed by the traversal of borders—what the author’s quest for identity necessitates. The quest is part of his ongoing reflection on his exiled, diasporic identity: it is a border maintained by the state, accompanied by other geographic features, that stands between Québec and France, and another that separates the Franco-Americans of Massachusetts from their one-time home territory. In both Canada and the United States, social and political limits were long imposed demanding that the French Canadians abandon their identity. But depicting the traversal experience as a satori allows Kerouac to accept the irrevocable foreignness that remains in the territory where he makes his quest, and the irrevocable foreignness he finds in himself—a way of introducing in the heart of a U.S. culture confident in its own familiarity to itself the foreignness that permeates it. There is, of course, always reason to be suspicious of the Orientalist motivations of Western appropriations of Asian culture, especially in light of the stresses on bourgeois individualism that have turned up in American Buddhism.17 However, emphasizing this as a possible aspect of Kerouac’s interest diminishes what has amounted to an important contribution to spurring awareness of Buddhism, especially in light of his serious contestation of U.S. bourgeois complacency as well as of his long-term approach to Buddhist texts. In any case, even when a view of another culture is conditioned by degrees of ethnocentrism, it doesn’t

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mean that all real traces of that culture are effaced—to believe otherwise would be to refuse the possibility of overcoming the epistemological blocks that arise in the power imbalance of transcultural contact in the course of imperial expansion. Throughout his Buddhist studies, Kerouac relied heavily on Dwight Goddard’s landmark A Buddhist Bible, first published in 1932, which offers translations of and commentaries on a number of major classical texts. As he was completing Some of the Dharma in 1955, he came to the writings of Suzuki, for whom he usually expressed admiration, but sometimes mild disparagement, as when he reported to Allen Ginsberg that “I dug Suzuki in NY Public Library, and I guarantee you I can do everything he does and better….”18 By the time Kerouac wrote Satori in Paris in 1965, he was considerably less engaged with Buddhism: but when he declares that “I’m not a Buddhist, I’m a Catholic revisiting the ancestral land” (69), one should hear some irony, a gentle mockery of the role he casts himself in by making the trip to France. The fascination he shows with Buddhism in a 1968 interview indicates that it remained a component of his syncretic thinking.19 However, it’s merely prudent not to regard Satori in Paris as a book informed by Buddhism in the same manner as The Dharma Bums, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, or Some of the Dharma: as he announces in the opening sentence, Kerouac uses the term satori mainly as a narrative device, but also as a critique of some of the Western cultural currents his quest for ancestry participates in, and hence also of the Catholicism that he avows. This modification and adaptation of the term notwithstanding, considering its definition in his source texts will shed light on its role in Satori in Paris. In a footnote to the title of Chapter 7 of the Sutra Spoken by the Sixth Patriarch, “Sudden Enlightenment and Gradual Attainment,” Goddard explains that the dispute, which persists through modern-day Buddhism, over whether enlightenment comes gradually or suddenly dates to a division within Chinese Buddhism during the lifetime of the Sixth Patriarch (637–713 ce). To describe the latter version, Goddard uses the word satori, qualifying it as “sudden and convincing and life-enhancing.”20 For his part, Suzuki writes, “Satori is the sudden flashing into consciousness of a new truth hitherto undreamed of. It is a sort of mental catastrophe taking place all at once, after much piling up of matters intellectual and demonstrative.”21 In this treatment it is, somewhat more than Goddard indicates in his offhand remark, life-altering. Suzuki characterizes it as a basic metamorphosis of the self and the transition to a new kind of relationship to reality that cannot, for the reason that it entails a fundamentally different type of understanding from that limited to the individual self, be explained to someone who hasn’t had it: “For Zen has no business with ideas, and satori is a sort of inner perception—not the perception, indeed, of a single object but the perception of Reality itself, so to speak”



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(63). Suzuki presents this experience as potentially occurring any time, under any sort of circumstances: “An inarticulate sound, an unintelligent remark, a blooming flower, or a trivial incident such as stumbling, is the condition or occasion that will open the mind to satori. Apparently, an insignificant event produces an effect which in importance is altogether out of proportion” (62). The text of Satori in Paris suggests that Kerouac adapts this explanation. As a tale of the quest for identity, the novel relocates identity such that the self is no longer bound by the nation, culture, and language in which it has been previously defined—the book describes the material of a satori, of something leading to an unsettlement of this self. Although it would be easy to believe that he is merely assimilating the idea of satori to the Christian notion of epiphany that was important to the modernist authors—particularly Joyce, in whose work he immersed himself—in his statement of the unsettlement it brings on he affirms the unsettled nature of the very experience. In contrast to an epiphany, which as a moment of crucial insight comes at a definite temporal and narrative point,22 Kerouac presents his satori as elusive in its moment and location in the extravagant series of events of his trip, a series he sketches in the next extravagant sentences of the book, the very long second one to which the third and fourth function as syntactic appendages: —Whatever, something did happen and in my first reveries after the trip and I’m back home regrouping all the confused rich events of those ten days, it seems the satori was handed to me by a taxi driver named Raymond Baillet, other times I think it might’ve been my paranoiac fear in the foggy streets of Brest Brittany at 3 a.m., other times I think it was Monsieur Casteljaloux and his dazzlingly beautiful secretary (a Bretonne with blue-black hair, green eyes, separated front teeth just right in eatable lips, white wool knit sweater, with gold bracelets and perfume) or the waiter who told me “Paris est pourri” (Paris is rotten) or the performance of St. Germain des Prés with elated violinists swinging their elbows with joy because so many distinguished people had shown up crowding the pews and special chairs (and outside it’s misting) or, in Heaven’s name, what? The straight tree lanes of Tuileries Gardens? Or the roaring sway of the bridge over the booming holiday Seine which I crossed holding on to my hat knowing it was not the bridge (the makeshift one at Quai des Tuileries) but I myself swaying from too much cognac and nerves and no sleep and jet airliner all the way from Florida twelve hours with airport anxieties, or bars, or anguishes, intervening? (7–8) The length of these sentences allows a confluence of the disparate experiences, transforming them into narrative events by conveying their

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connection. They are linked mainly in Kerouac’s syntax, which burgeons in order to admit these details as a way of making sense of what happened— but at this point no totalizing sense is to be made, since the unwieldiness of the sentences permits the experiences to remain a flux. So the privileged moment of the satori becomes unprivileged and hence unlike an epiphany. Although something transformative occurs in that moment, indeed a transformation of the self that Kerouac embarks on this narrative in order to define, the event in question is one of a set of everyday matters— everyday because they involve subjects like taxi drivers, a beautiful woman (the first time in the novel that he points to his narrator’s drunken lechery), the woman’s supervisor, a Rabelaisian pun about Paris, the first of a series of confessions about heavy drinking, and many other events of the trip to France, divergent in their purpose and geography. Kerouac’s syntax becomes a way of bringing details and locations together without homogenizing them, of leaving them in the chaos and foreignness with respect to him and each other in which he encounters them.23 And though in identifying the satori he leans toward the meeting with the taxi driver, Raymond Baillet, the quality of the latter is rather to embody the disparities and vagaries of experience.

Dispersing identity Even as the narrator speaks of his genealogical quest, the prose of the text demonstrates the persistence of the unsettlement that prompts the quest in the first place. In the next sentence he already suggests this effect, announcing that his goal is to fix his identity by way of its principal marker, his name: “As in an earlier autobiographical book I’ll use my real name here, full name in this case, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, because this story is about my search for this name in France…” (8). At the beginning of his travel narrative, Kerouac raises the question of the reality of his identity: since he legally changed his name to John Louis Kerouac, the statement suggests that the reality he seeks is at odds with law and custom.24 This seems even more the case when, later in the novel, he explains the name change as necessary for living in a male-dominated world intolerant of gender ambiguity or, apparently, of a plurality of phonetic systems yielding pronunciations that occasion such ambiguity: he changed his name to John, says the narrator, “because you can’t go around America and join the Merchant Marine and be called ‘Jean’” (95). This nominal confusion is part of Kerouac’s larger multiplication of names, the pluralization and dislocation that occur in his autofictions—Jack Duluoz, Ti Jean, Sal Paradise, Ray Smith (The Dharma Bums), Leo Percepied (The Subterraneans—a surname he borrows from Proust).25 Exploratory of the elusiveness of identity, these fictions entail



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a distancing and even a severing of ties from integral grounding. Even if, as Kerouac explains in Visions of Cody, “[b]ecause of the objections of my early publishers I was not allowed to use the same personae names in each work,”26 it is still in the larger apparatus of writing, which includes the demands of publication, that the dispersion of the name takes place. Not lost on Kerouac is the irony of a further scattering of the name, an extension of the Diaspora that removes Québécois names from their ostensible cultural origins through the very textualization that is supposed to ground it—that is, in this writing he dramatizes identity as something constructed or performed. When he spells the name Kérouac with an acute accent, he marks it as French and Québécois; over the course of Satori in Paris the accent mark comes and goes, a sign of the author’s wavering between national, cultural, and linguistic identities. Although Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac is a version of his given name, its instability, fluidity, anglicization, and unsettlement make it part of the series he has used for the narrators of his true-andfictional-novels, all of which ostensibly name the same person. Narrative distancing turns out to be a necessary part of how Kerouac writes down identity; this is further reason to make the traditional distinction between author and narrator in connection with his work. In Satori in Paris he changes a few key details of the “true” story—but these fictionalizations are integral and necessary to his project of revealing reality not by representing it literally but rather by transcribing it. Kerouac’s quest for identity through genealogy in France is deeply rooted in Québécois survivance, especially in the singularly important cultural practice of genealogy. In partial response to Lord Durham’s declaration that the French of Canada “are a people with no history, and no literature” and the ideology it entailed,27 genealogy established a close and supposedly indelible link between French Canadians and France: to this day the practice thrives in Québec.28 Beginning in 1871, a landmark set of books was published, one that Kerouac consulted in the research into his family history that he started in 1957: the Dictionnaire généalogique des familles canadiennes [Genealogical Dictionary of Canadian Families] by Cyprien Tanguay, seven volumes that ostensibly list the first settlers from all the French families in Canada, as well as their traceable descendants. (Tanguay’s work was reprinted as recently as 1996 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, a city that continues to have a large FrancoAmerican population.) In the introduction to the first volume, Tanguay, a historian and Catholic priest, answers the anticipated question of why he undertook the task of compiling this immense genealogy: “For some years now literary taste has been developing, historical research has been increasing” (my emphasis).29 That is, his genealogy precisely contributes to a refutation of Durham’s assessment of the French Canadians. He continues, “The creations of the intellect, the new life given by

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story-telling to what is no more; history, eloquence, and poetry have charms no one misses, least of all perhaps the author.”30 Despite the mild jab at their subjective character, he affirms that the purpose of literature and history is to preserve the past in the present and so prevent it from vanishing—the principal function of writing is a memorial one. Although genealogy is among the “less attractive studies,” writes Tanguay, it is also necessary, since dates, statistics, names, and genealogies are “the elements of history.”31 Genealogy is essential to history, also to literature if it is to be truly memorial, and thus to the preservation of “the French race in America,” according to an expression favored from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.32 Among the concrete practical uses of genealogy that Tanguay provides, the first is an explicitly racial one, the assurance of good breeding: “The Church prohibits marriages to certain degrees of kinship,” and hence it has the strict obligation “to make kinship known.”33 Moreover, Tanguay continues, genealogy preserves and maintains the exceptional qualities of a people: “Every land has its nobility. We have the nobility of the blood. It has come to us in large part from France. Several names figure in our history that glowed brightly in the time of the Crusades: it is the nobility of old rock, if not the richest. It has been more broadly represented on our shores than in any other colony.”34 Tanguay is affirming a major point of the ideology of survivance, which has to do with not only the Frenchness of the French Canadians but also their superiority even with respect to France: he goes so far as to present them as in possession of a racial nobility. In the terms of this ideology, their lineage extends deep into the Middle Ages and to the most purportedly admirable and noble propagation of Christianity, the Crusades, in Québec preserving true Frenchness from the atheism and modernization of the French Revolution of 1789. And the nobility of French Canada, according to Tanguay, rises even higher than that of Ancien Régime France, having achieved its unique greatness in two different ways: for engaging in “terrible struggles, at the start of the colony,”35 mainly against the Iroquois in the late seventeenth century, and also—he admits the controversial nature of the idea—for mixing, after making peace, with both the Hurons, who are “so full of intelligence,” and the Iroquois “with their boldness.”36 In the terms of this account, all these sources of nobility combine to produce an exceptional race and nation, one that has defined itself against and resisted the continuing conquest carried out through policies of the British-Canadian government (as of the Confederation of 1867, the Canadian federal government), that has made the greatest virtue out of its dismal condition of exile. Genealogy, then, is resistance to colonial domination carried out through a memorial to ancestry, whose purported nobility stands against the imperial push toward peasantry. In this perspective, literature that bases itself on genealogy is also a literature of survivance.



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Remembering the name In response to the Franco-American version of survivance, bearing on a culture and language rapidly disappearing in the twentieth century under pressures and temptations to assimilate in the United States, as ties to Québec, not to mention France, grew increasingly tenuous,37 in his writing Kerouac repeatedly states that one of the primary purposes of his work is memorialization. In support of his claim in Visions of Cody that he writes “remembrances” à la Proust, and borrowing a phrase from that book, both John Clellon Holmes and Allen Ginsberg term him “the Great Rememberer.”38 As a child Kerouac was known for his prodigious memory, even earning the nickname “Memory Babe” from friends (Nicosia, 39). Joyce Johnson has recently shown how Kerouac’s early literary efforts were marked by his passion for recovering and remembering his FrenchCanadian past and heritage: in a journal entry from 1945, while he was planning The Town and the City, Kerouac calls himself, for the first time, “half-American.”39 And in 1950, as he was preparing to write On the Road, he reports a visitation from a French-Canadian older brother who directs him to return to the old ways and stop trying to “defrench” himself.40 This sibling isn’t his late older brother Gerard, but rather “my original self returning after all these years since I was a child trying to become ‘un Anglais’ in Lowell from shame of being a Canuck.”41 That is, a figure from Kerouac’s imagination, the part of himself in which his ancestry is incarnated, is integral to the writing experiments to which he devoted his life; in the face of his vanishing language and culture he plans to cast them in memory through writing. Richard Sorrell makes the link between Kerouac’s penchant for memory, survivance, and the motto of the province of Québec, “Je me souviens (I remember).”42 This motto, as Mason Wade pointed out in the 1960s, has everything to do with the preservation of language and culture against imperial encroachments: “When the French Canadian says ‘Je me souviens,’ he not only remembers the days of New France but also the fact that he belongs to a conquered people.”43 However, in Satori in Paris, as soon as Kerouac states that he went to France in order to “search for this name,” even his presentation raises major problems with the project of stabilizing identity through the genealogical past. The book reaches into the past for grounding, and in the same gesture embraces the fragmentary identity that has resulted from being distant from the ground. As Jack moves through the story, he describes failing at every turn to gain meaningful knowledge of the name, hence leaving it in an unstable state. Several times he extends this procedure through a poetic exegesis of his name, multiplying its possible orthographic permutations in order to illustrate and recover its migration from place to place and semiotically connecting it to the locales from which it stems as a way of seeking

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its rootedness. Yet he is unable to reach the latter in the absence of fixed markers: And besides it’s all too long ago and worthless unless you can find the actual family monuments in fields, like with me I go claim the bloody dolmens of Carnac? Or I go and claim the Cornish language which is called Kernuak? Or some little old cliff-castle at Kenedjack in Cornwall or one of the “hundreds” called Kenedjack in Cornwall? Or Cornouialles itself outside Quimper and Keroual (Brittany thar). (34) I knew that the name of Cornish Celtic Language is Kernuak. I knew that there are stone monuments called dolmens (tables of stone) at Kériaval in Carnac, some called alignments at Kermario, Kérlescant and Kédouadec, and a town nearby called Kéroual…. (72–3) An essential part of the quest, the act of multiplication involves listing all the place names that begin with the syllable ker or a variant on it. The procedure demonstrates the elusiveness of the name, both verbally and geographically: place names proliferate even more with the attempt to fix a family name to them. Places themselves are elusive, as Kerouac shows with the rapprochement of Cornouaille(s) and Cornwall: when spelled without an s, Cornouaille designates a place in Brittany, and when spelled with an s it is the French word for Cornwall, England. But apparently as a counter to such linguistic unsettlement, Jack expresses pleasure at discovering that he’s partly at home in Paris because of his linguistic heritage, his fluency “in 300-year-old French which was preserved intact in Québec and still understood in the streets of Paris not to mention the hay barns of the North” (13). This comfort is nonetheless unsettled through irony, since this home is thousands of miles from either of the American regions that the narrator would call home. In the course of the novel, this tenuous linguistic settlement encounters further disturbance. In Paris the narrator is conscious of his accent, especially the difference between the rolled Québécois “r” and the uvular Parisian “r”: he exoticizes the latter, speaking of “those Arabic Parisian ‘r’s’” (40) because of the phoneme’s proximity to a guttural—he thus pushes France further east, away from North America even as he needs it to be nearer. He believes (rather fancifully) his French to be closer to Breton than Parisian French: but that assigns him, he knows, a minoritarian relationship with the metropolis, one of distance and vagabondage. Kerouac thus dramatizes the difference between French as language of empire, the language that accompanied his ancestors to North America, and French as the language of a despised ethnic group, a people who have experienced the brutality of



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conquest. In addition, he emphasizes the difference and distance between languages through the very practice that supposedly brings them together, translation. With some exaggeration, he shows how the literal, word-forword rendition of a phrase can yield another with a completely different meaning: he translates the name of a Parisian street, the rue des FrancsBourgeois (the street of the free or enfranchised townsmen or citizens) as “street of the outspoken middle class” (50), which by simple dictionary definitions is correct. Kerouac follows his customary practice of writing French phrases with deliberate irregularities in order to underscore the remove of his version of the language from standard, metropolitan French, or of linguistic minoritarianism from imperial grammar. And he does his usual literalist translation of most (but not all) of these phrases into English, though not with as much excessive emphasis as in the foregoing example, in order to demonstrate the textures, contours, and rhythms of his own deterritorialized French as well as the difference between English and French. With regard to both languages, he demonstrates their fluidity, permeability, and lack of stability. The following passage, in which the narrator asks a bartender for a morning beer, illustrates Kerouac’s insistence on the expressiveness of Québécois French in its clash with a more formal language that nonetheless manifests itself colloquially: “Ey, weyondonc, pourquoi t’a peur que j’m’dégrise avec une ’tite bierre?” (Hey, come on, how come you’re scared of me sobering up with a little beer?) “On s’dégrise pas avec la bierre, Monsieur, mais avec le bon petit déjeuner.” (We dont sober up with beer, Monsieur, but with a nice breakfast.) (80) All of this is correct French, presented as it would be spoken in everyday conversation, marked with colloquialisms such as contracted pronunciations and, in the bartender’s case, the omission of ne in his negation. What distinguishes the narrator’s speech as other than standard metropolitan French is the word weyondonc, Kerouac’s phonetic rendition of Voyons donc, “Let’s see then,” a multipurpose Québécois interjection. The narrator uses the informal second-person pronoun tu to address the bartender, a usage long standard among peasants and industrial workers in both France and Québec, and also, at the time, much more common in the general population in Québec and New England than in France. In turn, the bartender more formally addresses the narrator as “Monsieur,” the use of which makes the pronoun vous implicit. In addition, the narrator uses the contraction ’tite, which frequently occurs in place of petite in spoken Québécois but not metropolitan French—the bartender echoes with petit,

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augmenting the dialectal difference with the expression “petit déjeuner,” in contrast to the Québécois term for breakfast, which is simply déjeuner. In the translation, Kerouac leaves the word Monsieur intact in order to convey the specifically French politeness at issue, and hence the marked distinction between the geographies and registers of the two versions of French. The exchange involves motion between these variations on the language, and then, in the translation, between French and English.

Realizing and fictionalizing the past Similarly, the narrative of Satori in Paris conveys cultural itinerancy: the story is one of error and misdirection, both cartographic and epistemological. The plot proceeds by farcically ironic turns reminiscent of Kerouac’s beloved Marx Brothers—or one of their Hollywood descendants, Jerry Lewis, as the narrator says in self-mockery (101). As such the plot is well constructed, giving the lie to the notion that Kerouac wrote carelessly—and to his own claim, implied when his narrator states that he’s using his given name (8), that the text is straight reportage. A police officer, a figure of state regulation, gives the narrator wrong directions to the Bibliothèque Nationale, the repository of cultural heritage that eludes him (29–30); once there, he doesn’t find the books he’s looking for (35); at the National Archives, the main repository, he hears that records were destroyed during the Second World War (51). That is, in trying to verify the story of his ancestry through genealogical facts, Jack is thwarted by the very state institutions that exist to preserve it— his attempt at survivance becomes futile, an extension of the wandering that survivance is supposed to bring to conclusion. Kerouac is left with only his digressive story, a patchwork addition to the family romance that has lasted for generations—as writer and memorialist, his narrator has the mission of verifying it. It turns out that survivance, contrary to what it purports to be, can only be a matter of reconstruction, and hence of construction or performance. In making a request to the secretary of the curator, Monsieur Casteljaloux, for a list of the officers in the army of General Montcalm, the last military commander of French-ruled Québec, in 1756, Jack explains, “My ancestor was an officer of the Crown, his name I just told you, and the year he came from Brittany, he was a Baron they tell me, I’m the first of the family to return to France to look for the records” (51). He indicates the narrative status of this ancestor by saying “they tell me,” repeating the tale of an aristocratic forebear that has long been dear to the family, entirely in keeping with the impulse in survivance, expressed by Tanguay, to establish the noble credentials of the Québécois nation against the shift into peasantry that the conquest for many decades entailed. The latter is of course what gives the Québécois, as Kerouac sees things, their status as Fellaheen.



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This story of the first patrilineal ancestor in French Canada, the same Kerouac tells in Dr.  Sax and Lonesome Traveler,44 has the air of mythification: the ancestor arrived in Canada in 1756 and was a distinguished military officer rewarded for his service with a seigneurie at Rivièredu-Loup, a city northeast of Québec City on the St. Lawrence. As such, he is a last-minute representative of Ancien Régime France in Québec before the fall in 1759, a link to the Middle Ages and thus the truest French nobility, the warrior caste that ultimately traces its real or imagined origins to the Crusades. In taking such a strong interest in this particular ancestor, Kerouac accepts the emphasis on patrilineal ancestry of Catholic and Québécois survivance. This story, however, is at odds with his own findings: in 1957, on a trip that took him to Tangiers, Morocco, across the Mediterranean to Marseille, to Paris, and then to London, he went to the British Museum to do genealogical research, beginning with the name Lebris de Kérouac (Nicosia, 548), and during which he found what he believed to be his ancestral coat of arms and motto, “Aimer, travailler et souffrir [Love, work, and suffer].”45 Among the documents in the Kerouac Papers in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection is a “Tableau généalogique de Jack Kerouac,” which he copied in the British Museum— correctly, on a French typewriter equipped with accent marks—from “the French heraldic volume,” according to his handwritten notation.46 This table indicates Maurice-Louis-Alexandre LeBrice de Kérouack as the family’s first patrilineal forebear in Canada, married to Louise Bernier in 1732.47 The list proceeds through the generations until Kerouac’s own birth. In the same archival envelope are two photocopied pages, probably from several years later; although Kerouac didn’t note their source, they are from Volume 5 of Tanguay’s Dictionnaire généalogique, which between 1957 and 1965 would have been available in any number of libraries in the northeastern United States. These pages provide information on those named LeBrice (a variant of Lebris) de Kérouack (one of several spellings of the surname), including the marriage of Maurice-Louis-Alexandre and Louise Bernier, and the names and birthdates of their three children. But on the following page, next to the name François LeBrix, a soldier, born in Kas, Basse-Bretagne in 1703, Kerouac wrote the extended name FrançoisAlexandre Lebrix de Kerouac’h, noting only this man as his ancestor.48 Perhaps he made the mistake by wishing to verify the story of the military officer who arrived in 1756 (the entry indicates 1726 as Lebrix’s arrival date) to defend Québec in the French and Indian War, in contrast to a minor nobleman or bourgeois who would have come several decades earlier. In any case, this research suggests that Kerouac had far more information than he indicates in Satori in Paris, where he presents his narrator as proceeding in slapstick fashion from one dead end to another. That is, in this narrative of the search for his real name, for the reality of this name, for the real

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name of the ancestor (which he doesn’t provide in the novel, although he had narrowed it to two possibilities), he engages in misdirection, a fictionalization of reality whose purpose is to reveal reality in a way that releases it from the restrictions of representation. Hence the narrative is a diversion or digression from the centrality of patrilineal cultural transmission and the morally inflected representation it entails. Kerouac’s procedure has to do with the elusiveness of ancestral groundedness, or of any groundedness in the past, and the valorization of the wandering that one might do in order to find such rooting, further exile. Moreover, the fact of so many variants, which besides those above include Keroac and Kirouac, makes the origin of the name all the more difficult to establish because ancestry itself proves to be already permeated with scattering.49 In affirming his aristocratic past, Kerouac accepts and even embraces the dispersion it has of necessity undergone, hence his own effective flight from nobility and movement toward Fellaheen status.50 Here as elsewhere in his work, seeing great creative energy in this dual trajectory, he lucidly anticipates what Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin have termed the “powers of diaspora.”51 Largely because most of Kerouac’s readers, both critics and fans, tend to understand his novels primarily as thinly veiled memoirs, the misdirection in Satori in Paris has gone unnoticed until very recently.52 Notable among those who have taken him at his word and consequently missed this strategy are Patricia Dagier, the Bretonne genealogist hired by the Association des Familles Kirouac, and her co-author, Breton journalist Hervé Quéméner, who in 1999 and 2009 published accounts of her three-year research project. In the introduction to the 2009 book, Jack Kerouac: Breton d’Amérique, Dagier and Quéméner write of the narrative of Satori in Paris, “In Paris as in Brest, the ancestor is evasive,” pronouncing Kerouac’s search a “failure.”53 In the 1999 volume, they term “pure fantasy” his identification of the year of birth of his early ancestor as 1703 and the latter’s place of birth as Kas, Basse-Bretagne, which the author provided in a 1968 letter to his relative Gérard Lévesque.54 As I have just signaled, however, contrary to his reputation for sloppiness, Kerouac found these facts in the entry on François LeBrix in Tanguay’s Dictionnaire généalogique. Dagier and Quérémer open the book by proclaiming the name of the ancestor: “Urbain-François Le Bihan de Kervoac, alias Alexandre de Kervoach, alias Maurice-Louis Le Bris de Kervoach” (15)—a Breton born around the turn of the eighteenth century (63), married to Marie-Louise Bernier in 1732 at Cap-Saint-Ignace (150–1). This is the same person Kerouac identified as his ancestor in 1957; a confusion of names results from the man having taken an alias upon his emigration in 1722 following a brawl whose legal consequences tarnished his reputation (Dagier and Quéméner 1999, 96–9). And, though not a nobleman, his status as the son of a notary accorded him membership in what amounted to a pseudonobility in the immense bureaucracy of Louis XIV and Louis XV.55 In 1735, following remarkable



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entrepreneurial success, Le Bris de Kervoach acquired a seigneurie in Rivière-du-Loup where he briefly lived with his wife and children in noble adornment; following his untimely death in 1736, his family was soon destitute (Dagier and Quéméner 2009, 119–20).56 The confusion of identities, though surely unknown to Kerouac, further complicates patrilineal transmission from the mother country; it dovetails with his own shifts on the name of his ancestor as well as with his strategy of misdirection/ fictionalization in Satori in Paris, which entails a mixture of fact and family legend. In other words, the very project of searching for one’s ancestors of necessity augments its own uncertainties—grounding identity on patrimonial authority turns out to be its own undoing, and as such a revelation of its nature as constructed.

Overflows Dagier and Quéméner can’t be blamed for overlooking Kerouac’s canniness in acquiring and subsequently hiding knowledge of his ancestor, since the Kerouac Papers in the Berg Collection have only been available to the public since 2006. It’s understandable that they would accept the persistent image of the slipshod Kerouac—as so many others have, in the case of several scholars using the author’s own descriptions of drinking, along with biographical accounts, to insist that especially toward the end of his sadly short life he could no longer have written well.57 From the beginning to the end of Satori in Paris, through his narrator Kerouac provides confessional accounts of excessive consumption of alcohol (mainly cognac); of being taken for a panhandler (15); of being treated with suspicion at the Bibliothèque Nationale because librarians “smelled the liquor on me” (33); of being shooed out of the offices of his French publisher (53–4); and of continually returning to La Gentilhommière in the Latin Quarter, “the perfect bar” (19). But the literary dimension to these depictions of drinking stems in part, as in the Lowell novels, from his interest in Rabelais, who announces at the beginning of Gargantua (1535) that he is writing for drinkers.58 In passages in Gargantua to which Kerouac regularly returned for source material, drinking occurs constantly, often with the effect of social leveling as characters speak in unfettered fashion, in the manner of Plato’s Symposium. As an extension and secularization of communion, Rabelais’s drinking scenes move class distinction to the background, obliterate differences between high learning and popular tradition, and allow the emergence of a utopian truth that would surpass social authority and hierarchy. In one episode, the king (Grandgousier), his son the crown prince (Gargantua), the humble monk (Frère Jean), a scholar of bourgeois background (Gymnaste),

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and many others treat each other as equals: the monk tells a riddle about why “a damsel’s thighs are always cool,” a problem that Gargantua affirms “is not in Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodias, nor Plutarch.”59 Toward the beginning of the book, in a passage I address toward the end of Chapter 3 above in connection with Visions of Cody, a feast to celebrate the imminent birth of Gargantua becomes a farcical series of declarations not attributed to particular speakers. The text comprises relentlessly digressive speech on drinking, eating, sex, urinating, defecating—there is constant mixing of corporeal functions in Rabelais, a celebration of the body as the site of many pleasures. The talk is full of both curses and Latin phrases, offering Kerouac an example for mixed-language prose. In Visions of Gerard he explicitly mentions the passage.60 In Satori in Paris, drinking serves a distinctly Rabelaisian leveling function, pushing aside barriers of class, nationality, profession, and location. Kerouac describes the atmosphere in La Gentilhommière as follows: I’m going out of my mind because meanwhile I’m exchanging a hundred thousand French pleasantries and conversations with Negro Princes from Senegal, Breton surrealist poets, boulevardiers in perfect clothes, lecherous gynecologists (from Brittany), a Greek bartender angel called Zorba, and the owner is Jean Tassart cool and calm by his cash register and looking vaguely depraved (tho actually a quiet family man who happens to look like Rudy Loval my old buddy in Lowell Massachusetts who’d had such a reputation at fourteen for his many amours and had that same perfume of smoothy looks). (20) As he frequently does, Kerouac finds in one location the confluence of several—Paris becomes the Brittany of ancestry and also, through the resemblance of two men of French heritage, the old Franco-American mill town. He also brings onomastic play to this scene, identifying the surrealist poets as Breton, from Brittany (like the gynecologists), but in so doing he gives them the name of André Breton, one of the key founders of surrealism. This community is a largely male one, in which, as in Rabelais, crude lasciviousness permeates all other subjects. Women are sometimes admitted to this world as participants in the conversation, but usually their sexual characteristics are underscored. Hence the narrator speaks of the “eatable lips” (7) of the unnamed Bretonne secretary, later describing her as “raunchily edible” (50). In keeping with the tenor of medieval and early modern festivity, Kerouac writes in similar terms of a prostitute. Recounting their time together in his hotel the evening of his arrival in Paris, the narrator is struck by the fact that they’re the same age, forty-three: “Well this old gal



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was the wildest lay imaginable. How can I go into such detail about toilet matters. She really made me blush at one point. I shoulda told her to stick her head in the ‘poizette’ but of course (that’s Old French for toilette) she was too delightful for words” (16). Kerouac emphasizes the farcical nature of the scene through this grotesque image of dunking the woman’s head, of mixing it with the functions of what Bakhtin terms, in connection with Rabelais, the “lower stratum”:61 the highest part of the body comes down to the lower level that both sex and excretion occupy. Kerouac amplifies this Rabelaisian scene by using a word he identifies as Old French, and so in a slightly older language than Rabelais’s, and he touches on the same tradition of farce that the Renaissance author reworks.62 Although there is no evidence of the word poizette occurring in French outside of Kerouac’s vocabulary, in the notes he made in advance of writing this novel he made a list of what he identified as four “Quebecois Medievalisms,” one of which is poizette;63 he ties the word to the French he knows intimately, even spelling it with a z so that it looks late medieval or early modern. In line with the ideology of survivance, he regarded Québécois French as “true” French, the medieval language, that of fifteenth-century poet François Villon, as he says in Satori in Paris (45) and elsewhere,64 and as such it is a language apt for describing this farcical romp. Although Kerouac distances himself from the groundedness of patrilineal genealogy and its hierarchizing effects, he accepts these sufficiently to benefit from the male domination that they impose, an important element of medieval farce.65 This part of the story also involves a notable bit of misdirection, which seems to be for the purpose of further aligning Satori in Paris with French traditions of art and literature and hence of affirming its status as fiction, theater, or performance—the farcical performance of the quest for identity. His narrator has met the 43-year-old single mother, Kerouac writes, “in an afterhours Montparnasse gangster bar with no gangsters around” (16). This detail would seem to place Jack’s hotel, where he and the woman soon go together, in or near the Montparnasse area, which is in the 14th arondissement of Paris. However, a document in the Berg Collection indicates otherwise: Kerouac saved the call slip from the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris with which, on May 29, 1965, he requested the Histoire de la maison royale de France, et des grands officiers de la couronne by Père Anselme de Sainte-Marie (first published in 1674), a tome that interested him because of his persistent belief that his ancestor was a member of the high nobility. The address he provides is the Hôtel Madeleine Haussman, which is at 10 rue Pasquier, near the Place de la Madeleine in the 8th arondissement (and within reasonable walking distance of what was then the main location of the Bibliothèque), quite a distance from Montparnasse. Indeed, in the Satori in Paris manuscript, in providing the location of the “gangster bar” he initially writes “Montmartre,” which is considerably closer to the hotel than Montparnasse, crossing out “martre”

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and replacing it with “parnasse.”66 Although Montmartre had its own reputation as an artistic and underground quarter, at the time and historically Montparnasse was especially known as a residence and gathering site of artists and writers, which in the decades leading up to Kerouac’s visit included Sartre, Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, Henry Miller, Pound, Picasso, Blaise Cendrars, Marcel Duchamp, Diego Rivera, and Jean-Luc Godard. In 1965 Godard was one of the latest French sensations among New York intellectuals, and in his debut feature film, Breathless [À bout de souffle], which had appeared just five years earlier (and in which he first used the improvisational directing style through which his work aesthetically approaches Kerouac’s),67 there is a darkly lit scene in which gangsters meet after hours at a Montparnasse bar. Hence, this neighborhood provides excellent company and an atmospheric setting for a midcentury experimental writer known for his subterranean predilections.68 At least as much to the point, the area was named in the seventeenth century by students who recited their poetry there—Mount Parnassus, the home of the Muses, who inspire artistic activity but also, as the daughters of Mnemosyne, are involved in memorialization. As the novel proceeds, the studied depiction of drinking and farcical situations continues. When the narrator is on his way to Brittany, he misses the plane because he decides to use the toilet and consequently loses his bags (57). That is, this bodily function disrupts the order of social regulation, just as in the scene in Gargantua when the young giant arrives in Paris and, in response to local mockery that casts him as a provincial, climbs the towers of Notre Dame, whips out his male member, and floods the city with urine. Kerouac also alludes to this scene in On the Road, when he speaks of Dean’s “suffering bulk and bursting ecstasies,” comparing him to Gargantua.69 After traveling to Brest instead by train, Jack spends much of his time in frustration trying to recover his luggage (74–93). He can’t seem to get out of this ancestral homeland that he has begun to despise. But then in a bar, the genre of location in the novel where important things happen, he meets the owner, a man named Fournier (91): this is a common FrenchCanadian surname70 that takes the owner closer to the home the narrator is looking for—closer, that is, than if Kerouac had called him Didier, after the real bar owner he met in Brest (Dagier and Quéméner 1999, 212), an unusual surname among Québécois.71 Fournier persuades the narrator to stay in order to meet people named Lebris, who might well be relatives, of whom he provides an entire list: “Look, there’s dozens of ’em here. Lebris the pharmacist, Lebris the lawyer, Lebris the judge, Lebris the wholesaler, Lebris the restaurateur, Lebris the bookdealer, Lebris the sea captain, Lebris the pediatrician” (92). The multiplication of the name only amplifies the futility of the quest, the dispersion of familial rootedness. (Another fictionalization: in a later interview, Didier said that he suggested to Kerouac only one Lebris, the bookdealer [Dagier and Quéméner 1999, 212].) Jack



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then responds, “‘Is there a Lebris who’s a gynecologist who loves women’s thighs’ (Ya tu un Lebris qu’est un gynecologiste qui aime les cuisses des femmes?)” (92). With this allusion to the above-cited remark from Rabelais on “a damsel’s thighs,” Kerouac adds to the grotesque, farcical nature of this proliferation and accompanying diminishment of anchored meaning of the name; he performs unsettlement in the narrative by providing the narrator’s statement in English as well as colloquial Québécois. (Following the opening word in the above sentence, Ya, a contraction of il y a, “there is,” the second word, tu, has the specifically Québécois usage of marking a phrase as a question.)72

Dreaming memories When he meets Monsieur Lebris, the narrator takes a few awkward moments to verify his name and French identity: he shows his passport, a validation from state authority—it says John Louis Kerouac and thus emphasizes the remove from ancestral identity that this meeting is supposed to overcome. Despite their distance, M. Lebris offers the narrator cognac, and communion ensues. M. Lebris is ironically named “Ulysse”: when the narrator finds the present-day incarnation of the ancestor, it turns out that this wished-for anchor has the name of the classic wanderer, the name that one of Kerouac’s favorite authors, Joyce, gave to the identification between writing and wandering. That is, at the end of his quest for geographic and cultural fixity, Kerouac finds more wandering. This name is yet another change: the Lebris on whom Ulysse is based was actually named Pierre (Dagier and Quéméner 1999, 213–14). The latter name signifies just the sort of rocklike fixity that Kerouac is ostensibly looking for, a downright religious permanency; in the novel the new name suits his purpose of narrating the futility—the unsettlement and uncertainty—of trying to ground oneself in ancestry and an ancestral homeland. Furthermore, Ulysse Lebris is in bed with a hernia—he is geographically fixed not from settlement among his rooted ancestors but rather from physical immobilization. In describing M. Lebris on a “heap of delicious pillows,” the narrator interjects, “(O Proust!)” (95), associating M. Lebris with the remembrances of Kerouac’s own writing and its place in modernist Western literature, as well as contextualizing the encounter as part of the author’s literary project. M. Lebris is not only reminiscent of Proust himself but also the occasion for eruption of associative memories. But what is remembered is not so much the French aristocratic past as the fact that its memory continues to be elusive, even more so now that the narrator has arrived at the supposed site of origin—literary forebears displace those who derive from survivance. Further distancing M. Lebris from remembrance is

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another change that Kerouac makes: Pierre Lebris was a bookseller (Dagier and Quéméner 1999, 213–14),73 whereas Ulysse Lebris owns a restaurant— the character is connected with Rabelaisian feast, but not directly linked to Kerouac’s profession and its purposes, as was the man he met. The meeting becomes even less of a confirmation of kinship through the narrator’s strangely racializing, fantastical doubt as to the genuineness of the pedigree he encounters: At first I wonder “Is he Jewish? pretending to be a French aristocrat?” because something about him looks Jewish at first, I mean the particular racial type you sometimes see, pure skinny Semitic, the serpentine forehead, or shall we say, aquiline, and that long nose, and funny hidden Devil’s Horns where his baldness starts at the sides, and surely under that blanket he must have long thin feet (unlike my thick short fat peasant’s feet)…. (96) Jack muses on Ulysse Lebris’s widow’s peak, “where his baldness starts at the sides,” a phenotypic trait popularly associated with a fiendish appearance; such actors of eastern European heritage as Bela Lugosi and Al Lewis benefitted from it in their vampire roles.74 Along with this feature, Jack then assigns M. Lebris a whole series of attributes, most of them saliently aristocratic and hence marking an imagined racial imposture. The stereotype unfurls systematically, as though rehearsed—which in fact it is, since it’s closely related to one Kerouac describes in Visions of Gerard. In that novel he attributes its source to the St. Louis de France Parochial School in Lowell, where the nuns warned the French-Canadian children to keep away from the nearby Green Public School because the kids there who “werent Catholic” “have tails concealed beneath their trousers,”75 according to anti-Semitic fantasy transmitted directly from medieval diatribe.76 Confirming the darkly proper environment of this cliché, Kerouac describes “the particular Medieval Gaulic closed-in flavor” of the Centralville or Centerville neighborhood of Lowell.77 That is, the guardians of survivance perceived the Jews as absolute other to Québécois survivance, evil to supposedly noble Catholic goodness. In Satori in Paris, Kerouac’s invocation of this stereotype on first encounter with a contemporary representative of his narrator’s ancestry is similar to his use of stereotypes in other works (as I have discussed in connection with On the Road especially: see above, Chapter 2), which functions to illustrate the limits of cognition, the failure of a mind in an unknown cultural situation to grasp what it confronts. Unable to apprehend the plenitude of ancestry, Jack takes recourse to a dream image of his supposed kinsman through which he experiences this ancestry as the opposite of what he has always imagined it to be—so the encounter is a complete disruption of his



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expectations of establishing the pedigree of his paternal lineage. In keeping with the pattern of the novel, at the moment when anchoring is supposed to take place, it disappears altogether. But suddenly, Jack describes the transformation of the racialized fantasy, and before him M. Lebris becomes “an old noble Breton” about whom he adds, “For a man like this armies would form” (97)—everything about him is worth fighting for, as a cause of survivance. He may or may not be the anchor, but he has rather become a source of mystical revelation: the vision of aristocratic traits—a second dream, following the first, and as part of the succession having no more claim to objective reality—reminds Jack, with his “fat peasant’s feet,” of the refined traits that he himself lacks because of the conquest and movement into Fellaheen status. The next paragraph, the last in the chapter, pretty much lays out Kerouac’s strategy: “It’s that old magic of the Breton noble and of the Breton genius, of which Master Matthew Arnold said: ‘A note of Celtic extraction, which reveals some occult quality in a familiar object, or tinges it, one knows not how, with “the light that never was on sea or land”’” (97). The full secondary quotation is actually from the article on François René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) in the Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition, which in 1960 Kerouac bought second-hand in its entirety, reading it frequently for the rest of his life.78 Elsewhere in the novel, Kerouac explicitly mentions Chateaubriand three times (17, 42, 66), the second alongside Voltaire and Henri de Montherlant, saying that reading them “the previous winter” was part of his preparation for the trip, thereby suggesting, as Peggy Pacini points out, that “the quest for his literary forebears might…be more important than the quest for his family ancestors.”79 An author of the French romantic period, Chateaubriand was originally from Saint Malo in Brittany; the tertiary quotation is a phrase from Arnold’s praise for him.80 The unstated choice of Chateaubriand as a figure of comparison corresponds to both Kerouac’s genealogical project and the literary perspective he brings to it. Born soon after the 1759 fall of Québec, in early adulthood Chateaubriand witnessed the French Revolution, several years into which, after his initial sympathies, his aristocratic status led him to exile in North America, where he explored the wilderness. At the turn of the nineteenth century, he published two novels roughly based on his experiences, Atala and René, widely and durably read tales of the noble qualities of Native Americans (specifically the Natchez), a subject of obvious interest to Kerouac in connection with the quest for heritage. Moreover, as the Britannica article states, critics have long recognized Chateaubriand as a literary bridge between classicism and romanticism: his work combines the latter’s “fertility of ideas, vehemence of expression and luxury of natural description” with “a discipline learnt in the school of their predecessors,” the classicists.81

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Kerouac’s allusion to Chateaubriand injects disorientation into the meeting with Ulysse Lebris. Jack, noted American author of idealized depictions of his country, has a distant sense of connection to Breton aristocracy but feels exiled in America partly owing to events around the French Revolution. He sees in his possible relative the idealized image of a Breton aristocrat who in the wake of the French Revolution went into exile in America, returning to become a noted author of idealized images of America. Jack’s, and Kerouac’s, entire literary project has turned on a tension between searching for origins and, as the search is in progress, renouncing it as futile and instead embracing the encounters that occur on the way. The directions of the search that Kerouac stages are hence scrambled: the very idea of rooting oneself in the past, through a “return” to the eastern, ostensibly more primordial territory of Europe—“the great European night,” as he says in Visions of Cody (362)—struggles to keep making sense. The search declares itself to be, instead of authentically grounding, a literary construction that involves fantastical notions of ancestry. In the face of all these qualities, and while misdirecting recognition of them through multiple levels of quotation, he attributes M. Lebris’s ability to reveal “some occult quality in a familiar object” and to offer the “the light that never was on sea or land.” In a series of dream visions concerning ethnic and social affiliations, this man offers something unexpected and inexplicable, found in travel but not as its goal—perhaps it’s the satori—that is utterly different from the expectation of patrimonial anchoring that his narrator has sought. This meeting is the strongest reminder that Jack’s quest has no clear or simple end, that its end may be the impossibility of concluding its vagabondage. Finally, then, redemption takes place in the recourse to the specifically French literary tradition of Proust and Chateaubriand, the genealogy of Kerouac’s own writing as the honoring of movement and change. The result of the voyage Kerouac portrays, then, is that he is required to continue the wandering motion that has marked his life and literary career. A major point of Satori in Paris concerns the necessity of facing the manifold, mobile nature of language, experience, geographies, reality, and selfhood. There is certainly value in learning one’s ancestral roots, but the lesson of a quest that seeks them for the sake of fixity is that fixity will be ever more elusive: searching for grounding in the fathers only turns out to displace them further and require a reconfiguration of identity that stems from the very motion of the quest. That is, rather than containing identity within the family and its extensions, such as ethnicity and nation, the quest reorients these on a broadly social plane, challenging the borders and hierarchies by which these constructions maintain themselves. The story that comes of this quest, effectively surpassing it, celebrates the inevitable occurrence of the unexpected human contacts that push the importance of the fathers into the background. During his Buddhist studies, one of



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Kerouac’s critiques of Christianity as a major current of Western culture takes aim at the grounding of truth and experience in the fathers: in Some of the Dharma, although he calls Jesus “a Buddha,” he also accuses him of “gild[ing] the lily, with talk, humantalk, of fathers in heaven” as ground for the truth. But in his own practice and writing Kerouac needs “bare fatherless truth.”82 Hence the satori of Satori in Paris, or at least the experience he identifies as most likely to be the satori—an acquisition of new knowledge, new because it is the result of a thoroughgoing reconfiguration of the self. Kerouac offers the probable satori, finally, on the last pages of the novel: it happens during the time his narrator spends with the taxi driver Raymond Baillet, whom he mentioned at the outset of the book. Jack tells a pleasant, rather pointless story about conversation with M. Baillet followed by a good time drinking in the bars on the way to the airport, a sweet end to this otherwise frustrating trip. “If you’re in a real hurry,” says Jack, “I’ll show you how to chukalug a beer down” (117)—he proposes fast, intemperate, Rabelaisian drinking. Kerouac finishes the text with, “When God says ‘I Am Lived,’ we’ll have forgotten what all the parting was about” (118). He affirms the immanence of divinity, the idea that the latter is imbricated in life and experience, that the life of God is the collective life of living creatures; the corollary is that the latter are transcendent in their everyday doings, that immanence and transcendence are different ways of viewing the same phenomena. Life, then, doesn’t subsist in the afterlife or as the object of sequestered worship. The satori takes place in an elusive moment because the privileged moment of an epiphany would lead to a hierarchization of times and places, running counter to the knowledge acquired. And the narrator’s experience here is communion with another person, a variation on the “moment of rapport” that he mentions in Visions of Cody (351), a breakdown of the barriers of individuality: despite being cut off from roots and met with disappointment when trying to connect with them, a wanderer is still bound to have meaningful encounters, indeed they take place in the condition of being unrooted.83 Neither God nor the fathers will provide fixity—but the act of looking for fixity may lead to fulfillment through the permeations between languages, cultures, territories, and persons that take place in vagabondage, and thus to a diminishment of the need for the fathers. That is the conclusion of this portion of Kerouac’s quest: it’s an invitation to more vagabond writing that explores the fluidity and unsettlement of the array of North American identities—that is, to a continually shifting literature that traverses them.

Conclusion

Through a strategy that Ann Douglas has aptly termed the “poetics of intimacy,”1 Kerouac continues to have a way of convincing readers that he is speaking directly to them and that what he writes is the truth. She attributes this strategy in good part to the profoundly confessional nature of the writing: he “makes the reader his confidant, taking her into his most private thoughts and experiences, into areas which the world sometimes seems to prohibit us from sharing with anyone—our feelings about our bodies, our self-imaginings, our moods that inspire and afflict our need to believe” (22). I would add that his style, designed to reflect an immediacy of composition, sometimes even in its apparent awkwardness (an effect of constant challenges to the regularity of syntax) seems to invite a personal relationship with readers. To use a common but most ill-defined term, his writing is accessible. One should always recognize, though, that Kerouac’s strategy is a self-consciously literary one,2 that he seeks a place for his work in the Western tradition of confessional literature. Besides that he identified Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, one of the exemplary European works of autobiographical fiction, as among his biggest influences in writing confessional literature,3 he makes plain his interest in, if not his debt to, Augustine by patterning the last novel he published in his lifetime, Vanity of Duluoz, after the Confessions: both comprise thirteen books, each divided into a series of short chapters. But his approach is pastiche: whereas Augustine confesses to God, Jack Duluoz talks to “wifey,” bringing the account to the level of colloquy with a person intimately nearby.4 From beginning to end, Kerouac’s work is nothing if not literary— permeated with allusion, homage, appropriation, adaptation, pastiche, in addition to involving technique carefully crafted through deep and prolonged engagement with major currents of Western poetics. Kerouac’s technique persuades many readers that he has no technique, that he’s simply relating experience in unmediated fashion. This quality accounts for much of his appeal, not to mention much of the disparagement that his work

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continues to garner. As I discussed in the Introduction, one way that this widespread reaction to his work manifests itself is in the preponderance of biographies over critical writing. But however much the biographies have emphasized his immersion in the Western canon, they haven’t succeeded in dispelling the prevailing image—a survey of a wide range of accounts of his work indicates that it remains entirely possible to dismiss its accomplishment and importance. The extent of his response to and place with respect to the Western canon has yet to be fully assessed. As I have several times indicated, his knowledge of Renaissance literature was sophisticated—he not only takes Rabelais as a text to be reworked but also places him historically with respect to customs and language in order to arrive at an often uncanny understanding of New England Québécois culture and its situation in the dominant Anglophone culture of the United States, and more broadly as a way of meditating on cultural difference. Other recent research has moved along similar lines: in a recent article, “Tangled Generations: Dylan, Petrarch, Kerouac, and the Poetics of Escape,” Timothy Hampton examines all three authors’ relationship to literary tradition, and specifically that of each to his predecessor in this series of three, as point of departure, as a legacy against which to proceed in new directions.5 Hampton, a Renaissance comparatist with an emphasis in French who teaches a course on Dylan and Rimbaud, in a footnote remarks that, despite biographical documentation of very broad reading, “most accounts of Kerouac’s work pay little attention to the intertextual aspects of his work, beyond the usual suspects (Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, and others).”6 With Hampton I share both a major area of scholarly specialization and this observation—in a few pages I’ll say more about the restrictive effects of specialization and discliplinarity on understanding Kerouac’s challenges to institutions of literary criticism. Ironically, responses to Kerouac’s technique, so elaborately conceived and executed, have contributed to hiding his achievements as a writer— and as I have argued throughout, especially to hiding the French-Canadian cultural background that was integral to his motivations to acquire a literary education and train himself as a writer. For the same reasons that scholarship and biography tend to underrepresent his engagement with literature, it does so to a greater degree with his background. The near-universal dismissal of Satori in Paris as at best the scribblings and at worst the ravings of a drunk completely omits consideration of any but the literal dimension of the depictions of drinking, maintaining oblivion toward the medieval and Renaissance cultural and literary sources to which he closely and explicitly ties his interest and research in Québécois and French genealogy. Even in light of the labor of discovering the phenomenon of Québécois survivance, one might still wonder why many intelligent scholars and biographers find it sufficient to characterize Satori in Paris as a mere reflection of the author’s state while in France—or to call it, as does

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Barry Miles, “a lamentably poor piece of writing, obviously written in an alcoholic haze,”7 when such a blatant causal link between drunkenness and bad writing is at complete odds with major examples from literary history. Rabelais practiced what he preached: a physician and Franciscan friar who for some time held the charge of curate, he owned a breviary flask, a container in the shape of a breviary for the express purpose of clandestine tippling in church.8 Perhaps those I’ve cited on this point would apply the same standard to Rabelais’s writing—moreover, the likes of Coleridge, Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Lewis Carroll would also need to go if the substance disqualification were reasonably extended. And let’s not forget Wallace Stevens: only someone as drunk as he was would be foolish enough to believe he could knock down Ernest Hemingway with a crack on the jaw, rather than find himself flat on his back to nurse his own broken hand.9 Surely any poem Stevens wrote around that time, such as “The American Sublime” (1936) with its cryptically alliterative couplings like “Mickey Mockers” and “plated pairs,” its sudden, unmotivated leaps to figures like General Jackson of all people,10 could only be babble from the depths of a bottle. Despite the misapprehensions that arise in connection with Kerouac’s poetics of intimacy, I would never say that being captured by it is a wrong reaction. Rather, in appreciating Kerouac, it may well be an inevitable starting point, which one should follow with critical circumspection in order to take distance from narcissistic identification with the narrative voice. I speak from my own experience with first reading Kerouac at the age of twenty, which may be a somewhat atypical one because of my personal background. My family lived in a small farming town in southern New England nested among several small, decaying industrial cities; many residents were descended from recent immigrants, among whom the Franco-American population was well represented, and my parents, from Western Europe and the Middle East, even as professionals were less out of place in that home of legacy misfits than they might have been elsewhere. Despite lack of general knowledge in the United States concerning the French-Canadian migration, I had some awareness of it: many school friends were from French-Canadian families, as were many of the artisans my parents hired; the first spoken French I heard was Québécois. When I came to On the Road in the summer of 1980, I had just finished my second year of college in New England as a measurably talented but underperforming science major. Fancying myself a poet, I wanted to learn more than the little bit I knew about literature; I also wished to travel and had an idea of Kerouac’s link to my vague dream city of San Francisco. Talk of Proust and Nietzsche in his pages fascinated me as much as the wanderlust—I also recognized Sal Paradise, a second-generation ItalianAmerican from an industrial region, if not quite like myself then similar to people I’d known. Before I’d read far, I canceled my fall registration, put

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the book in my backpack along with a few clothes and supplies, and at the roadside put my thumb up. About eight days later I reached northern California: once settled in an inexpensive room I finished On the Road. Over the following months, around the forty hours of my near-minimumwage work week, Kerouac dominated my reading—The Subterraneans, Dr. Sax, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, Scattered Poems, Heaven and Other Poems, Lonesome Traveler, and On the Road a second time. Besides my increasing awareness of his craft, of a frequently breathtaking and at times awkward style (which inspired me to attempt ornate placements of my own clunky word combos), I was drawn, perhaps by a wish for the learning environment I’d not found in two dreadful years of college, to the intellectual life in his circles. I also took note of his relentless reflections, those of a kindred spirit, on being from an immigrant background in the United States and feeling far-flung roots—connecting my own writing with his made me feel more American. That is, the preoccupations that I bring to Kerouac more than thirty years later, which I characterize as largely hidden as a function of responses to his poetics of intimacy, stem from my own sense that he was speaking to me. After my second scholarly presentation on Kerouac in 2008, when a noted Beat scholar asked how I’d come to this understanding, I gave him a brief version of the foregoing. To which, concerning his own first experience, he very insightfully replied, “I thought he was a white guy—like me.” A year after dropping out, having established residency in California, I resumed college: under the influence of the Beat writers, who had introduced me to the humanities as something vital, pertinent to the largest questions and smallest details of everyday life, I dashed giddily into my studies. At the time the Beat Generation was barely taught in American universities, but I pursued what I’d read about in Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso, in addition to expanding the one other intellectual interest I’d left New England with, existentialism and Marxist philosophy. The University of California at Santa Cruz provided a wonderfully interdisciplinary environment, suited to the ranging disposition that had drawn me to the Beats and that in reading them I’d cultivated, and starting then I lingered among names they had pretty much introduced me to: Blake, Nietzsche, Joyce, Goethe, Faulkner, Rabelais, among many others. These encounters furthered my settlement in the West, an integration that met obstacles stemming from my personal background and frequent responses to it. Moving on to graduate study in comparative literature, I discovered the intellectual currents that continue to inform my scholarly writing. About thirty-five years after my first reading of Kerouac nudged me into this adventure, I complete this book as partial repayment, gratitude for the interdisciplinary passions his writing inflamed in me—an effect, I emphasize, of his poetics (the reason why I provide this account following rather than preceding my account of his intricate procedures). As most students of Kerouac recognize, a full appreciation of his

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work requires an interdisciplinary approach. But I would go further: his writing challenges the confines of disciplinarity, remaining incomprehensible if significant material from multiple disciplines isn’t brought to bear. Moreover, much as it was to literary criticism in his time, his writing is an unruly body in the very make-up of literary studies, which still operates predominantly according to divisions of nation and language. Part of his practice is to refuse the inertia of such distinctions, both in geography and in the writing and thinking that follow it. According to Douglas, “Back in 1959, On the Road told me and my friends, all young women from the upper-middle classes reared in privileged, densely settled, even stratified regions of the United States, that we were part of a continent rather than a country” (23). This is certainly true in his depictions of America (“whatever that is,” he writes in Visions of Cody)11—as well as in his prose, which insistently deforms instituted geographic, psychic, and linguistic boundaries. As Gilles Deleuze puts it, “Kerouac’s sentences are as sober as a Japanese drawing, pure lines traced freehand, crossing over eras and reigns.” Deleuze even adds, “It took a true alcoholic to reach such sobriety,”12 recognizing that under some circumstances, in the lineage of Rabelais as well as Baudelaire and Apollinaire, alcohol may contribute to relief from bilious, regressive mental habits and permit an opening of experience, sociopolitical borders, and apprehensions of the past. The ramifications of Kerouac’s work push through the limitations of a disciplinary approach that remains more or less within the limits of nation and period and gravitates toward monolingualism. A way of further approaching Kerouac from this perspective entails assessing the effectiveness of his work, its movement in the geography that it responds to, its own border and linguistic crossings as it is read and understood. As I have argued elsewhere with respect to European Renaissance literature, subsequent iterations of texts, their reworking in a later context, their translation, adaptation, redirection, are an important but neglected aspect of critical reading: besides that scholars should take writers’ understandings of texts more seriously than they tend to, such transfers have the capacity, especially when an expansive geography is in play, to blur the lines of nation and language that the literatures ostensibly confirm and enact.13 The most obvious reiteration of Kerouac’s work is in Québec. Of course, interest there stems in part from the great literary success of an author who, as a diasporic native son, seems to speak directly to readers; but from early on writers and critics have also viewed Kerouac as raising vital questions concerning Québécois identity. The first mention of Kerouac in Québécois literature is in the landmark 1965 novel Knife on the Table [Le Couteau sur la table] by Jacques Godbout. With pithy flippancy, Godbout writes of the Beat author’s exile from Québec, presenting it as necessary given both the limitations, at the time, of the province’s literary culture and the task of extending Québécois experience to a continental scale: “I know

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some who are dying of jealousy in this country…they would have snuffed out your genius, twisted it, wrung it dry. And you, Jack, you’ve spread it across an entire continent, our misery and your condition as a man, Saint Jack Kerouac, give us jazz, weariness, the desire to love and die.…”14 Seven years later, citing impuissance (both impotence and powerlessness) as one of the basic cultural characteristics of the colonized, exiled Québécois, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu deems that “Jack is the best French-Canadian novelist of Impotence and this is why it’s important for us to annex his works.”15 Such annexation responds to the various annexations that have historically transformed Québec and its population on both sides of the border. A distinctively elaborate and accomplished annexation—which is also, in tacit response to Beaulieu’s nationalistic positioning, a challenge to the very premises of annexation—is Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues (1984), among the most widely read and discussed Québécois novels of the last three decades. Aligning his book with Kerouac’s work by alluding through its title to Mexico City Blues, naming a vehicle rather than a place in order to evoke movement as space, Poulin takes On the Road as an obvious intertext. Though written as a carefully ordered narrative in syntactically neat sentences, Volkswagen Blues engages bilingualism through passages in English, mainly in dialogue, as well as through many references to Anglophone North American literature. Poulin sends his main character, Jack Waterman, a Francophone writer whose hesitancies make him notably unlike Kerouac, despite their shared first name, on a trip from the far eastern reaches of Québec, through Ontario, and across the United States. Driving a VW microbus, an emblematic vehicle of North American countercultural vagabondage, Jack begins at the Bay of Gaspé, where Jacques Cartier first landed in 1534, and ends in San Francisco, one of the key sites of Kerouac’s cartography of America, clearly marked in the novel as the city of the Beat Generation. With his companion, a hitchhiker in her mid-twenties of mixed Native and European ancestry who goes by the name La Grande Sauterelle (the Big Grasshopper), Jack crosses the northern part of North America in search of his long-lost brother Théo, whose name suggests an almost divine power to anchor identity even many years after he has wandered away. On their quest, Jack and La Grande Sauterelle proceed, aided by her general refusal of social convention, through a negotiation of state institutions on both sides of the border: police stations as agencies of the maintenance of order, museums and libraries as cultural repositories. She responds to the limitations in the regulated circulation of cultural knowledge and artifacts with her alternative procedure for borrowing library books: she takes a book without checking it out, then after reading it she sends it back with a note explaining that she found it in a public restroom.16 In this fashion she engages in utopian liberation of various cultural heritages—the transcontinental road trip thus becomes a reassembly of identity. Because they have seen it in the list of possessions with Théo’s arrest

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record at Toronto police headquarters, La Grande Sauterelle “borrows” On the Road, in French translation, from a library in Kansas City. Much of the narrative of Volkswagen Blues takes place as a confrontation between a textualization of travels of discovery and the reality of the trip, which the protagonists have undertaken partly in response to these textualizations; this confrontation is the discovery of identity in tandem with that of the North American social reality that the novel presents. In further contrast with Kerouac, for whom “[a]ll my knowledge rests in my ‘French-Canadianness’ and nowhere else,”17 Jack affirms, “Everything I know, or just about, I’ve learned from books” (24/30)—but he is then forced to face the reality of North America on the trail of his brother. His literary landscape is made up of many North American authors: besides Kerouac and Saul Bellow, science fiction writer Robert Silverberg writing as Chapman Walker, John Irving, Ernest Hemingway, and Gabrielle Roy. This landscape covers many different aspects of America, it includes Québec, and it’s bilingual. Unlike Beaulieu, for whom Kerouac’s meditations on exile express impotence or powerlessness, Poulin draws on the Beat author’s affirmations of the power of nomadism. Of course, when at the end of the novel Jack and La Grande Sauterelle find Théo and discover that not only is he paralyzed but also has no memory of his brother (208–9/314–15), Poulin acknowledges the sad reality that nomadism may also lead to powerlessness and cultural amnesia; however, the two main characters have inadvertently fulfilled their quest in becoming connected to the motion and transformation of North American culture. Forming a series with the many literary texts it refers to, reconfigures, and addresses, with most of its action taking place in the United States and its lengthy passages in English, Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues sets forth the case for a transnational, translingual literature in the discovery and configuration of North American identity. In the wake of Kerouac, Poulin offers a celebration of territorial and linguistic differences on a globalizing continent. Along with a number of other writers both Francophone and Anglophone, including Gilles Archambault, Monique LaRue, Nicole Brossard, Kenneth McGoogan, and Ray Robertson,18 Kerouac’s work has seen further life in Québécois literature, in a set of readings that challenge the linguistic and literary confines that his institutionalization in the category of (Anglophone) American literature has placed him in the United States. These textual and cultural extensions simply build on what his writing already does: its engagements with multiple languages and territories not only operate within his texts but also participate in reworkings along their paths of circulation—his writing may offer to literary studies concepts by which it may overcome its own disciplinary limitations and its tendencies toward monolingualism and nation-based thinking. Though beginning with the specificity of his own Franco-American and Québécois cultural background, Kerouac valorizes an energetic reformation of American literature as North American, with

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suggestions for reaching a global scope. Half a century ago criticism resisted recognition of this contribution to poetics; but more recently, the pressing realities of migration, colonization, and ever-shifting territories have urged its embrace.

NOTES

Introduction  1 Alexandre Goulet, Une Nouvelle-France en Nouvelle-Angleterre (Paris: Les Presses Modernes, 1934), 124–5.  2 Jack Kerouac, letter to Yvonne Le Maître, September 8, 1950, in Selected Letters 1940–1956 (New York: Viking, 1995), 228; Kerouac, The Subterraneans (New York: Grove, 1958), 3 (the author speaks here through his first-person narrator, Leo Percepied).  3 Franco-American is the term of choice in the community of French-Canadian descent in the United States. In Québec, since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, prevailing usage has favored the term Québécois over Canadienfrançais and the hyphenated, half-and-half identity it suggests. Without intending disrespect to either this convention or the U.S. community’s self-designation, I will frequently use French-Canadian in reference to the historical population and culture, a designation fully accepted during the time in question on both sides of the border. When called for, I will prefer the French word Québécois to the awkward English Quebecker, since the latter doesn’t translate the full function of the French as both noun and adjective. (Kerouac used both French-Canadian and Franco-American, occasionally Québécois.)  4 Ronna Johnson has written an excellent analysis of the ways that Kerouac’s image has occluded his writing: “‘You’re Putting Me On’: Jack Kerouac and the Postmodern Emergence,” The Beat Generation: Critical Essays, ed. Kostas Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 37–56. Speaking in terms of the postmodern notion of the simulacrum displacing the original, Johnson acutely demonstrates the dialectical implication of Kerouac’s own pre-postmodernism in this phenomenon.  5 Robert Elliot Fox offers excellent reasons for the use of the term resurgence to describe periodic renewal of public and scholarly attention to Kerouac and the Beat Generation: review of Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness (Ryko RCD, 1997), Postmodern Culture 7.3 (May 1997): http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu  6 Walter Salles, director, On the Road, MK2 Productions, American Zoetrope, 2012; Michael Polish, director, Big Sur, 3311 Productions, Troy Entertainment, 2013; John Krokidas, director, Kill Your Darlings, Killer Films, 2013.

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 7 Ethan Todras-Whitehill, “Where Isolation Left Its Mark on Kerouac,” New York Times, November 18, 2012.  8 Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (1965) (New York: Riverhead, 1995), 71.  9 The index to McNally’s book lists the names of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jean Cocteau, Hart Crane, Dostoevsky, Lawrence Durrell, T. S. Eliot, Faulkner, André Gide, Goethe, Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Melville, Henri Michaux, Henry Miller, Nietzsche, Pound, Proust, Rimbaud, William Saroyan, Shakespeare, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Thomas Wolfe, and William Butler Yeats, among others, most with more than five entries, Dostoevsky in the lead with twelve, Proust next with eleven. Furthermore, McNally reports such incidents as when, one drunken night in 1965, “during a binge,” friend Gerard Wagner read aloud the part of Falstaff and Kerouac that of Prince Hal from Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays— Wagner realized that Kerouac was accurately reciting from memory. Dennis McNally, Desolate Angel (New York: Delta, 1979), 320. A deeply passionate, unwavering engagement with literature, involving reading, written reflection, and discussion with friends, was so much a part of Kerouac’s everyday life that it’s hard to know why anyone would omit mention of it, even in a short account, without a vested interest in doing so. 10 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1, Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, ed. William C. Carter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 50; Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1, Du Côté de chez Swann (1913) ed. Jean Milly (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), 141–2. 11 In Dr. Sax, which is partly an experiment in writing on the basis of the distance of memory, Kerouac refers to this passage: “A shudder of joy ran through me—when I read of Proust’s teacup—all those saucers in a crumb— all of History by thumb—all of a city in a tasty crumb—I got all my boyhead in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove.” Jack Kerouac, Dr. Sax: Faust Part Three (1959) (New York: Grove, 1987), 19. 12 Part of what has enabled Johnson’s focus is the public availability, since 2006, of the Jack Kerouac Papers in the New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. Most of the other biographies accord some space to Kerouac’s French-Canadian heritage, in some cases devoting quite a few pages to his ancestry in Québec and before that Brittany, and despite shortcomings are certainly not without value. In Kerouac: His Life and Work, rev. ed. (Lanham, MD: Taylor, 2007), Paul Maher offers a diligently factual and quite engaging account of Kerouac’s first ancestor to migrate from France to Québec in the early eighteenth century and the family’s subsequent history. Although he provides material on the intensely Francophone community of Lowell, he doesn’t examine the extent of the migration or the social circumstances of the French Canadians in the United States, nor the challenges of bilingualism. Maher occasionally connects these matters to Kerouac’s work with such statements as the following on the Lowell novels: “He suffered from the weight of what he termed his ‘Canuck’ dualism, a duality that reached as far back as his forebears, who arrived in the United States still craving the traditions, culture, and social mores of Canada,



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yet immersed themselves and their children in their new country’s technology, prosperity, and freedom” (244)—an observation that is a bit too general and circumstantial to explain much, also suffering from inaccuracy concerning Québécois immigrants’ embrace of U.S. culture.   Although in Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), Ellis Amburn recognizes that the “Canucks” were “scorned” in U.S. society for maintaining their language and traditions through the vastly important cultural phenomenon of survivance (7–8), by the time he gets to Kerouac’s transfer to public school in 1933 the language gap has ceased to be a problem (17), and subsequently he only returns peripherally to the author’s background. Tom Clark, in his Jack Kerouac: A Biography (1984) (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1990), discusses the immigrant life of Kerouac’s family, emphasizing their status as French-speakers and stating at the outset that “[h]e is arguably the most important writer since Conrad to adopt English as a second language” (3). However, Clark quite underestimates the impact of the migration on Kerouac, mainly by underestimating the migration’s status as cultural rupture: for example, he speaks of the “thousands of other Quebecois [who] came down to the mills and factories of New England towns” (6), whereas the number during the entire period of the migration, between 1840 and 1930 (as I will discuss below), was closer to several hundred thousand. Barry Miles also gives some details about the Kerouacs’ immigrant status in Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats (New York: Henry Holt, 1998). But he sees the French-Canadian material in the novels as incidental at best, even going so far as to wonder whether in Visions of Gerard, an extensive meditation on the limits of the atavistic Catholicism of French-Canadian culture as an effective ethical force, Kerouac included “peculiar Cannuck French and Catholic platitudes about Jesus, Mary and the angels…to please [his sister] Carolyn” (214). In Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), Gerald Nicosia devotes his prologue to the migration, making quite insightful observations on Québécois culture, but these don’t play a huge role in his otherwise illuminating critical discussions of Kerouac’s work later in the book. Commenting on the limited treatment that she gave Kerouac’s Québécois background in her pioneering Kerouac: A Biography (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), Ann Charters graciously opened her remarks at the 1987 International Kerouac Gathering in Québec City with the following: “Americans tend to be a provincial people, and I am no exception to that general rule…. Since I am descended from a recent immigrant family myself, I should have been more sensitive to the importance of Kerouac’s cultural and social inheritance, but I’d focused instead in his autobiographical books on what he told me he had found in America. I had conveniently forgotten what he’d started with and what, I erroneously thought, he’d left behind.” Ann Charters, “…Seen from the United States,” in Un homme grand: Jack Kerouac at the Crossroads of Many Cultures/Jack Kérouac à la confluence des cultures, ed. Pierre Anctil et al. (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1990), 231.    The detail in Johnson’s The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (New York: Viking, 2012) on Kerouac’s Francophone and Québécois background is by far the most extensive to date, and she has the keenness of

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insight to present the author’s obsession with writing, already manifest in his childhood, as inseparable from his struggles with cultural assimilation and bilingualism. Even by the time Kerouac first drafted On the Road in 1951, at the age of thirty-one, the narrative voice that readers would find “as American as apple pie…had been born in French” (391). Johnson makes this assessment through comparisons with La Nuit est ma femme, the novella that Kerouac wrote in French as part of his preparation to write On the Road (I will discuss this text in Chapter 2). 13 For an excellent account of the importance of Johnson’s biographical innovations, see Lauren Du Graf, “You Don’t Know Jack: Kerouac, Biographer Joyce Johnson and ‘The Voice Is All,’” The Daily Beast, September 6, 2012. 14 Andrew O’Hagan, “Jack Kerouac: Crossing the Line,” New York Review of Books, March 21, 2013. 15 Jack Kerouac, letter to Le Maître, 228; qtd. in James Campbell, “Road Ready,” New York Times Book Review, January 18, 2013. 16 See my letter to the Times on this point, which accompanies Johnson’s response to the review: “Don’t Quote That,” New York Times, January 21, 2013. 17 Johnson, 21–3. 18 The two articles bookending this period are George Dardess, “The Delicate Dynamics of Friendship: A Reconsideration of Kerouac’s On The Road,” American Literature 46, no. 2 (Spring 1974): 200–6, and my own “Literatures of Exile and Return: Jack Kerouac and Quebec,” American Literature 84. no. 3 (September 2012): 589–615. 19 In e-mails of January 30 and June 28, 2014, Hunt told me that this was the gist of the response of Louis Budd, from 1979 to 1986 the managing editor of American Literature, and then until 1990 its editor, to his request that the journal review Kerouac’s Crooked Road: The Development of a Fiction, 3rd ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), following its first publication in 1981. 20 Search conducted July 9, 2015, via Proquest Literature Online. 21 Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, ed. Bloom (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 2004), 1–2. 22 In his editor’s note, Bloom casually yet completely dismisses Hunt’s reading of On the Road (“An American Education,” in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, 27–75) as belonging to a tradition that includes Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and The Great Gatsby (vii). 23 Mark Richardson, “‘Peasant Dreams’: Reading on the Road,” in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, 207–31. 24 Richardson, 213. 25 Jon Panish, The Color of Jazz: Race and Representation in Postwar American Culture (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997), 110. 26 Ibid.



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27 These reactions led John Clellon Holmes to write in a 1967 tribute to his close friend: “Though he has already created a larger body of work than any of his contemporaries, to most people his name summons up the image of a carefree do-nothing sensation hunter. Though that body of work creates a dense, personal world that is as richly detailed as any such American literary world since Faulkner, he is continually thought to be nothing but the poet of pads and the bard of bebop. And though he is a prose innovator in the tradition of Joyce, whose stylistic experiments will bear comparison with any but the most radical avant-gardists of the century, he is constantly ticketed as some slangy, hitchhiking Jack London, bringing a whiff of marijuana and truck exhaust into the lending libraries.” Holmes, “The Great Rememberer,” in Nothing More to Declare (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1967), 68. 28 Kenneth Rexroth, “Discordant and Cool,” New York Times Book Review, November 29, 1959, 14. 29 Kenneth Rexroth, “The Subterraneans,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 16, 1958. 30 McNally, 218–19; Nicosia, 526. 31 Gilbert Millstein, review of On the Road, New York Times, September 5, 1957. 32 David Dempsey, “In Pursuit of ‘Kicks,’” New York Times Book Review, September 8, 1957, 3. 33 David Dempsey, “Beatnik Bogeyman on the Prowl,” New York Times Book Review, May 3, 1959, 28. 34 David Dempsey, “The Choice Jack Made,” New York Times Book Review, July 19, 1959, 4. 35 Maher, 243–4. 36 Jack Kerouac, Excerpts from Visions of Cody (New York: New Directions, 1960), 95–108. The full version of the novel appeared in 1972, five years after Kerouac’s death, at the initiative of Joyce Johnson, then an editor at McGraw-Hill: Visions of Cody (New York: Penguin, 1993); for the experiment, which comprises four chapters in this edition, 119–247. 37 I have found only one other study from the same year: Huub Schumacher, “Jij bent een engel”: Mysticus op weg, de Oneindigheit, God en de Leegte, de Eeuwigkeit en het hier-en-nu [“You’re an angel”: Mystic on the road, Infinity, God and Emptiness, Eternity and the here-and-now] (my translation) (Rotterdam: Lemniscaat, 1972). Ann Charters’s A Bibliography of the Works of Jack Kerouac (New York: Phoenix, 1972) may be included; of course, two years after Beaulieu’s and Schumacher’s studies, Charters’s Kerouac: A Biography (San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1974) appeared. 38 Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, Jack Kerouac: A Chicken-Essay, trans. Sheila Fischman (Toronto: Coach House, 1975), 27; Beaulieu, Jack Kérouac: Essai-poulet (1972) (Montreal: Typo, 2004), 31. 39 Dempsey, “Beatnik Bogeyman.” 40 Beaulieu, 27/31.

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41 In my “Literatures of Exile and Return,” I explore Beaulieu’s position with respect to literary, political, and cultural debates in Québec. 42 I’m alluding to the most notorious early attack on the Beat Generation, whose particular focus is Kerouac: Norman Podhoretz, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians” (1958), in Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Penguin, 2001), 479–93. 43 A case in point is the omission of attention to any French-Canadian contributions in the magisterial collection edited by Werner Sollors, Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1998) and its companion volume, The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations, ed. Marc Shell and Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 2000). This despite a thriving literary culture: one of the defining works of nineteenth-century Québécois literature, Honoré Beaugrand’s Jeanne la fileuse; épisode de l’émigration franco-canadienne aux États-Unis (Montreal: BiblioLife, 2008), was first published in Fall River, Massachusetts in 1878, and not in Montreal until ten years later. 44 François Weil, Les Franco-Américains (Paris: Bélin, 1989), 145–50, 173–200. 45 John Dickinson and Brian Young, A Short History of Quebec, 4th ed. (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2008), 158–68, 182–4. Henceforth cited in the text. 46 John George Lambton, Earl of Durham, Lord Durham’s Report on the Affairs of British North America (1839), ed. Sir C. P. Lucas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 27. Google Books edition. Henceforth cited in the text. 47 Yves Roby, The Franco-Americans of New England: Dreams and Realities, trans. Mary Ricard (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2004), 12–14; Roby, Histoire d’un rêve brisé? Les Canadiens français aux États-Unis (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2007), 19. I will henceforth cite both in the text. 48 On conditions in Québec surrounding the French-Canadian migration to the United States, see Roby 2004, 7–28; Roby 2007, 13–34; Weil, 13–44. On Anglophone domination of the economy in Québec, see Jean Hamelin and Yves Roby, Histoire économique du Québec (Montreal: Fides, 1971), especially 340, 375–76; and Roby, Alphonse Desjardins et les Caisses Populaires, 1854–1920 (Ottawa: Fides, 1964), 45–47. For general works on the Québécois Diaspora or exodus, see Raymond Breton and Pierre Savard, The Quebec and Acadian Diaspora in North America (Toronto: Multicultural Society of Ontario, 1982); and Textes de l’Exode. Recueil de textes sur l’émigration des Québécois aux États-Unis (XIXe et XXe siècles), ed. Maurice Poteet et al. (Montreal: Guérin Littérature, 1987). 49 Roby, Histoire d’un rêve, 22–27. 50 Albert Faucher, “Projet de recherche historique: l’émigration des Canadiens français au XIXe siècle,” Recherches sociographiques 2, no. 2 (1961): 244; qtd. in Roby, Franco-Americans, 1. 51 The title of a declaration by Adolphe-Basile Routhier on the divine mission of



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French Canadians in America gives an indication: “Le rôle de la race française en Amérique [The Role of the French Race in America],” in Fête nationale des Canadiens-Français célébrée en Québec en 1880, ed. H.-J.-J.-B. Chouinard (Québec City: A. Côté, 1881), Google Books edition, 282–95. 52 In his landmark late-nineteenth-century study of the French-Canadian communities of New England, Father Edouard Hamon leaves no doubt as to the perceived necessity of extending ecclesiastical institutions: “We must, I believe, look on high to understand this strange migration. The speed with which it has occurred, the ease with which the Canadians, transplanted on foreign land, have immediately reformed the Catholic mode of the parish that made them so strong in Canada; the energy they have deployed to build churches, raise convents, group together, and organize themselves into flourishing congregations, supported from within by all that can nourish Christian piety, defended against the pernicious influences from without by the force of association and a generally well-managed press: all these elements of Catholic life organized in a quarter century, in the very heart of the citadel of old Puritanism, seem to indicate, as I have already said, an action as well as a providential mission whose full importance the future alone will reveal to us.” [“Il faut, je crois, regarder plus haut pour comprendre cette migration étrange. La rapidité avec laquelle elle s’est accomplie, la facilité avec laquelle les Canadiens, transplantés sur une terre étrangère, ont immédiatement réformé le moule catholique de la paroise qui les fit si forts au Canada; l’énergie qu’ils ont déployée pour bâtir des églises, élever des couvents, se grouper ensemble et s’organiser en congrégations florissantes, soutenues au dedans par tout ce qui peut alimenter la piété chrétienne, défendues contre les influences pernicieuses du dehors par la force de l’association et d’une presse généralement bien dirigée: tous ces éléments de vie catholique organisés en un quart de siècle, au sein même de la citadelle du vieux puritanisme, semblent indiquer, comme je l’ai déjà dit, une action aussi bien qu’une mission providentielle dont l’avenir seul nous révélera toute l’importance.”] Edouard Hamon, “Introduction,” Les Canadiens-Français de la Nouvelle-Angleterre (Québec City: Hardy, 1891), Google Books edition, 5. 53 See Routhier, 292: “Now, let us first recall that France, our mother, for ten centuries was an abode of Christian civilization with immense influence. She hasn’t always marched at the forefront of the civilized world; but no nation has exercised as vast and durable a rule as she. When a rival has beaten her, almost always it was only a temporary victory, after which France rushed back to first place.    “Let us also not forget the date of our birth and that of our separation from the Crown of France. These two dates hold a major importance and are no effect of chance; for nothing is fortuitous in the destinies of a people. Moreover, what we term chance is only a pseudonym for Providence, or, after a poet’s expression, it is God acting incognito.    “So, at the dawn of the seventeenth century France became our mother, and we were separated from her at the moment when she was slipping, in the pull of irreligion, on the fatal slope of the Revolution.    “Therefore we are not sons of 1789, but the children of most-Christian France, and we were born in perhaps the most glorious age of civilization.”

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   [“Or, rappelons-nous d’abord, que la France, notre mère, a été pendant dix siècles un foyer de civilisation chrétienne dont le rayonnement a été immense. Elle n’a pas toujours marché à la tête du monde civilisé; mais aucune nation n’a exercé une magistrature aussi vaste, aussi durable. Quand une rivale l’a devancée, ce ne fut presque toujours qu’une prééminence termporaire, et la France s’est hâtée de reprendre la première place.    “N’oublions pas non plus la date de notre naissance, et celle de notre séparation de la Couronne de France. Ces deux dates ont une importance majeure et ne sont pas un effet du hasard; car rien n’est fortuit dans les destinées d’un peuple. Et d’ailleurs ce que nous appelons hasard n’est qu’un pseudonyme de la Providence, ou, suivant l’expression d’un poète, c’est Dieu agissant incognito.    “Eh bien, c’est à l’aurore du dix-septième siècle que la France est devenue notre mère, et nous en avons été séparés à l’heure où elle glissait entrainée par l’irreligion sur la pente fatale de la Révolution.    “Nous ne sommes donc pas les fils de 89, mais les enfants de la France très-chrétienne, et nous sommes nés à l’époque la plus brillante peut-être de la civilisation.”] 54 See André Sénécal, “La thèse messianique et les Franco-Américains,” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 34, no. 4 (1981): 557–67. 55 Pierre Anctil, “La Franco-Américanie ou le Québec d’en bas,” in Du continent perdu à l’archipel retrouvé. Le Québec et l’Amérique française, ed. Dean R. Louder and Eric Waddell (Saint-Nicolas, QC: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2007), 25–39. 56 Carroll D. Wright, Uniform Hours of Labor [From the Thirteenth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor] (Boston: Rand, Avery, and Co., 1881), Google Books edition, 149; henceforth cited in the text. See also Goulet, 90–105; Roby, Histoire d’un rêve, 68–73; Weil, 117–28, 145. 57 Carroll D. Wright, The Canadian French of New England [From the Thirteenth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor] (Boston: Rand, Avery, and Co., 1882) Google Books Edition, 4. Henceforth cited in the text. 58 John F. McClymer offers a splendidly and succinctly illuminating account of Wright’s project and the resonant responses to it: “Carroll D. Wright, L’Abbé Jean-Baptiste Primeau, and French-Canadian Families,” in Ballard C. Campbell, The Human Tradition in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, ed. Ballard C. Campbell (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2000), 1–18. 59 “The French Canadians,” New York Times, July 5, 1889; rpt. in Poteet, Textes de l’Exode, 341. 60 William MacDonald, “French Canadians in Maine,” The Nation, October 15, 1896, 285. 61 Robert C. Dexter, “The Gallic War in Rhode Island,” The Nation, August 29, 1923, 215. See also Weil, 190–2. 62 Dexter, 216.



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63 Telling in this regard is the pledge of allegiance to the Carillon-Sacré-Cœur flag, recited daily in French-Canadian parochial schools in New England (as was the pledge of allegiance to the American flag) from the early twentieth century until, in some cases, the 1960s. The flag itself is the banner of General Montcalm with the added image of the Sacred Heart, commemorating the strength of Catholic faith through both French victory and defeat in North America: “Honor to you, Noble Drapeau Carillon-Sacré-Cœur; remind us of the faith and valor of our ancestors; and on our adopted soil, be ever the rallying sign of the French-Canadian race.” [“Honneur à toi, Noble Drapeau Carillon-Sacré-Cœur; redis-nous la foi et la vaillance de nos ancêtres; et sur ce sol d’adoption, sois toujours le ralliement de la race canadienne-française.”] (My translation.) Gerard J. Brault, The French-Canadian Heritage in New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986), 94. See also Roger Brunelle, “Les premières années de l’enfance de Jack Kérouac (1922– 1932),” in Anctil ed., Un homme grand, 139. 64 Throughout, I will refer to the notable studies, both Anglophone and Francophone. The understanding in Québec of Kerouac’s notions of travel as stemming from his experiences in the Québécois migration is so widely accepted that in 1978, pop/folk musician Sylvain Lelièvre could sing to Kerouac:    I don’t want to know why,    so short a time ago as 1920,    a good million Québécois   became Americans;    nor do I want to know—    it’s fine to imagine it—    what kept you from    finishing your book in French.    [Je ne veux pas savoir pourquoi,    pas plus loin qu’en mille neuf cent vingt,    un bon million de Québécois    sont devenus Américains;    je ne veux pas savoir non plus—    je l’imagine et c’est assez—    pour quelle raison t’as jamais pu    terminer ton livre en français.]

(Sylvain Lelièvre, “Kérouac” (1978), Ses plus belles chansons © 1991 GSI Musique, iTunes. My translation.)

65 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 125. 66 Podhoretz, 490. 67 Stephen Battaglio, David Susskind: A Televised Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2010), 3; see also McNally, 267. 68 An excellent example is the following: “He was a middle-aged child that had never shed its baby fat, though some gifted tailor had almost succeeded in camouflaging his plump and spankable bottom. There wasn’t a suspicion of

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bone in his body; his face, a zero filled in with pretty miniature features, had an unused, a virginal quality: it was as if he’d been born, then expanded, his skin remaining unlined as a blown-up balloon, and his mouth, though ready for squalls and tantrums, a spoiled sweet puckering.” Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Three Stories (New York: Vintage, 1993), 35–6. Though diverting from start to finish, the passage seems designed more to showcase Capote’s exacting stylus and arch wit than to convey much about the character, life in New York, or the uselessness fostered in bourgeois society. 69 Darren Wershler-Henry understands Capote’s line as a refusal to recognize the habitation in writing of a new medium, typing, that was fundamentally changing its admissions and address. Capote regarded his own writing as remaining exceptionally within the lines of a past literary monumentality, as uniquely unsloppy, following up one of his many repetitions of his put-down of Kerouac by explaining that “Ninety-nine-point-nine percent” of his writer contemporaries, “[a]nd that’s being generous,” were typing rather than writing. Truman Capote, Conversations with Capote, ed. Lawrence Grobel (New York: NAL, 1985), 135; qtd. in Darren Wershler-Henry, The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2005), 243. In his new book, The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), which honorably complements his first, Tim Hunt provides a keenly elaborate analytical response to Capote, exploring Kerouac’s use of the typewriter as a device integral to his conception and practice of writing: 58–93. 70 The only scholarly treatments of Kerouac’s French-language texts that I’m aware of are Isaac Gewirtz, Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road (New York: New York Public Library; London: Scala, 2007), 98–9, 100–2, and my own “Jack Kerouac and the Nomadic Cartographies of Exile,” in The Transnational Beat Generation, ed. Nancy M. Grace and Jennie Skerl (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 31–50. Gabriel Anctil has written two newspaper articles about these novellas: “Les 50 ans d’On the Road: Kerouac voulait écrire en français,” Le Devoir (Montreal), September 5, 2007; “‘Sur le chemin’: Découverte d’un deuxième roman en français de Jack Kerouac,” Le Devoir, September 4, 2008. He also gave an interview to Le Monde: “‘Sur le chemin’, un inédit de Jack Kerouac écrit en français, Le Monde, September 9, 2008. 71 This is the expression that Anne Charters and Samuel Charters use to characterize Kerouac’s writings: Brother Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2010), 21. 72 François Ricard, “Vécrire,” in La littérature contre elle-même (Montréal: Boréal Express, 1985), 93–8; rpt. of “La vécriture de Jack Kerouac,” Liberté 128 (March–April 1980): 85–90. In a footnote to the first publication Ricard writes, “In the criticism, no one has yet, to my knowledge, brought to light a set of problems central to Kerouac’s life and work: his Franco-American origin and, as a consequence, his extremely tense relations with American



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society, the division he experienced between belonging, on the one hand, and the necessity of adapting, on the other. [Dans la critique, personne, à ma connaissance, n’a encore mis en lumière une problématique centrale de la vie et de l’œuvre de Kerouac: son origine franco-américaine et, de là, ses rapports extrêmement tendus avec la société américaine, l’espèce de déchirement qu’il éprouva entre l’appartenance, d’une part, et la nécessité de l’adaptation, d’autre part…]” (N. 2—my translation). Thirty-five years after Ricard’s suggestion, I offer this study. 73 See especially Philippe Gasparini, Est-il je? Roman autobiographique et autofiction (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 9–15. Following Serge Doubrovsky’s first use of the term in 1977, the definitional work on autofiction is the special issue of RITM, the journal of the Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur les Textes Modernes at the Université of Paris X–Nanterre, Autofictions & Cie, ed. Serge Doubrovsky, Jacques Lecarme, and Philippe Lejeune, RITM 6 (1993). Other notable titles are Gasparini, Autofiction. Une aventure du langage (Paris: Seuil, 2008); Autofiction: pratiques et théories, ed. Arnaud Genon (Paris: Mon Petit Éditeur, 2013); and Autofiction(s). Colloque de Cerisy, ed. Claude Burgelin, Isabelle Grell, and Roger-Yves Roches (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2010). 74 Podhoretz, 491.

1 Unsettlements  1 Jack Kerouac, letter to Yvonne Le Maître, September 8, 1950, in Selected Letters, 1940–1956, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1995), 228. Henceforth cited in the text.  2 See Rosaire Dion-Lévesque, “Yvonne Le Maître, journaliste de Lowell, Massachusetts,” in Silhouettes franco-américaines (Manchester, NH: Association Canado-Américaine, 1957), 549–53; Michel Lacroix and Nadia Zurek, “Une journaliste franco-américaine au seuil de l’avant-garde: l’espace des possibles d’Yvonne Le Maître (1876–1954),” Recherches féministes 24, no. 1 (2011): 77–99.  3 Lacroix and Zurek, 77–79.  4 Yvonne Le Maître, “The Town and the City,” Le Travailleur 20, no. 12 (March 23, 1950): 1: “un animateur de première force; il sait peupler un milieu d’une vie agissante, trépidante, frémissante et drue. C’est là le fort d’un talent considérable, qui atteint déjà en ce premier essai une couleur et un relief peu ordinaires.” (My translation.)  5 Ibid.: “a réussi l’exploit de faire vivre à la forêt américain un arbre vigoureux répandant autour de lui une sève exubérante, sans nous parler une fois du vieux sang où cet arbre a puisé vie et vigueur.”  6 Ibid.: “Réalisme fort accusé dans toute l’oeuvre, si vous voulez, mais auquel s’accroche toutefois une certaine mesure d’irréalité. Au sol initial, l’humus ethnique multiple et divers où croît son arbre, qui est Lowell, John Kerouac

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n’a pas planté de racines…humaines. Pensez à un Hamlet où manquerait le spectre du père….” (Emphasis and suspension points in the text.)  7 Ibid.: “Génération spontanée, donc, que ce Lowell; masse uniforme dont ne surgit avec un visage à soi aucun des éléments qui ont créé cette masse. Et pourtant…pourtant Lowell est tout excepté l’uniformité et la fusion. Lowell—Galloway est le nom que porte la ville dans l’ouvrage—est le melting pot où rien n’est encore parfaitement fondu; Lowell est le Canada français du Québec, le Canada anglais des Provinces Maritimes; l’Irlande, l’Angleterre et l’Écosse; le Portugal et les Açores; l’Italie, la Suède, la Norvège, la Grèce, l’Arménie, la Syrie et le Liban; la Pologne et la Lithuanie, Israël et quoi encore! Je ne fais qu’effleurer les 47 variétés et les 47 survivances.” (Suspension points in the text.)  8 Ibid.: “roman immigrant,” “la banalité enfantine.”  9 Ibid.: “Quand John Kerouac lui-même appelle l’Enfant-Dieu the Little Jesus, avec des mots anglais il parle encore français.” (Suspension points in the text.) 10 Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City (1950) (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1983), 171, 176. Henceforth cited in the text. 11 Dion-Lévesque, “Le Maître,” 550–1. 12 Le Maître, 1: “d’origine purement française,” “des survivants prononcés” (Emphasis in text). 13 Ibid.: “le jeune romancier lui-même parle un français châtié.” 14 In his review of The Town and the City, John Brooks makes this judgment: “Of Growth and Decay,” New York Times, March 5, 1950. 15 A notable exception is James T. Jones, Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 58–75. Henceforth cited in the text. 16 Jack Kerouac, Lonesome Traveler (1960) (New York: Grove, 1988), viii. 17 Jack Kerouac, qtd. in Alfred G. Aronowitz, “The Beat Generation, Part II,” New York Post, March 10, 1959; qtd. in Michael Hrebeniak, Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 23. 18 William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1954), 3–18. 19 A case in point is biographer Ellis Amburn, who is guilty of serious overreach in this regard: he explains, “In this book as in other biographies, stories [from Kerouac’s novels] are recounted with real people’s names as accurate accounts of real events.” Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 6. Even if Kerouac made to Amburn, the editor at Coward-Mann who handled Vanity of Duluoz, some version of the claim that “his fiction was entirely factual,” such statements from any author need to be treated with much greater caution than Amburn displays. Especially in Chapter 5, I will signal notable departures in Kerouac’s fiction from real-life events, in each case proposing reasons for them.



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20 A search on July 10, 2014 in the catalog of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s libraries, where, owing to the Beat Collection in the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, there is a policy of acquiring every available publication related to Kerouac, turns up about twenty-six biographies, in addition to several dozen memoirs addressing parts of lives spent with the author. Another search, conducted July 12, 2014, yields about twenty-six book-length critical works devoted solely to Kerouac, a few others partly to him. The biographies and memoirs tend to be considerably longer then the critical works. 21 Ann Charters, Kerouac: A Biography (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 107; Joyce Johnson, The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (New York: Viking, 2012), 325—henceforth cited in the text; Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (1983) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 267. 22 This is just what Gilles Deleuze says about Kerouac’s writing, in connection with The Subterraneans (1959). Deleuze sees Kerouac as challenging both the limits of prose dominated by convention, as well as the kind of overly self-conscious or self-reflexive writing that the philosopher saw dominating the postwar French literary scene: “He doesn’t ask, ‘What is writing?,’ because it is wholly necessary for him, and impossible to make another choice that makes writing—on condition that in its turn writing for him is already another becoming, or comes from another becoming. Writing, the means to life that is more than personal, instead of the life that is a poor secret for a kind of writing with no end other than itself. Oh, the misery of the imaginary and the symbolic, the real always getting put off until later.” Gilles Deleuze, “De la supériorité de la littérature anglaise-américaine,” in Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (1967) (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), 62–3. My translation. In the English edition, which I don’t quote because of its lapses, Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 51. 23 Aristotle, Poetics, 26.1447a. I rely on Aristotle, Poetics, trans. I. Bywater, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. 2, 2316–40. I will cite the text using chapter and Bekker numbers. 24 William Saroyan; qtd. by Paul Marion in Jack Kerouac, Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings, ed. Marion (New York: Viking, 1999), 35; and by Johnson, 84. 25 Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947–1954, ed. Douglas Brinkley (New York: Penguin, 2004), 25. Henceforth cited in the text. 26 Jacques Rancière, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 10. 27 Rancière develops these notions in a number of texts, but see especially Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics, trans. James Swenson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 29–51, 73–85. See also Jean-Philippe

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Deranty, “Regimes of the Arts,” in Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts, ed. Jean-Philippe Deranty (Durham, UK: Acumen, 2010), 116–30. 28 See Rancière, Flesh, 9–40. 29 Rancière, “Why Emma Bovary Had to Be Killed,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 233–48. 30 In the epilogue to his masterpiece of critical theory, Auerbach writes of the ideas that guided his research: “The first of these ideas concerns the doctrine of the ancients regarding the several levels of literary representation—a doctrine which was taken up by every later classicist movement. I came to understand that modern realism in the form it reached in France in the early nineteenth century is, as an aesthetic phenomenon, characterized by complete emancipation from that doctrine.” Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 554. 31 Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, March 2, 1950. 32 In his Times review, Brooks likely intuits this particular struggle when he describes the beginning of the novel as “ungrammatical” compared to the pages toward the end (especially since Kerouac’s text really doesn’t give this impression), though he doesn’t otherwise mention this angle. 33 Although Kerouac could have encountered the Heraclitean notion of the river in any number of places, a source in which it is a recurrent image of tradition, the passage of time, and poetry itself is the work of Edmund Spenser, whose complete poems the author was familiar with. Jack Kerouac, letter to Elbert Lenrow, June 28, 1949, in Letters, 204. Kerouac quotes both The Shepheardes Calendar (1579) and The Faerie Queene (1590–6). In Complaints (1591) Spenser includes his translations of the French poet Joachim Du Bellay: in the third sonnet of Du Bellay’s Les Antiquitez de Rome (“Ruines of Rome” in Spenser’s version), the Tiber, which explicitly figures time, takes on this Heraclitean function in the disappearance of ancient Rome; one of Du Bellay’s sources is his own translation of Ovid’s poetic rendition of Heraclitus. Hassan Melehy, The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 43–4. In the long poem that opens Complaints, “The Ruines of Time,” Spenser rewrites Du Bellay’s Tiber as the Thames, with a lamentation on the disappearance of Roman civilization in England; throughout the collection, and in many parts of The Faerie Queene, Spenser returns to the conflict between stability and change, between fixity and flow. Heraclitus’ fragment, commonly rendered as “You can’t step into the same river twice,” is “As they step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow upon them.” T. M. Robinson, Heraclitus: Fragments (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), fragment 12, 16–17. 34 In editing the manuscript of The Town and the City, Robert Giroux cut out large chunks, including major episodes, working closely with Kerouac on the job. Yet Kerouac often reacted as if Giroux had made the changes alone: in his journal entry of November 2–6, 1949, he writes, “Working at the Harcourt office on the galley proofs. Bob has done a splendid job of revision.”



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However, he recognizes that his editor’s work is a response to, and indeed part of, his own struggle involving the two poetic models: “It may be that where a story like T & C is concerned, the story is more important than the poetry. How should I know?” Windblown, 244—emphasis in text. Even if Giroux’s hand enhanced the narrative structure, the latter remains something that belongs to the poetics that Kerouac is working with and developing, and his comment is an acknowledgment of that fact, though perhaps an ambivalent one. Tim Hunt sees regret in Kerouac’s words in this entry: The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 198 n. 9. 35 Leslie Choquette, Frenchmen into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 57–8. 36 I borrow this term, along with several others, from the English translation of Gustav Freytag’s Die Technik des Dramas (1863): Techniques of the Drama, trans. Elias J. MacEwan (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1900). This remarkable book offered a basis to the pedagogy of tragedy in American high schools and colleges in the twentieth century. 37 Although I commend Jones for seeing the extensive interest in Oedipal relations that marks much of Kerouac’s work, regrettably he is unwilling to attenuate his insistence on Oedipus as the governor of Kerouac’s thinking and writing. He reads this passage as reaffirming Peter’s (and hence Kerouac’s) entanglement in the Oedipal binds (74), and he never sees that the author’s poetics entails a move away from the cycles of Oedipal transmission, despite the frustrations with psychoanalysis that Kerouac regularly expressed during his career. 38 Kerouac’s first mention of On the Road is in his journal entry of August 23, 1948. Windblown, 123. 39 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari see both these poles at work in Kerouac and, more generally, Anglo-American literature. However, they see them in succession, rebellion followed by a return to the ancestors, rather than operating simultaneously. In a description that pertains to Kerouac more than to the other authors they list—Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, Henry Miller, and Allen Ginsberg—they present this itinerary: “They overcome a limit, they shatter a wall, the capitalist barrier. And of course they fail to complete the process, they never cease failing to do so. The neurotic impasse again closes—the daddy-mommy of oedipalization, America, the return to the native land—or else the perversion of the exotic territorialities, then drugs, alcohol—or worse still, an old fascist dream.” Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 133. See also Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 280. Kerouac’s “fascist dream,” as they specify later in Anti-Oedipus, is “his dreams of a great America, and then [his] search for his Breton ancestors of the superior race” (277). As I will show in Chapter 5, this is a misreading

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of the novel in which Kerouac relates a search for his ancestors, Satori in Paris (1966): the story is rather one of failing to make a solid link with the ancestors, of the inefficacy of trying to ground oneself in them, and hence of the affirmation of the human contacts resulting from the movement of the quest. In Satori in Paris, Kerouac certainly takes up the Oedipal question, only to suggest once again its futility—as he does in The Town and the City, On the Road, and much of his other fiction. Given that he continually looks to Oedipal transmission and continually rediscovers its failure—which isn’t the same as Deleuze and Guattari have it in their assessment that Anglo-American authors “never cease failing” “to complete the process”—Kerouac is a more vigilant revolutionary than they make him out to be. However, in this regard, the question of the conservatism that he increasingly espoused toward the end of his life, coincident with his deeper plunges into alcoholism, shouldn’t be overlooked. 40 As Peggy Pacini observes, “The scope behind the Legend echoed a literary life of wandering towards the point of origins, which would take the shape of a constant return onto the topology of an imaginary world that had become legendary.” Peggy Pacini, “Satori in Paris: Deconstructing the French Connection or the Legend’s Satori,” in Comparative American Studies 11, no. 3 (2013): 291. Kerouac held that his first novel, because it was “fictional” and not written in spontaneous prose, didn’t constitute a part of the legend: Jack Kerouac, letter to Malcolm Cowley, February 4, 1957, in Selected Letters: 1957–1969, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1999), 9. 41 Jacques Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin (1996), trans. David Wills (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 25. Derrida returns to the phrase throughout. Although he makes reference to the imposition of French in Algeria, his object is to reflect on the linguistic functioning of systems of domination.

2 On and off the Franco-American road  1 Yves Roby, Histoire d’un rêve brisé? Les Canadiens français aux États-Unis (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2007), 136–8; Roby, The Franco-Americans of New England: Dreams and Realities, trans. Mary Ricard (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2004), 396–433; François Weil, Les Franco-Américains (Paris: Belin, 1989), 201–5.  2 Jack Kerouac, letter to Rosaire Dion-Lévesque, December 28, 1950, Kerouac Collection, Center for Lowell History, University of Massachusettes–Lowell, Box 2, Folder 15; Dion-Lévesque, “Jean-Louis Kérouac, romancier,” Silhouettes franco-américaines (Manchester, NH: Association CanadoAméricaine, 1957), 433. In a letter to Dion-Lévesque dated March 30, 1951, Kerouac speaks of having read the text of the profile, as well as newspaper articles about him by Dion-Lévesque in the Nashua Telegraph and La Patrie of Montreal; in a postcard mailed on September 27, 1960, writing in French, Kerouac politely accepts Dion-Lévesque’s offer to send him a copy



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of Silhouettes. Jack Kerouac letters, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, MSS 0025c.  3 Ann Charters, Kerouac: A Biography (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 404.  4 Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947–1954, ed. Douglas Brinkley (New York: Penguin, 2004), 159. Henceforth cited in the text.  5 Joyce Johnson, The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (New York: Viking, 2012), 369–409; Isaac Gewirtz, Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road (New York: New York Public Library; London: Scala, 2007), 72–147. Henceforth I will cite both in the text.  6 Tim Hunt, Kerouac’s Crooked Road: The Development of a Fiction (1981), 3rd ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), 77–110.  7 Gabriel Anctil, “Les 50 ans d’On the Road: Kerouac voulait écrire en français,” Le Devoir, September 5, 2007. My translation.  8 Jack Kerouac, La Nuit est ma femme (1951), Kerouac Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 15.20. My translations. Although the title might also be rendered as The Night Is My Wife, in Visions of Cody Kerouac cites a book called The Night Is My Woman: Visions of Cody (1972) (New York: Penguin, 1993), 103. Kerouac wrote The Sea Is My Brother in the spring of 1943, around his twenty-first birthday: The Sea Is My Brother: The Lost Novel, ed. Dawn Ward (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2012); also The Sea Is My Brother, in The Sea Is My Brother: The Lost Novel, ed. Dawn Ward (London: Penguin, 2011), 1–45. La Nuit et ma femme will soon be published in a volume with its companion work, which I address below, Sur le chemin: Jack Kerouac, La Vie est d’hommage, ed. Jean-Christophe Cloutier (Montreal: Boréal, 2016). They will also appear in English translation in a forthcoming collection: The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished and Newly Translated Writings, ed. Todd Tietchen, translations by Jean-Christophe Cloutier (New York: Library of America, 2016).  9 Gewirtz provides quotations from and an image of the manuscript of La Nuit est ma femme, as well as very astute comments about its role in the writing of On the Road, 100–1. 10 Jack Kerouac, letter to Neal Cassady, May 22, 1951, in Selected Letters, 1940–1956, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1995), 315. 11 An example is a journal entry of November 1944 containing a poem reminiscent of Baudelaire and Rimbaud: Kerouac Papers 53.3. 12 The one I have consulted throughout my study of Kerouac’s French is Léandre Bergeron, Dictionnaire de la langue québécoise (Montreal: Typo, 1997). 13 For a superb linguistic analysis of Franco-American French, see Edith Szlezák, Franco-Americans in Massachusetts: “No French no mo’ ’round here (Tübingen: Narr, 2010), 39–84. 14 Jack Kerouac, letter to Yvonne Le Maître, September 8, 1950, in Selected Letters, 1940–1956, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1995), 229. Henceforth cited in the text.

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15 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957) (New York: Penguin, 1991), 126; On the Road: The Original Scroll, ed. Howard Cunnell (New York: Penguin, 2007), 227. I will henceforth cite both in the text as OTR 1957 and “scroll,” respectively. 16 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16. 17 Ibid., 26. 18 Jack Kerouac, “The Father of My Father,” in Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings, ed. Paul Marion (New York: Penguin, 1999), 151. 19 Ibid. 20 From the novel’s beginnings, Kerouac always saw The Town and the City as advancing such a conception of cultural shifts and the movement that they occasion. In a 1943 note on the “Galloway” novel, he writes, “The story concerns the deep change war brings in a country. A deep change occurs also in the hero-protagonist. The point to make (in lieu of the can’t go home again complaint) is to accept change for what it is and realize change leads to new life. People too commonly accept change as a process of disintegration—which it isn’t.” Kerouac Papers, 8.21. 21 I speak of Kerouac’s writing as a map not only because it depicts a large number of locations and presents them in the cohesiveness of a narrative, but also because his prose participates in and mimes the movement it depicts. Similar notions of map are at issue in Doreen Massey’s challenge to representational geography in For Space (London: Sage, 2005): in response to the unruly heterogeneity and just plain strangeness of space, especially the vast spaces of imperial purview, she addresses the efforts in many disciplines to “tame space,” suggesting, “Maybe our current, ‘normal’ Western maps have been one more element in that long effort at the taming of the spatial” (106). She draws examples from what she terms “the hegemonic cognitive mappings of five hundred years ago…the attempts to grasp, to invent, a vision of the whole; to tame confusion and complexity.” To such dominant cartography she offers the contrast of situationism, arising in the wake of Guy Debord’s social and political criticism, which “work to do the opposite, to disrupt the sense of coherence and totality. Situationist cartographies, while still attempting to picture the universe, map that universe as one which is not a single order. On the one hand, situationist cartographies sought to disorient, to defamiliarise, to provoke a view from an unaccustomed angle. On the other hand, and more significant to the argument here, they sought to expose the incoherences and fragmentations of the spatial itself.…” Following Thomas Y. Levin, she describes the work of such cartography as “a mimesis of incoherence” (109). She also finds support for her critique in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, who present a map as an antidote to the constriction and filtering of geography that occurs in what they characterize as “a tracing”: the distinction is that a map, in this understanding, “is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real.” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 12, qtd. in Massey, 111. Deleuze and



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Guattari also explain that “a map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back ‘to the same’” (12). 22 Kerouac, Sea (Boston), 73–90; Sea (London), 57–67. See also my “Becoming Kerouac,” American Book Review 33, no. 3 (March–April 2012): 26. 23 Jack Kerouac, “Where the Road Begins,” Kerouac Papers 2.41. 24 Jack Kerouac, “Where the Road Begins,” in Atop an Underwood, 58, 59. Henceforth cited in the text. 25 There are numerous accounts of Kerouac’s highly mythified composition process, but few based on close examination of all the manuscripts: the most detailed is Matt Theado, “Revisions of Kerouac,” in What’s Your Road, Man? Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, ed. Hilary Holladay and Robert Holton (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 8–34; Theado systematically pits reality against myth. Howard Cunnell provides a succinct account, partly for the purpose of debunking some of the myths, in “Fast This Time: Jack Kerouac and the Writing of On the Road,” in Kerouac, scroll, 24; see also Johnson, 395–6. Indispensable for his extraordinary account of the prescroll, scroll, and postscroll versions is Gewirtz, 73–148. 26 Kerouac, letter to Cassady, May 22, 1951, 315–16. 27 In The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), Tim Hunt treats Kerouac’s use of a typewriter as a recording device in the manner of new media, rather than a mere tool for transcribing something already written (58–93). 28 Helen Weaver, The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties (San Francisco: City LIghts, 2009), 15. 29 Kerouac, Visions of Cody, preliminary pages. 30 Paul Maher, Kerouac: His Life and Work, rev. ed. (Lanham, MD: Taylor, 2007), 236. 31 Gewirtz notes that this typescript “may no longer be extant” (112). 32 Dennis McNally, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America (New York: Delta, 1979), 274–5; Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 604. 33 Cf. Hunt, Crooked, 77–8, 83–142. 34 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142–8; Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Language, Countermemory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–38. 35 Kerouac, letter to Cassady, May 22, 1951, 315. 36 They are on the following pairs of pages, which refer first to the 1957 version and then to the scroll edition of 2007: 37/140, 58/160, 132/233, 140/241, 153/253, 179/282, 191/289, 208/305, 213/309–10, 216/314, 217/315, 233/330, 245/346, 251–2/353, and 263/363.

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37 Howard Cunnell, “Appendix,” in scroll, 401: he explains that the appendix to this edition of On the Road is a reconstruction based on all the available versions of the novel, including the 1957 publication. See also Gewirtz, 120. 38 My source is the standard dictionary of the French language, Le Petit Robert des noms propres: dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française, electronic edition (Paris: Robert, 2012). This dictionary, comprising about 60,000 entries, is the shorter version of the Robert, the closest equivalent in French of the Oxford English Dictionary. 39 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Robert M. Durling, ed. Durling and Ronald Martinez, vol. 1, Inferno (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 26–7. 40 Jack Kerouac, Sur le chemin, Kerouac Papers 39.10. My translations. Henceforth cited in the text. For future publication information on Sur le chemin, see n. 8 above. 41 Cf. Gabriel Anctil, “‘Sur le chemin’: Découverte d’un deuxième roman en français de Jack Kerouac,” Le Devoir, September 4, 2008. 42 Jack Kerouac, letter to Neal and Carolyn Cassady, January 10, 1953, in Selected Letters, 1940–1956, 395. 43 Ibid. 44 In the early versions of his “Galloway” novel, from 1943–44, Kerouac makes the main characters French-Canadian. Kerouac Papers, 43.6. 45 For important observations on Kerouac’s use of French in his novels, see Pierre Anctil, “Paradise Lost, ou le texte de langue française dans l’œuvre de Jack Kérouac,” in Un homme grand: Jack Kerouac at the Crossroads of Many Cultures/Jack Kérouac à la confluence des cultures, ed. Anctil (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1990), 93–103. 46 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2008), 7. Cf. Arun Saldanha, Psychedelic White (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 135. 47 Paul Marion suggested to me this term for Kerouac’s position in this letter. 48 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 133; see also A Thousand Plateaus, 280. 49 The Institut de la Statistique du Québec ranks Paradis as the seventy-fourth most frequent name in the province: “Les 1000 premiers noms de famille selon le rang, Québec,” www.stat.gouv.qc.ca/statistiques/populationdemographie/caracteristiques/noms_famille_1000.htm 50 Nicole Deschamps, “Avant-propos,” in Louis Hémon, Maria Chapdelaine. Récit du Canada français (Montreal: Boréal, 1988), viii. 51 WorldCat is my source for this information. 52 Julien Duvivier, director, Maria Chapdelaine, Société Nouvelle de la Cinématographie, 1934; DVD, Éditions Prestige, 2006; information on release dates from the Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com.



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53 Nicosia, 77, 112. 54 See Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (1965) (New York: Riverhead, 1995), 137. 55 Eric Waddell, “Kérouac, le Québec, l’Amérique…et moi,” in Un homme grand, 17. 56 Without linking them to the name Sal Paradise, Robert Holton quotes these words to develop the idea that the recurrence of rags, trash, scum, and dirt in On the Road mark the novel’s most direct challenge to the regularity of dominant culture: “The Tenement Castle: Kerouac’s Lumpen-Bohemia,” in Hilary Holland and Robert Holteon ed.,What’s Your Road, Man?, 71. 57 Charters, Kerouac, 86. 58 Adolphe-Basile Routhier, “Le rôle de la race française en Amérique,” in Fête nationale des Canadiens-Français célébrée en Québec en 1880, ed. H.-J.-J.-B. Chouinard (Québec City: A. Côté, 1881), 293, 294: “abandonnée par sa mère, conquise, envahie par l’élément étranger, soumise à tous les régimes qui devaient l’absorber”; “le commissionnaire de la France et de Dieu!” My translation. Cf. Roby, Histoire, 38, and Franco-Americans, 43–4. See above, Introduction, 12. 59 See Timothy Hampton’s comments on this passage: “Tangled Generations: Dylan, Kerouac, Petrarch, and the Poetics of Escape,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 710. Hampton adds, “‘In vita nova,’ writes Dante in the story of his own conversion to love [Vita Nuova], ‘the new life begins’” (710). 60 Kerouac states this connotation in a French-language interview with Fernand Seguin on the Montreal TV show Le Sel de la semaine, broadcast March 7, 1967; transcript, Le Devoir, October 28, 1972. 61 When he uses this technique, Kerouac’s prose becomes a microcosm of the extended space of the United States as a series of places composed of many social and geographic trajectories. The coexistence of spaces in the depictions of his prose is an image that points to the indeterminate and transforming make-up of continental American geography—it is a miming of heterogeneous space, the object of Massey’s reflections: “What space gives us is simultaneous heterogeneity; it holds out the possibility of surprise; it is the condition of the social in the widest sense, and the delight and the challenge of that” (105). “Arriving in a new place means joining up with, somehow linking into, the collection of interwoven stories of which that place is made…. At either end of your journey, then, a town or a city (a place) which itself consists of a bundle of trajectories” (119). 62 Hunt, Crooked, 4. 63 Rachel Ligairi, “When Mexico Looks Like Mexico: The Hyperrealization of Race and the Pursuit of the Authentic,” in What’s Your Road, Man?, 139–54. 64 “On the Road, second draft,” Kerouac Papers, 25.1, 92; “On the Road, third draft,” Kerouac Papers, 26.1, 104. Henceforth cited in the text as OTR2 and OTR3. 65 John Dickinson and Brian Young, A Short History of Quebec, 4th ed. (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2008), 170–3.

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66 In discussing the formation of whiteness in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Europe and the United States, Charles W. Wright correctly insists on the basic division between whites and nonwhites, while recognizing the divisions of whiteness imposed by dominant culture and ideology: “All whites are equal, then, but some are whiter, and so more equal, than others, and all nonwhites are unequal, but some are blacker, and so more unequal, than others. The fundamental concept cut, the primary division, then remains that between whites and nonwhites, and the fuzzy status of inferior whites is accommodated by the category of ‘off-white’ rather than nonwhite.” The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 80. Wright quotes Richard Drinnon on the Irish, who under British domination “remained at most ‘white niggers.’” Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), xvii. The term “white niggers” was also used by a highly influential Québécois writer to describe the social, economic, and cultural position of his people as recently as the 1960s: Pierre Vallières, White Niggers of America: The Precocious Autobiography of a Québécois “Terrorist,” trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review, 1971); Nègres blancs d’Amérique (1968) (Montreal: Typo, 1994). Further evidence that the French Canadians are quite aptly regarded as off-white, as bearing the signs of rough transformation from nonwhite to white, is offered by David R. Roediger, who reports a key response to Carroll D. Wright’s official designation of the French Canadians as “the Chinese of the Eastern States”: “We are a white people.” David R. Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 109. See also above, Introduction, 13–14. 67 Though giving somewhat limited attention to Kerouac’s reasons for identification with nonwhite peoples, Justin Thomas Trudeau makes similar observations about the “way” in which Kerouac/Jack/Sal may be Mexican. Trudeau provides canny analysis of racial identification as something performed: in the scroll, “Jack cannot fully escape his own ethnicity, just as he cannot fully identity with the fellahin people that he so desperately wants to join in the first place. Kerouac knew this as well, as in the later version of On the Road he supplements the ending of the passage from ‘I am’ to ‘in a way I am’…. Kerouac thus admits the impossibility of his earlier mimetic utterance, and over the course of the novel he even more blatantly cites his white performativity so that readers can judge the hypocrisy of his romantic poeisis.” “Specters in the Rear-View: Haunting Whiteness in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road,” Text and Performance Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2011): 161. 68 James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” (1961), in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s/ Marek, 1985), 297–98. Henceforth cited in the text. 69 Norman Mailer, “The White Negro” (1957), in Advertisements for Myself (New York: Putnam, 1959), 348.



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70 James Baldwin, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” (1979), in Price, 650. 71 James Baldwin, “Introduction: The Price of the Ticket,” in Price, xix. 72 Ibid., xx. Albert Memmi makes a closely related observation: “Though the corrosive suffering of the victim is wholly incommensurate with and overshadows the psychic deformation of the victimizer, one nevertheless does not transform oneself into an executioner without great cost. There is a double erosion of personhood in all racism, because its only purpose is to torment other people through an attempt to reduce them to nothing, and to harass people to the point of destroying them.” Racism, trans. Steve Martinot (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 57. 73 David Amram, Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2002), 123. 74 Ibid., 112. 75 James Baldwin, “Color” (1962), in Price, 322. 76 Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Delta, 1968), 71–72. 77 The main difference between the two versions of the passage is the greater sexual explicitness of the earlier one, as well as its use of a racial epithet: “But that night my dream of glory was turned gray fact, and I walked on Welton Street wishing I was a ‘nigger;’ because I saw that the best the ‘white world’ had to offer was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.    “I remember: I stopped at a little shack-place where a man sold hot, red chili in paper containers. I bought some and ate it strolling in the dark mysterious streets. I also wished I was a Denver Mexican, or even a Jap, Toshio Mori! anything but a ‘white man’ disillusioned by the best of his own ‘white world.’ (All my life I had had white ambitions!)    “As I strolled I passed the dark porch steps of Mexican & Negro homes. Soft voices were there, and occasionally the dusky leg of some mysterious, sensual girl; and dark men who owned them; and little children who were growing up with the same idea—the idea of life-as-you-will. In fact a group of Negro women came by and one of the younger ones detached herself from mother-like elders to come to me and say—‘Hello Eddy.’    “As I said to Allen in a letter, I knew I was really Eddy. But this is untrue. I knew damn well I wasn’t so fortunate as to be Eddy—some white kid who dug the colored girls down there. I was merely myself.    “So sad I was—in the violet dark, strolling—wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-minded, ecstatic Negroes of America” (Windblown, 215). 78 Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 186. 79 Ibid. Nancy Grace also writes articulately on Kerouac’s “white ambitions”: Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 13. See also Johnson, 269–305. 80 Nancy Grace signaled to me the importance of Kerouac’s mention of Benares here.

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81 Cf. Robert Holton, On the Road: Kerouac’s Ragged American Journey (New York: Twayne, 1999), 117: “Sal’s respect for these people allows him to penetrate the racist American clichés and stereotypes that so often reduce and mock them, an important accomplishment at this moment in cultural history.” 82 Ligairi, 152. 83 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 2, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1957)—emphasis in text. Henceforth cited in the text. 84 See Leslie Choquette, Frenchmen into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of French Canada (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), expecially 279–305. 85 Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 5: “Diaspora, partaking always of the local, but by definition never confined to it, thus suggests itself as a place where [the] interaction [between the individual and the collective] can be grasped. This suggests in turn that there may be something to be gained from thinking about diaspora not merely as a comparative social or historical phenomenon, not ever only as a predicament shared by many people or peoples who otherwise have little else in common, but as a positive resource in the necessary rethinking of models of polity in the current erosion and questioning of the modern nation-state system and ideal.” 86 Kerouac, Desolation Angels, 341—emphasis in text. 87 Kerouac, Desolation Angels, 341. 88 In his insightful and informative At the End of the Road: Jack Kerouac in Mexico, trans. Daniel C. Schechter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Jorge García-Robles remarks, “It would be difficult to find a more astute passage by a twentieth-century writer coming face-to-face with Mexico” (27). 89 Nicosia shows that in much of Kerouac’s work, gold functions as the substance of visions and as “the symbol of ultimate spiritual hope” (401). 90 Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1960) (San Francisco: City Lights, 1994), 23. 91 Less sympathetic than I am to this passage in On the Road and its later version in Visions of Cody (298), García-Robles sees it as reflecting Kerouac’s inundation in the dream of Mexico that stems from his personal spirituality: “With a little help from the grass, Jack leaped onto another plane, unleashed from fragmented reality, to rock upon an ever-yearned-for spiritual substratum of inner harmony, where Neal is God (as well as America in its purest state) and Mexico a magical land gushing golden symbols. What more could Jack, seeker and lover of alternative consciousness, ask for! The dual name Neal-Mexico echoed divinity” (32). 92 Douglas Malcolm, “‘Jazz America’: Jazz and African American Culture in Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road,’” Contemporary Literature 40, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 85–110.



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93 See Gewirtz, 145, for a different judgment of the literary merit of this addition. 94 Alfred Sauvy, “Trois mondes, une planète,” L’Observateur 118 (August 4, 1952): 4.

3 Writing in real time  1 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957) (New York: Penguin, 1991), 126. Henceforth cited in the text.  2 Interview on Montreal TV, Le Sel de la semaine (Canadian Broadcast Company), March 7, 1967; transcript, Le Devoir, October 28, 1972.  3 Knowing time is knowing it as something other than linear or, as Walter Benjamin puts it, “homogeneous.” Dean’s knowledge of time is akin to that of Benjamin’s Jewish thinkers, who didn’t look to the future, “for every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.” “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 264.  4 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) (New York: Penguin, 1977), 13; henceforth cited in the text. Michael Hrebeniak, Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 34–35. Henceforth cited in the text.  5 One of the most important of Doreen Massey’s proposals for the reconfiguration of space is the recognition “that time and space should be thought together”—that time should be understood as continually affecting space and attending on its changes. As a counterpoint to the imperial establishment of cartography beginning with the conquest of the Americas, in which spaces were mastered partly by rendering them as static, Massey presents the Aztec Codex Xolotl, a map that depicts lines of migration and hence incorporates time. For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 7, 108. Lawrence and to a greater degree Kerouac challenge the fixity of Western space and the inertia of its social ordering by assigning a temporality, tending toward utopia, in their depictions of geographic movement.  6 Regina Weinreich, Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics: A Study of the Fiction (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2001), 54.  7 Tim Hunt, Kerouac’s Crooked Road: The Development of a Fiction (1981), 3rd ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), 120–1. Henceforth cited in the text.  8 Jack Kerouac, letter to Allen Ginsberg, May 18, 1952, in Selected Letters, 1940–1956, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1995), 357. Henceforth cited in the text.  9 Allen Ginsberg, letter to Jack Kerouac, June 12, 1952, in Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, ed. Bill Morgan and David Stanford (New York: Viking, 2010), 176. 10 A survey of opinions on this point is worthwhile. David Amram, among

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the most accomplished American musicians and composers since the 1950s, wrote, “Collaborating with Kerouac was as natural as breathing. That is because the breath and breadth of Jack’s rhythms were so natural that even the most stodgy musician or listener or reader could feel those rhythms and cadences, those breathless flowing phrases, the subtle use of dynamics that are fundamental to the oral (i.e., spoken) and aural (i.e., to be listened to) tradition of all musical and poetic forms of expression.” Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2002), 3—henceforth cited in the text. In his review of The Subterraneans Kenneth Rexroth famously wrote, “The story is all about jazz and Negroes. Now there are two things Jack knows nothing about—jazz and Negroes.” “The Subterraneans,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 16, 1958. Jon Panish’s scholarly treatment of the question definitely tilts in Rexroth’s direction, if it doesn’t partake of the same vitriol. Taking Kerouac’s two principal theoretical statements, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” and “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose,” as evidentiary documents of the author’s knowledge of jazz, Panish writes, “No mention is made anywhere in Kerouac’s pronouncements of study being necessary prior to the undertaking of ‘spontaneous prose.’ Kerouac’s instructions…for this creative activity suggest that the writer’s improvisations (like the jazz musician’s, he implies) require nothing more than consciousness, emotions, and life experience.” The Color of Jazz: Race and Representation in Postwar American Culture (Jackson : University of Mississippi Press, 1997), 110. And in the following chapter, “In Kerouac’s work, the jazz process remains one that is not the result of a cultural development on the group level and disciplined practice on the individual level, but one that is fundamental to any ‘primal’ human existence” (139). Listing the conceptual problems with these statements would take far more space than such work merits. But I’ll signal that Panish is just as guilty of taking Kerouac out of his context as he wrongly believes Kerouac to be with regard to jazz. For example, when Kerouac says that “[t]he object is set before the mind,” other texts make plain that this is a disciplined, studied activity, as is sketching, which Panish even names in one of his quotations from “Essentials.” Panish didn’t consult the richest source of Kerouacian context, the letters, the first volume of which was available (in 1995) before his 1997 publication date. Neither did he consult Hunt, whose landmark 1981 book extensively treats Kerouac’s relationship to jazz, with ample reference to Kerouac’s corpus. Whatever truth there may be in the claim that Kerouac’s efforts didn’t result in an adequate knowledge or sensibility regarding jazz, that he ended up somewhere between primitive and infantile, Panish himself, rather than demonstrating his claim, chooses the far easier route of setting out to discredit Kerouac, apparently in his own mind meeting with success. 11 Douglas Malcolm, “‘Jazz America’: Jazz and African American Culture in Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road,’” Contemporary Literature 40, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 98. 12 Ralph Ellison, “The Charlie Christian Story,” in Shadow and Act (1964) (New York: Vintage, 1995), 234.



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13 Ralph Ellison, “The Golden Age, Time Past,” in Shadow and Act, 212— emphasis in text. 14 Ralph Ellison, “Blues People,” in Shadow and Act, 247–59. 15 Ralph Ellison, “The Charlie Christian Story,” 238; qtd. in LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 176. Henceforth cited in the text. 16 Walton M. Muyumba, The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 20–21. 17 Ibid., 128–9. Muyumba’s quotation is from Tujomola Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest, Masks of Resistance (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 35. 18 Weinreich affirms that Kerouac’s “understanding of [jazz] is actually limited to what he could adapt to his prose” (62); she follows this observation with a careful analysis of Visions of Cody in terms of the author’s use of synesthesia, synchronicity, and syncopation (62–73), “techniques,” she observes, “that Kerouac developed through his study of jazz music—his frequent trips to jazz clubs as recounted in the novels, his experience of reciting his writing with a jazz backup” (62). Preston Whaley offers a specific comparison between Kerouac’s prose, as exemplified in a passage from The Dharma Bums (1958) (New York: Penguin, 1976) in which narrator Ray Smith and Japhy Rider run down northern California’s Matterhorn (85–6), and a solo by Charlie Parker: “Kerouac’s passage extends itself, its theme of spectacular descent, not through variation but in uninterrupted release of momentum—conveyed through a line of conspicuously immediate, active present participles—to the end. Compare it, for instance, with Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘A Night in Tunisia.’ Recorded in 1946, the composition features one of Charlie Parker’s famous solos. The piece begins with an Afro-Latinesque introduction, followed by an interlude. A four-measure solo follows the interlude in which Parker releases a time-and-space merging stream of sixteenth-notes—twelve notes per second for five seconds straight—that forms what Thomas Owen called no virtuosic run through a scale or chord, but ‘a perfectly structured melodic statement.’ The correspondence of momentum and instantaneous creation between Parker’s solo and Kerouac’s prose derives from their basis in open psychic conditions. Both Parker’s sequence of melodic ideas and Kerouac’s sequence of word pictures seem to be conceived and simultaneously expressed, whole and intact, not in accord with convention, but with their own implicit logic of structure and timing.” Blows Like a Horn: Beat Writing, Jazz Style, and Markets in Transformation of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 33. 19 Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 486. Henceforth cited in the text. 20 Malcolm is definitely guilty of this sort of imposition when he makes the following comments on Sal Paradise’s exuberant “history” of jazz in On the Road (239), which includes Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Bennie Moten, Hot Lips Page, Thelonius Monk, Dizzy

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Gillespie, and Lester Young: “Kerouac’s conception of jazz is conspicuous for being based on individual stars rather than, say, the bands in which they played or the cities in which their distinctive sounds originated. As Leroy Ostransky makes clear, the musicians named by Kerouac derived their styles in major part from the jazz communities in New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago, and New York” (Malcolm, 95). This comment is obviously driven by Malcolm’s critical agenda rather than careful reading, since, in the very passage he quotes, Kerouac lists New Orleans, Kansas City, and New York. Malcolm somehow doesn’t notice Kerouac’s ceaseless cartography of America, concluding his article by judging the literary achievement of On the Road as merely widening “the scope of suitable fictional subject material to include alcoholics, junkies, and jazz musicians and fashion[ing] a distinctive prose style to depict their lives” (107). 21 I have examined five jazz improvisation textbooks from the last fifty years: Jerry Coker, Improvising Jazz (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964); also its second edition of two decades later, Improvising Jazz (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), which has no updates, so was apparently not criticized for grave omissions; Bertram Konowitz, Jazz Improvisation at the Piano: A Textbook for Teachers (PhD dissertation) (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1971); Trent P. Kynaston and Robert J. Ricci, Jazz and Improvisation (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978); Zachary Poulter, Teaching Improv in Your Jazz Ensemble: A Complete Guide for Music Educators (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); Scott D. Reeves, Creative Jazz Improvisation (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995). Although they all mention, usually in connection with a style or progression, some of the luminaries of jazz improv—Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Charlie Parker—none of them provides anything like a systematic history or even a portion thereof. Kynaston opens with: “Jazz is a highly involved American art form that has become a major influence on all types of music, dance, and related arts throughout the world. A brief look at its history shows that it evolved as a blending of the musical cultures of Africa and Europe during the first three hundred years of American development” (2). He doesn’t mention until he’s written several pages: “In jazz, no one ever told Stanley Turrentine that he must sound like Stan Getz, or Urbie Green that he must match J. J. Johnson’s sound, or Miles Davis that he should sound like Dizzy Gillespie” (4). The rest of the book is devoted to technique and practice. Indeed, who would expect otherwise, unless the goal were to discredit Kerouac? 22 Scott Deveaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 18. 23 Ibid., 19. 24 Ellison, “Golden Age,” 212. 25 Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues (212 Choruses) (1959) (New York: Grove, 1990), preliminary pages. 26 Of Kerouac’s performances, Amram writes compellingly, all the more so for being informed by rare knowledge of jazz: especially 3–22, 33–5, 73–7.



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27 Jack Kerouac, “The Father of My Father,” in Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings, ed. Paul Marion (New York; Penguin, 1999), 151. 28 Kerouac’s conceptualization of writing, his regard for it as a system in which language can be bent and transformed so as to admit what it has hitherto not admitted, bears close kinship with Derrida’s notion of writing. I borrow a formulation from a book by Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), that turns up elsewhere in my study. He addresses the failure of a given language to be the integral and cohesive unity that is grammar’s reason for existence: “For the classical linguist, of course, each language is a system whose unity is always reconstituted. But this unity is not comparable to any other. It is open to the most radical grafting, open to deformations, transformations, expropriation, to a certain a-nomie and de-regulation. So much so that the gesture—here, once again, I am calling it writing [écriture], even though it can remain purely oral, vocal, and musical: rhythmic or prosodic—that seeks to affect monolanguage, the one that one has without having it, is always multiple” (65). 29 Della Pollock, “Performative Writing,” in The Ends of Performance, ed. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 78–79. At least as relevant to understanding Kerouac, Pollock further sees performative writing as a challenge to institutional and cultural avenues of cognition, a means of admitting the unrecognized: “Performative writing is evocative. It operates metaphorically to render absence present—to bring the reader into contact with ‘other-worlds,’ to those aspects and dimensions of our world that are other to the text as such by re-marking them. Performative writing evokes worlds that are other-wise intangible, unlocatable: worlds of memory, pleasure, sensation, imagination, affect, and in-sight” (80). And it strives to overcome the separations and exclusions resulting from the imposition of boundaries: “Performative writing is nervous. It anxiously crosses various stories, theories, texts, and spheres of practice, unable to settle into a clear, linear course, neither willing nor able to stop moving, restless, transient and transitive, traversing spatial and temporal borders…” (90–1). 30 Throughout his new The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), Tim Hunt develops the idea of Kerouac’s writing as performance, viewing it somewhat differently from the way I do: “Kerouac is imagining writing as performance, not composition, and he is projecting writing—and reading—as a direct exchange between writer and reader that would have at least some of the interactive immediacy of speaker and listener” (32). 31 My analysis of sketching owes a great deal to that of Hunt, who in Kerouac’s Crooked Road writes, “Rather than viewing writing as the translation of already perceived experience into language and structure, sketching views writing as the process of recording the artist’s act of perception or interpretation of that experience” (124). He also accords sketching extensive treatment in Textuality, 97–127. Cf. Joyce Johnson, The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (New York: Viking, 2012), 419: “He was

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about to discover what he had been looking for—a way to write passages in which he would seize the peak moment of initial inspiration and ride it through to the end, without interrupting the flow of imagery. I will henceforth cite Johnson in the text. 32 Jack Kerouac, letter to Ed White, April 28, 1957, in Selected Letters, 1957–1969, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1999), 30. 33 Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (1983) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 279. Henceforth cited in the text. 34 Jack Kerouac, letter to Ed White, May 9, 1949, in “Letters from Jack Kerouac to Ed White, 1947–68,” The Missouri Review 17, no. 3 (1994): 130. Henceforth cited in the text. 35 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi and J. Glenn Gray, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 194. Henceforth cited in the text. Although it is only of anecdotal interest whether Kerouac read Heidegger, since it’s entirely possible for many intellectuals, artists, and writers in a given time period to encounter the same consequential problems in their work without knowledge of each other, in Desolation Angels (1965) (New York: Riverhead, 1995) the author explicitly shows his familiarity with the German philosopher (265). 36 Clark Coolidge, Now It’s Jazz: Writings on Kerouac and the Sounds (Albuquerque: Living Batch, 1999), 18. Henceforth cited in the text. 37 Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody (1972) (New York: Penguin, 1993), preliminary pages. Henceforth cited in the text. 38 Jack Kerouac, letter to John Clellon Holmes, June 5, 1952, in Selected Letters, 1940–1956, 371—suspension points in text. 39 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” trans. James E. Irby, in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and Irby (New York: New Directions, 2007), 51–8. 40 Jack Kerouac, Excerpts from Visions of Cody (New York: New Directions, 1960), preliminary pages. 41 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 109: “Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connections of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual connection, grasped as pure locus of the possible.” See also Tom Conley, “Space,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. Adrian Parr (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 257–9. 42 Jack Kerouac, biographical résumé, Fall 1957, in Heaven and Other Poems, ed. Donald Allen (Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox Press, 1977), 39: “Spent 3 years on first full novel (1100-page Town and City) which was cut to 400 pages by Harcourt-Brace and thereby reduced from a mighty (overlong, windy, but



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sincere) black book of sorrows into a ‘saleable’ ordinary novel…(Never again editorship for me.)” 43 Also, Hunt, Textuality, 161–4. 44 Jack Kerouac, On the Road notebook, Jack Kerouac Collection 1948–80, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, 1.3. I owe my knowledge of this passage to Gerald Nicosia, who quotes somewhat less of it (274); he confirmed to me by e-mail on May 1, 2013, that it is from this journal. 45 André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), vol. 1, 35. 46 Ibid., 37. 47 Jack Kerouac, Vanity of Duluoz (1968) (New York: Penguin, 1994), 104. 48 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema?, vol. 1, 13. 49 This is the gist of Jacques Rancière’s critique of the ideal of what he terms “cinematographic modernity,” that of an apparatus that passively captures reality and opens it to challenging the ideological confinements of the intellect, in Film Fables, trans. E. Battista, (New York: Berg, 2006), 9–10. Later in the book, Rancière identifies Bazin as the first of the two major theorists of cinematographic modernity, the other being Gilles Deleuze (145). See also Hassan Melehy, “Film Fables,” in Jacques Rancière: Key Concepts, ed. Jean-Philippe Deranty (Durham: Acumen, 2010), 171–2. 50 CF. Hunt, 165. He cites French philosopher and critic Claude-Edmonde Magny, whose L’Age du roman américain (Paris: Seuil, 1948), one of the sources Bazin acknowledges, makes the tie between the cinema and twentiethcentury American literature. Cf. also Weinreich, 75. 51 Jack Kerouac, letter to Philip Whalen, June 10, 1959, in Selected Letters, 1957–1969, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1999), 207. 52 Jack Kerouac, Book of Sketches, ed. George Condo (New York: Penguin, 2006), v. Henceforth cited in the text. 53 See Darren Wershler-Henry’s rather remarkable valorization of Kerouac’s writing precisely as typing: The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2005), 238–44. 54 Friedrich Nietzsche, letter to Peter Gast, end of February 1882, in Gesammelte Briefe, vol. 4, Briefe an Peter Gast, ed. Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche (Leipzig: Insel, 1908), 97; qtd. in Friedrich Kittler, “The Mechanized Philosopher,” in Looking After Nietzsche, ed. Laurence Rickels (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 195. 55 Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” (1950), in The New American Poetry: 1945–1960, ed. Donald Allen (1960) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 389–90: “And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who

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writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending—where its breathing, shall come to, termination.” A bit further Olson writes, “(speech is the ‘solid’ of verse, the secret of a poem’s energy)” (391). 56 Ibid., 393. 57 Cf. Wershler-Henry on Olson’s Projective Verse: 166–176. Wershler-Henry notes Marshall McLuhan’s observation on Olson’s understanding of the typewriter as part of a basic transformation of the performing body: “[P]oets like Charles Olson are eloquent in proclaiming the power of the typewriter to help the poet to indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspension, even, of syllables, the juxtaposition, even, of parts of phrases which he intends, observing that, for the first time, the poet has the stave and the bar that the musician has had.” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 227–8; qtd. in WershlerHenry, 167. 58 In The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Daniel Belgrad provides a highly illuminating account of the relationship between Olson’s and Kerouac’s poetics, including Olson’s great interest in Kerouac, Ginsberg, and other Beat Generation figures as a furthering of the program of Projective Verse (200–4). Hunt also comments on this relationship: Textuality, 188–9. 59 Although I’m largely sympathetic not to mention indebted to all of Hunt’s critical insights, in light of the observations I’m making here I would suggest at least an attenuation and complication of the priority that, taking cues from Walter J. Ong, he assigns to speech in his account of spontaneous prose. Tim Hunt, “‘Blow As Deep As You Want to Blow’: Time, Textuality, and Jack Kerouac’s Development of Spontaneous Prose,” Journal of Beat Studies 1 (2012): 54: “Spontaneous prose is, among other things, an attempt to make writing operate in time and to prioritize the temporal over the spatial so that writing can be used not only to compose representations of speaking (what, in speech-act theory, would be termed ‘written utterance’) but also to function as a mode of speaking (what might be thought of as ‘uttering’ occurring in and as writing). In speaking, in actually ‘uttering,’ language is inherently behavioral; a speaker interacts directly with a listener.” Throughout Textuality, Hunt draws on Ong as well as Jack Goody and Eric Havelock. 60 Jack Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” in Good Blonde and Others, ed. Donald Allen and Robert Creeley (San Francisco: City Lights/Grey Fox, 1993), 69. Henceforth cited in the text. 61 Jones/Baraka offers an illustration that implicates the body in improvisational practice: “Jay McNeeley used to lie on his back and kick his feet in the air while honking one loud screeching note or a series of identical riffs. The riff itself was the basis for this kind of playing, the saxophonist repeating the riff much past any useful musical context, continuing it until he and the crowd were thoroughly exhausted physically and emotionally. The point, it seemed, was to spend oneself with as much attention as possible, and also to make the instruments sound as unmusical, or as non-Western, as



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possible” (172). See also Coolidge’s remarks on this article of “Essentials,” 50–1. 62 In notes he made in 1944 for an essay he apparently never wrote, “Blake— Nietzsche—Yeats,” Kerouac repeatedly quotes the Nietzschean phrase, opposing it to the shaming judgment of bourgeois morality. The notion informs the departure from Oedipally structured morality that he takes at the end of The Town and the City and pursues in all his subsequent work: Kerouac Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 13.43. Nietzsche also turns up in a number of other places, including on a 1943 reading list that also includes Aristotle, Adam Smith, Locke, and Hume (Kerouac Papers 7.71) and in a declaration of his utter importance for understanding concepts of good and evil in modern literature (Kerouac Papers 43.9). 63 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Adrian del Caro, ed. del Caro and Robert B. Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 222. 64 In his 1995 Nietzsche and Music, trans. David Pelauer and Graham Parkes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), Georges Liébert provides an explanation of uses of the dash that is strikingly reminiscent of Kerouac’s: “[W]hereas for Flaubert this sign did not break the continuity of the sentence but, like a short breath, helped lead up to the final falling off, the last backwash of the adagio, for Nietzsche (as for Laurence Sterne, whom he admired, or for Valéry), it breaks the cadence—something unforeseen springs forth, a surprising thought that, often, in a final rebound, presto, leaps ‘beyond,’ when it does not turn against itself” (4). 65 Michael Kammen, who as Master of Harvard’s Lowell House hosted Kerouac in 1964, notes that after requesting a volume of her poetry, the author “read Dickinson splendidly and with feeling. He knew exactly which poems he wanted, flipped pages and found them handily.” “Jack Kerouac’s Restless Odyssey and His New Life on the Road,” LA Review of Books (http:// lareviewofbooks.org/), May 9, 2013. 66 Cf. Wayne Miller, “Dickinson’s Dashes and the Free-Verse Line,” in Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, ed. Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 166–7: “It is my contention that Dickinson’s dashes often work like the line-breaks we frequently come across in contemporary free-verse; that is, rather than building metrical patterns, as her actual lines do, her dashes serve to control the arrival of ideas within the unfolding of the poem. In the process, they often disrupt and/or complicate the meaning of her sentences, constructing subordinate, fragmentary meanings within those sentences, and even building determinacies (or multiplicities) inside them.” 67 In connection with Yeats’s explorations of the “automatic faculty,” see William Butler Yeats, A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision, ed. George Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978), 244–9. 68 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 29–30. Henceforth cited in the text.

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69 Referring to a 1958 letter from Ginsberg to Olson, Belgrad credits Breton as a principal source in Ginsberg’s notions of spontaneity (206). 70 Here I borrow Foucault’s notion of certain authors—his examples are Marx and Freud—as “initiators of discursive practices,” that is, the reach of whose texts is to establish “the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts”: Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Language, Countermemory, Practice, ed. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 131. 71 Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm: Sex-Economic Problems of Biological Energy, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Noonday, 1961), 62–93, especially 79–87. Reich uses the phrase “clouding of consciousness,” which Kerouac adapts to his “Mental State” article, in this section of the book (83). It describes what occurs in both men and women as they approach the pleasure of full-body orgasm, which entails complete release from tension and anxiety. He distinguishes a person’s “orgastic potency” from the condition of “orgastic impotence,” in which orgasm, though it may occur easily and frequently, is mostly limited to contraction of the genitals, gives little to no pleasure, and affords no release from inhibition (77–78). 72 Kerouac wrote the Book of Dreams manuscript between 1952 and 1960: Jack Kerouac, letter to Calvin Hall, July 11, 1967, in Selected Letters, 1957–1969, 499; henceforth cited in the text. City Lights published the book in abridged form in 1961, then in its entirety in 2001: Jack Kerouac, Book of Dreams, ed. James Brook (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001), xv. Henceforth cited in the text. 73 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part), trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth, 1953), 154. 74 This set of notions runs through both volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari’s thoroughgoing critique of the classifications and repressions of Western culture, in which they take psychoanalysis as a principal target for its capacity to embody so many currents of the West and to channel them into an impoverishment of desire through the imposition of Oedipal structures: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), and A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). The specific passage to which my comments pertain is in Anti-Oedipus, 116. The references to Kerouac in the work of Deleuze alone and Deleuze and Guattari are not many, but generally indicate admiration for his revolutionary writing practice. In a 1985 course lecture, Deleuze referred to Kerouac as “the greatest, one of the greatest American authors” [“le plus grand, l’un des plus grands auteurs américains”] My translation. Gilles Deleuze, cinéma cours 77, January 29, 1985: www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/article. php3?id_article=299. In a somewhat speculative but mainly superb article, Marco Abel suggests profound and intimate connections between Deleuze and Kerouac: “Deleuze never wrote an essay on Kerouac. However, throughout



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his various engagements with American literature, he frequently refers to Kerouac. Further, the type of vocabulary used by Deleuze (speed, movement, territory, earth, lines of flight) resonates with Kerouac’s.” “Speeding Across the Rhizome: Deleuze Meets Kerouac on the Road,” Modern Fiction Studies 48, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 247 n. 1. 75 Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1992), 38–39. 76 William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), vol. 2, 239—emphasis in text. Qtd. in Stevenson, 39. 77 See Stevenson, 36–58, and Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel: A Study of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, William Faulkner, and Others (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954). 78 Jack Kerouac, “Notes on ‘Galloway’ Style,” Kerouac Papers 43.17. 79 Jack Kerouac, “Interview,” Beat Writers at Work (The Paris Review), ed. George Plimpton (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 108. Henceforth cited in the text. 80 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939) (London: Penguin, 1999), 106: “Some in kinkin corass, more, kankan keening, Belling him up and filling him down.” 81 Allen Ginsberg, “Visions of the Great Rememberer,” in Kerouac, Visions of Cody, 427. Henceforth cited in the text. 82 Oliver Harris, “Cutting Up the Corpse,” in The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game, ed. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneidemann, and Tom Denlinger (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 82–103. 83 See especially Jean-François Lyotard, “What Is Postmodernism?,” trans. Régis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81: “The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.” 84 For example, Lynn Neary, “Long-Lost Letter That Inspired ‘On the Road’ Style Has Been Found,” NPR.org, November 24, 2014. www.npr. org/2014/11/24/366349721/long-lost-letter-that-inspired-on-the-road-stylehas-been-found. For a more sober, even-handed account of the Joan Anderson Letter in the development of Kerouac’s prose, see Johnson 382–4. 85 Belgrad sees this experiment as a central challenge to the aesthetic of the novel, specifically its tendency to mask “the power dynamics implicit in speaking for others.… Kerouac was aware of this problem, and in Visions of Cody he grappled with it directly. The predominance of dialogue over plot in his novels probably reaches an apex in this work, which juxtaposes his accounts of dialogues to actual transcripts from wire recordings, allowing the reader to compare Kerouac’s memories to the taped versions.… Thus the ‘novel,’ if you

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can call it that, is really a palimpsest of dialogue” (210). It’s hard to know why Belgrad questions the status of Visions of Cody as a novel, since according to one of the most widely considered definitions offered since the Second World War, that which Bakhtin summarized with the word dialogism, in its generic beginnings the novel is precisely an unruly mixture of voices, a challenge to univocal authority, including that of the author: Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 259–422, especially 260–75. Kerouac is enacting a return, as it were, to this earlier model of the novel, exemplified for both himself and Bakhtin in the work of François Rabelais— Bakhtin 309–310, and of course Bakhtin’s most widely read work is Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). I will address Kerouac’s relationship to Rabelais below and in Chapter 5, as part of his project of wresting the novel from the homogenization of its rhetoric and diction that he saw especially in the postwar period. 86 Hunt sees “Imitation of the Tape” as Kerouac’s attempt to remedy the problems that the tape experiment raises: “Although the title of ‘Imitation of the Tape’ seems to characterize the section as a further elaboration of the project of ‘Frisco: The Tape’ using alternative means, the ‘Imitation’ functions as a reaction against ‘Frisco: The Tape’ and corrective to it, in which Kerouac responds to the failure of transcribing recorded speaking to resolve either the problem of the mysterious reader or the differences between speaking and writing as expressive systems” (Textuality, 143). 87 In standard French, “Il t’aurait essuyé le cou au derrière.” 88 François Rabelais, Gargantua, in Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2006), 245–50; Gargantua, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 137–47. Although Kerouac read a great deal of French literature in the original, the copy of Rabelais that he owned and annotated, which the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection holds, is a twentieth-century edition of the much-reprinted seventeenth-century English translation: François Rabelais, Works, trans. Thomas Urquhart and Peter Anthony Motteux (London: published for the trade, n.d.). When Kerouac bought it, this would have been an inexpensive yet physically durable edition. 89 Jack Kerouac, Visions of Gerard (1963) (New York: Penguin, 1991), 61–2. In the English-language edition of Rabelais to which I refer, 219–24; in the French, 69–77. Cf. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 285–86. 90 Jack Kerouac, “Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel,” Kerouac Papers 6.32. 91 Rabelais, 294/265. 92 Jack Kerouac, Satori in Paris (1966), in Satori in Paris and Pic: Two Novels (New York: Grove, 1985), 45; letter to Philip Whalen, November 18, 1963, in Selected Letters 1957–1969, 373–4. In her 2010 poem “Keep the Beat,” Diane di Prima wonders whether Villon was a Beat poet: The Poetry Deal (San Francisco: City Lights, 2014), 81. 93 In a letter to John Clellon Holmes dated June 24, 1949, Kerouac writes of Rabelais’s “Crazy-Book”: Kerouac, Selected Letters, 1940–1956, 199. Four



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days later, in a letter to Elbert Lenrow, he speaks of “the Crazy-Book of Doctor Sax”: Selected Letters, 1940–1956, 205. Writing to Philip Whalen on December 13, 1962, he praises the French translation of Dr. Sax by Jean Autret by saying that it “reads like Rabelais”: Selected Letters: 1957–1969, 353.

4 Movements of return  1 Jack Kerouac, letter to Rosaire Dion-Lévesque, December 28, 1950, Kerouac Collection, Center for Lowell History, University of Massachusetts–Lowell; Dion-Lévesque, “Jean-Louis Kérouac, romancier,” in Silhouettes francoaméricaines (Manchester, NH: Association Canado-Américaine, 1957), 433.  2 Jack Kerouac, letter to Allen Ginsberg, May 18, 1952, in Selected Letters, 1940–1956, ed. Ann Charters (New York: 1995), 355.  3 They are the following: “Visions of Dr. Sax” (1950), a poem on a single leaf (Kerouac Papers, Berg Collection, 2.20); “Sax” and “Dr. Sax” (1948–50), draft pages with notes (4.58); “The Doctor Sax Papers by Adolphus Asher Ghoulens. Part Two. The Wife of Doctor Sax” (perhaps from 1943) one leaf (8.25); “The book of the myth of the rainy night: or, The crazy-book of Doctor Sax” (perhaps from 1951), a five-page draft (11.32); “Doctor Sax by Jack Kerouac” (1943), three leaves (22.1).  4 Jack Kerouac, “Composing Diary” entries of November 1 and 2, 1948, in Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947–1954, ed. Douglas Brinkley (New York: Viking, 2004), 159–61.  5 Jack Kerouac, letter to Yvonne Le Maître, September 8, 1950, in Selected Letters, 1940–1956, 228.  6 Jack Kerouac, letter to Allen Ginsberg, November 8, 1952, in Selected Letters, 1940–1956, 383.  7 Jack Kerouac, Dr. Sax: Faust Part Three (1959) (New York: Grove, 1987), 3. Henceforth cited in the text.  8 Jack Kerouac, biographical note, in The New American Poetry, 1945–1960, ed. Donald Allen (1960) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 439: “At the age of 24 I was groomed for the Western idealistic concept of letters from reading Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit.”  9 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–32) (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1975), vol 2, 598: “ein angespanntes und aufgedunsenes Heldenwesen,” “die abgespielte Wahrheit einer uralten Gegenwart.” My translation. 10 Ibid., 547: “uns…zu höheren, freieren und ebenso wahren als dichterischen Weltansichten und Geistesgenüssen vorbereitet.” 11 Jack Kerouac, qtd. in Alfred G. Aronowitz, “The Beat Generation, Part II,” New York Post, March 10, 1959; qtd. in Michael Hrebeniak, Action Writing:

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Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 23. 12 Jack Kerouac, Book of Dreams ed. James Brook (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001), xvii. 13 Jack Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1957), in Good Blonde and Others, ed. Donald Allen and Robert Creeley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1993), 69. 14 Jack Kerouac, letter to Bernice Lemire, August 11, 1961, in Selected Letters, 1957–1969, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1999), 299. 15 The first critical reaction to this French was that of Bernice Lemire, a graduate student in English at Boston College who in 1961–2 wrote her MA thesis on Kerouac, as a good survivante chiding him for not insisting on the solidity of Franco-American culture but rather observing its disintegration: “The boy of lower middle-class background whose formal education is bound to be spasmodic and unsatisfying as Kerouac’s was from high school onward, finds himself with a superficial knowledge of French which he writes badly or not at all, with a first-hand understanding of the degenerating attributes of his race and none of its great cultural background. The bad use of idiomatic French in the Lowell books (the bad spelling even) does not enhance the portrayal of local characters. It harms it rather. The effect is forced and unnatural and the translation, which is literal, is often ridiculous.” Bernice Lemire, graduate thesis, Boston College, 1962, Kerouac Collection, Center for Lowell History, University of Massachusetts–Lowell, 23. That Kerouac gave close attention to the French is evident from his correspondence about the proofs of Dr. Sax with Jeanne Unger, production editor at Grove: “Fix’t some of the French but you fix’t most 99% of it, you know French.” Letter to Jeanne Unger, February 5, 1959, in Selected Letters 1957–1969, 181. In Desolation Angels (1965) (New York: Riverhead, 1995), there is a marked contrast between the “proper” French used in some situations and the Québécois French spoken in others. 16 Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (1842), ed. Patricia Ingram (London: Penguin, 2000), Chapter 4, “An American Railroad. Lowell and Its Factory System,” 72–80. 17 Jack Kerouac, letter to Stella Sampas, February 13, 1959, in Selected Letters, 1957–1969, 183. 18 For a superb reading of Dr. Sax, which includes a very attentive mapping of its relationship to sources, see Fiona Paton, “Reconceiving Kerouac: Why We Should Teach Doctor Sax,” in The Beat Generation: Critical Essays, ed. Kostas Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 121–53—henceforth cited in the text. See also Nicosia, 392; Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, Jack Kerouac: A Chicken-Essay, trans. Sheila Fischman (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1975), 20; Beaulieu, Jack Kérouac: Essai-poulet (1972) (Montreal: Typo, 2004), 17–18; Louis Rousseau, “Si Jack devait maintenir vivante la religion populaire du Québec!,” Le Devoir, October 28, 1972 ; and above, Chapter 3, n. 93. 19 Joyce Johnson, The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (New York: Viking, 2012), 34, 45.



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20 Johnson, 11–12; James T. Jones, Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 60. 21 Jack Kerouac, letter to Neal Cassady, December 28, 1950, in Selected Letters, 1940–1956, 260. 22 Nancy Grace offers a thoroughgoing reading of Dr. Sax, examining Kerouac’s use of dream association and its function in building a cosmology, as well as the novel’s detailed engagements with Goethe and the antecedents of Faust: Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 103–33. Henceforth cited in the text. For an insightful analysis of how Kerouac’s art brings dreams into contact with reality to produce the otherworld of Dr. Sax, see Nicosia, 393–4. 23 Paul Maher notes that this description matches the Lowell Telegram’s weather report for March 12, 1922: Kerouac: His Life and Work (2004), rev. ed. (Lanham, MD: Taylor, 2007), 494 n. 24. 24 The Bible: Authorized King James Version (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), Genesis 25:25. 25 Goethe, vol. 1, 15: “Am 28sten August 1749, mittags mit dem Glockenschlag zwölf, kam ich in Frankfurt am Main auf die Welt. Die Konstellationen war glücklich: die Sonne stand im Zeichen der Jungfrau und kulminierte für den Tag; Jupiter und Venus blickten sie freundlich an, Merkur nicht widerwärtig; Saturn und Mars verhielten sich gleichgültig; nur der Mond, der soeben voll ward, übte die Kraft seines Gegenscheins um so mehr, als zugleich seine Planetenstunde eingetreten war. Er widersetzte sich daher meiner Geburt, die nicht eher erfolgen konnte, als bis diese Stunde vorübergegangen.” My translation. Although I have no information as to which translation Kerouac read, I have consulted translations from 1932 and 1987, finding them similar enough that the text I provide is adequate for comparison to the passage in Dr. Sax. I thank Dorothea Heitsch for pointing out to me the similarity of Kerouac’s passage to this one. 26 Jack Kerouac, Docteur Sax, trans. Jean Autret (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 26. 27 Honoré Beaugrand, La Chasse-galerie (1900) (Montreal: Bibliothèque Québécoise, 1991), 59–72. 28 Kerouac himself once called Dr. Sax a “puberty myth” (Nicosia, 394). 29 Beaulieu, 27/31: “Je dirai…qu’il s’agit là, dans ce roman, du meilleur document que l’on possède sur la vie franco-américaine des années 1920–1930.” 30 Thanks to decades of efforts by the Association des Familles Kirouac, the family history has been reconstructed. Patricia Dagier’s extensive genealogical research in Brittany and Québec demonstrates that the story Kerouac told of “l’ancêtre,” though inaccurate in some details, was correct in its outlines: Patricia Dagier and Hervé Quéméner, Jack Kerouac: Au bout de la route…la Bretagne (Ar Releg-Kerhuon: An Here, 1999); Dagier and Quéméner, Jack Kerouac: Breton d’Amérique (Brest: Télégramme, 2009). Henceforth cited in the text. 31 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957) (New York: Penguin, 1991), 280. Henceforth cited in the text.

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32 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 79. 33 Nancy Grace sees the interplay of English and French as integral to Kerouac’s deployment of a “dual vision of reality,” the imaginative world of a dreamed cosmology in confrontation with the actual world, noting that the novel projects a space in which “multiple social systems exist synchronically” (118). 34 After insisting on the inescapability of monolingualism in the negotiation of systems of domination, Derrida observes that the mixing of languages may point to a different situation: “One can, of course, speak several languages. There are speakers who are competent in more than one language. Some even write several languages at a time (prostheses, grafts, translation, transposition). But do they not always do it with a view to an absolute idiom? and in the promise of a still unheard-of language? of a sole poem previously inaudible?” Jacques Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. David Wills (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 67. 35 Borrowing a term from Chantal Zabus and invoking Raymond Williams’s The Long Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), Ann Douglas remarks on Kerouac’s linguistic procedure, “His writing is less a translation of his native tongue into English than a relexification of English; he de-anglicizes it, undoing the routinization process that created Standard English and condemned its variants as the idiom of the illiterate.” “‘Telepathic Shock and Meaning Excitement’: Kerouac’s Poetics of Intimacy,” in The Beat Generation: Critical Essays, 31. 36 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, trans. Walter Arndt, ed. Cyrus Hamlin, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2001), Part One, ll. 354–56. 37 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. 2, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1957), 503. 38 See especially Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 60–72; reprinted in Goethe, Faust, 718–28. See also Paton, 146–7. 39 The quotation is from the introduction to The Shadow radio program, which from 1930 to 1954 was spoken by the character of Lamont Cranston: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows. Mwee hee hee ha ha!” The Shadow, 1930–49, www.oldradioworld.com/shows/The_ Shadow.php. This is Dr. Sax’s laugh (133). 40 Jack Kerouac, letter to Lemire, 298. 41 The second sentence of Finnegans Wake begins as follows: “Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war….” James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939) (London: Penguin, 1999), 3. Joyce’s opening is also marked by medievalisms, including the name “Sir Tristram” of Tristan and Iseult, as well as, in the first sentence, a castle and the mention of “Adam and Eve’s.” Like the Duluoz ancestor, Sir Tristram is a nobleman who has crossed water to a peninsula, and his North Armorica suggests the mixing of spaces separated by a much wider body of water.



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42 St. Thérèse of Lisieux, The Autobiography of Thérèse of Lisieux: The Story of a Soul, trans. Michael Day (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2008), 203. 43 Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (1958) (New York: Penguin, 1976), 9. 44 Ibid., 5. 45 Jack Kerouac, letter to Stella Sampas, October 12, 1955, in Selected Letters, 1940–1956, 526–27. 46 Ibid., 525. 47 Jack Kerouac, “Pome on Doctor Sax,” in Pomes All Sizes (San Francisco: City Lights, 1992), 167. 48 Jack Kerouac, letter to Carolyn Cassady, July 2, 1954, in Selected Letters, 1940–1956, 427. Suspension points in text. 49 Jack Kerouac, Satori in Paris (1966), in Satori in Paris and Pic (New York: Grove, 1985), 69.

5 The roots of abandonment  1 Todd Giles provides an excellent account of Kerouac’s study of Mahāyāna Buddhism and his integration of it into his work, especially in connection with Mexico City Blues: “‘upsidedown like fools’: Jack Kerouac’s ‘Desolation Blues’ and the Struggle for Enlightenment,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 53, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 179–206. Bent Sørensen also looks at Kerouac’s Buddhism, especially in its intersections with Catholicism, in an account that unfortunately shies away from providing historical and cultural context for the two traditions: “Buddhism, Madness and Movement: Triangulating Jack Kerouac’s Belief System,” in Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature, ed. Lawrence Normand and Alison Winch (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 105–22.  2 Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (1965) (New York: Riverhead, 1995), 3. Henceforth cited in the text.  3 William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Burton Raffel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 3.2, 99–104.  4 Kerouac’s source, as I will discuss below, is Dwight Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible, which provides excerpts of the Lankavatara Sutra based on D. T. Suzuki’s translation: “It is like the dim-eyed ones who seeing a hairnet exclaim to one another: ‘It is wonderful! Look, Honorable Sirs, it is wonderful!’ But the hairnet has never existed; in fact, it is neither an entity, nor a nonentity, for it has both been seen and not seen. In the same manner those whose minds have been addicted to the discriminations of the erroneous views cherished by the philosophers which are given over to the realistic views of being and non-being, will contradict the good Dharma and will end in the destruction of themselves and others.” Dwight Goddard, A Buddhist Bible, 2nd ed. (Thetford, VT: Goddard, 1938), 281. Kerouac’s copy of this edition is in the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection.

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 5 Shakespeare, 3.2.1, 99.  6 François Weil, Les Franco-Américains (Paris: Bélin, 1989), 184.  7 Notable exceptions are James T. Jones, Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), mainly 205–12; and Ben Giamo, Kerouac, the Word and the Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 202–4.  8 Jack Kerouac, Satori in Paris (1966), in Satori in Paris and Pic: Two Novels (New York: Grove, 1985), 7.  9 See Jones, 205. 10 David Need, “Rethinking Kerouac’s Contribution to American Buddhism: A Prolegomenon,” “No One’s Rose,” August 19, 2009, http://noonesrose. blogspot.com/2009/08/rethinking-kerouacs-contributions-to.html. Need also explores the Buddhist-Catholic syncretism that marked the last decade or so of Kerouac’s life. See also Jack Kerouac, letter to Stella Sampas, October 12, 1955, in Selected Letters, 1940–1956, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1995), 524. 11 This book has been published: Jack Kerouac, Some of the Dharma (New York: Viking, 1997). Isaac Gewirtz provides a wonderfully detailed and analytically precise account of the composition of Some of the Dharma in the context of Kerouac’s Buddhist studies and syncretic approach to Christian notions of a single transcendent god: Isaac Gewirtz, Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road (New York: New York Public Library; London: Scala, 2007), 149–69. 12 Deshae E. Lott, “‘All Things Are Different Appearances of the Same Emptiness’: Buddhism and Jack Kerouac’s Nature Writings,” in Reconstructing the Beats, ed. Jennie Skerl (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 169; Richard Hughes Seager, Buddhism in America, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 47–8. 13 Jack Kerouac, letter to Philip Whalen, early November, 1958, in Selected Letters, 1957–1969, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1999), 164–6; see also Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 589—henceforth cited in the text; and Paul Maher, Kerouac: His Life and Work, rev. ed. (Lanham, MD: Taylor, 2007), 384–5.    In his initial reaction to the Beat Generation, “Zen in the Modern World,” Japan Quarterly 5, no. 4 (October–December 1958): 452–61, Suzuki expresses skepticism of these writers’ grasp of Buddhism: he finds their interest to be mainly an index that they are “struggling, rather superficially” against aspects of Western culture that severely limit consciousness. Yet he also states his belief that the Beat Generation’s embrace of Zen is genuine, that it “is somehow prognostic of something coming, at least to American life” (453). At the same time, Suzuki makes plain that his remarks are provisional, based mainly on newspaper accounts, in particular a rather condescending article by Alan Pryce-Jones in the Times Literary Supplement, and not on a reading of Kerouac (whose reported words Suzuki quotes) or any of the



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other Beat writers. Although in her Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), Jane Naomi Iwamura is correct to propose the possibility that Suzuki wasn’t as interested in Kerouac as the author believed (39–41), she is unjustified in citing this article as evidence of Suzuki’s full opinion of Kerouac: its publication date and Suzuki’s own statements indicate that at the time of writing their meeting hadn’t yet taken place. The grounds she offers for her claim that Kerouac hadn’t read Suzuki (273 n. 51) are quite insufficient without implicit recourse to the recycled image of the semiliterate hipster. 14 For an informative account of Kerouac’s studies in Buddhism, the different traditions that interested him, and how they became a part of his literary practice, see Nancy M. Grace, Jack Kerouac and the Literary Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 135–61. 15 Eric Mottram, “Introduction,” in Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1960) (San Francisco: City Lights, 1994), 7. 16 Ibid., 8. 17 See Joseph Cheah, Race and Religion in American Buddhism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 52–5. 18 Jack Kerouac, letter to Allen Ginsberg, April 20, 1955, in Kerouac and Ginsberg, The Letters, ed. Bill Morgan and David Stanford (New York: Viking, 2010), 282. 19 Jack Kerouac, “Interview,” Beat Writers at Work (The Paris Review), ed. George Plimpton (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 117–20. 20 Goddard, 547 n. 21 D. T. Suzuki, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (1934) (New York: Grove, 1964), 65. 22 See Manfred Jahn, “Epiphany,” in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (New York: Routledge, 2005), 140. 23 In “Taxicab Enlightenment: Zen and the Importance of Performing Kerouac in Satori in Paris,” Japan Studies Review 9 (2005): 115–21, Paul Worley provides a brief but fascinating explanation of the narrative form of Satori in Paris as a Zen kōan, “the purpose of which, in the words of Nyogen Senzaki, is to ‘point out that Reality is not to be captured in a thought, or a phrase, or an explanation. Reality is the direct seeing of the world as it is, not as our intellects describe it, map it, or conceive it’…. Instead of giving a straightforward answer to Kerouac’s initial search for his roots, the work itself is left to stand on its own as a continual performance of the author’s identity” (116). The reference is Nyogen Senzaki, The Iron Flute: 100 Zen Kōans (Boston: Tuttle, 2000), viii. Worley concludes that “the book as expressed in Kerouac’s meandering, nonlinear style is to be a performance of the experience, not an imitation of it” (121). 24 Susan Pinette explores the functioning of the unstable proper name in Satori in Paris: “Jack Kerouac: l’écriture et l’identité franco-américaine,” Francophonies d’Amérique 17 (Spring 2004): 37–9.

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25 Dr. Percepied makes his first appearance in Proust’s extended narrative in Swann’s Way (1913), In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, ed. William C. Carter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 118; A la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1, Du Côté de chez Swann (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), 209. 26 Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody (1972) (New York: Penguin, 1993), preliminary pages. Henceforth cited in the text. 27 John George Lambton, Earl of Durham, Lord Durham’s Report on the Affairs of British North America (1839), ed. Sir C. P. Lucas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), Google Books edition, 294. See also above, Introduction, 11–12. 28 “Généalogie au Québec,” in Encyclopédie du patrimoine culturel de l’Amérique française: www.ameriquefrancaise.org/fr/article-511/Généalogie_ au_Québec.html 29 Cyprien Tanguay, Dictionnaire généalogique des familles canadiennes depuis la fondation de la colonie jusqu’à nos jours, vol. 1 (Montreal: Sénécal, 1871), Google Books edition, v: “Depuis quelques années le goût littéraire se développe, les recherches historiques se multiplient.” 30 Ibid.: “Les créations de l’intelligence, la vie nouvelle donnée par le récit à ce qui n’est plus; l’histoire, l’éloquence, la poésie ont des charmes auxquels personne n’échappe, l’auteur moins que les autres, peut-être.” 31 Ibid.: “études moins attrayantes,” “les éléments de l’histoire.” 32 See, for example, D. M. A. Magnan, Histoire de la race française aux États-Unis (Paris: Amat, 1913), digitized edition, Robarts Library, University of Toronto, www.archive.org; Louis-Adolphe Paquet, “La vocation de la race française en Amérique,” sermon delivered on June 23, 1902, Québec City, http:beq.ebooksgratuits.com; Adolphe-Basile Routhier, “Le rôle de la race française en Amérique,” in Fête nationale des Canadiens-Français célébrée en Québec en 1880, ed. H.-J.-J.-B. Chouinard (Québec City: A. Côté, 1881), Google Books edition, 282–95. 33 Tanguay, vi: “L’Église prohibe les alliances à certains degrés de parenté,” “de faire connaître la parenté.” 34 Ibid., ix: “Chaque pays a sa noblesse. Nous avons eu celle du sang. Elle nous est venue en grande partie de la France. Plusieurs noms figurent dans notre histoire, qui brillaient au temps des Croisades: c’est la noblesse de vieille roche, sinon la plus riche. Elle a été plus largement représentée sur nos rives, que dans aucune autre colonie.” 35 Tanguay, x: “des luttes terribles, au début de la colonie.” 36 Ibid., xiii: “si pleins d’intelligence,” “avec leur audace.” 37 Weil, 145–50. 38 Kerouac, Visions of Cody, 103: “I struggle in the dark enormity of my soul, trying desperately to be a great rememberer redeeming life from darkness”; John Clellon Holmes, “The Great Rememberer,” in Nothing More to Declare (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1967), 68–86; Allen Ginsberg, “Visions of the Great Rememberer,” in Kerouac, Visions of Cody, 407.



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39 Joyce Johnson, The Voice Is All (New York: Viking, 2012), 203. 40 Ibid., 14, 263. 41 Jack Kerouac, Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947–1954, ed. Douglas Brinkley (New York: Viking, 2004), 259. Qtd. in Johnson, The Voice Is All, 15. 42 Richard S. Sorrell, “Jack Kerouac, French Canada, and France,” The American Review of Canadian Studies 10, no. 2 (Autumn 1980): 20–1. See also Brigitte Lane, Franco-American Folk Traditions and Popular Culture in a Former Milltown: Aspects of Ethnic Urban Folklore and the Dynamics of Folklore Change in Lowell, Massachusetts (New York: Garland, 1990), 367. 43 Mason Wade, The French Canadians, 1760–1967, revised ed., vol. 1 (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada; New York: St. Martin’s, 1968), 47. 44 Jack Kerouac, Dr. Sax: Faust Part Three (1959) (New York: Grove, 1987), 118–19; Lonesome Traveler (1960) New York: Grove, 1988), vii. 45 Jack Kerouac, letter to Philip Whalen, April 10, 1957, in Selected Letters, 1957–1969, 26. 46 This notation is reproduced in the finding aid of the Kerouac Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library: http://archives.nypl.org/ brg/19343#c228577 47 Kerouac Papers, 46.36. 48 Cyprien Tanguay, Dictionnaire généalogique des familles canadiennes depuis la fondation de la colonie jusqu’à nos jours, vol. 5 (Montreal: Sénécal, 1887), Google Books edition, 231–2. 49 The entry for “Keroac” in Tanguay (42) refers readers to “Le Brice”; “Kirouac” is the preferred variant of the current Association des Familles Kirouac. See François Kirouac et al., Bretagne 2000: Voyage au pays de notre Ancêtre Urbain-François de Bihan (Saint-Etienne-de-Lauzon, QC: Association des familles Kirouac, Inc., 2001). For an analysis of the variants as dispersion, see Peggy Pacini, “Satori in Paris: Deconstructing the French Connection or the Legend’s Satori,” in Comparative Amercan Studies 11, no. 3 (2013): 293–4. 50 Although Giamo offers a sensitive and insightful account of the spiritual dimension of Satori in Paris, his assessment of Kerouac’s relationship to his noble past is largely wrong: “The novel is perhaps a classic example of a French-Canadian immigrant’s son unsuccessfully claiming the grandeur of the conqueror and not the inferiority of the vanquished” (203). Always expecting failure, from the beginning of the quest Kerouac leans strongly toward suspicion. Also deficient in their assessment are Deleuze and Guattari, who, though praising his “revolutionary ‘flight,’” see Kerouac as emblematic of the artist who slips into fascism by going “in search of his Breton ancestors of the superior race.” See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 277. They repeat this characterization in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

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1987), 19. They don’t allow the understanding that Kerouac makes a big problem of finding his ancestor and is rather searching for something else. 51 Jonathan Boyarin and Daniel Boyarin, Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 4: “This is the paradoxical power of diaspora. On the one hand, everything that defines us is compounded of all the questions of our ancestors. On the other hand, everything is permanently at risk. Thus contingency and genealogy are the two central components of diasporic consciousness.” 52 The first account is in my own article, “Jack Kerouac’s Quest for Identity: Satori in Paris,” Studies in American Fiction 41, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 49–76, on which sections of this chapter are based. Without providing detail of factual alteration, in her slightly earlier text Peggy Pacini shows how the narrative deconstructs its own underpinnings in the solidity of ancestral origin. 53 Patricia Dagier and Hervé Quéméner, Jack Kerouac: Breton d’Amérique (Brest: Télégramme, 2009), 10: “A Paris comme à Brest, l’ancêtre est insaisissable,” “échec.” My translation. Henceforth cited in the text. 54 Patricia Dagier and Hervé Quéméner, Jack Kerouac: Au bout de la route… la Bretagne (Ar Releg-Kerhuon, Brittany: An Here, 1999), 209: “fantaisiste.” My translation. Henceforth cited in the text. 55 Marie-Françoise Limon, Les Notaires du Châtelet de Paris sous le règne de Louis XIV (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1992), 15–20, 167–79. Although Limon concentrates mainly on Paris, her presentation regularly returns to discussing the importance and privilege of notaries in different regions of France, a status that continued well into the eighteenth century. 56 Maher opens his biography with a succinctly informative, compellingly narrated account of Kervoach’s emigration and life in French Canada (3–5). 57 At the American Literature Association conference in Boston on May 27, 2011, following my presentation of a preliminary version of parts of this chapter, John W. McHale, a career-long scholar of Kerouac’s work, stated his view that Satori in Paris is “just drunken prose.” Though taking the book seriously, Jones describes the text as made up of “drunken ravings,” in Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend, 205. In Action Writing: Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), noting the “boorish tedium in Satori in Paris and some of the blues poems,” “works that demand rigorous editing, if not disposal” (161), Michael Hrebeniak connects what he regards as the “poisonous urge for conquest, dogma, and hierarchy that scars” the book with Kerouac’s statement that it was “the first book I wrote with drink at my side” (123). Kerouac says this in his 1968 interview with The Paris Review (103). 58 François Rabelais, Gargantua, in Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2006), 205; Gargantua, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 33. 59 Rabelais, Gargantua, 326–7/357. 60 Jack Kerouac, Visions of Gerard (1963) (New York: Penguin, 1991), 61–2.



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61 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 368–436 passim. 62 See E. Bruce Hayes, Rabelais’s Radical Farce: Late Medieval Comic Theater and Its Function in Rabelais (Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 1–22. 63 Jack Kerouac, “Notes on Brittany,” Kerouac Papers, 14.2. A highly respected authority on Franco-American culture and its importance for Kerouac, Roger Brunelle of Lowell, told me that he wasn’t aware of the word poizette other than through Kerouac’s work; he speculated that the author’s mother might have said it as a euphemism for toilette. 64 Kerouac, Satori, 45; Kerouac, letter to Philip Whalen, November 18, 1963, in Selected Letters, 1957–1969, 373–4. 65 See E. Jane Burns, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 31–46. 66 Jack Kerouac, holograph notebook “S(1) Satori in Paris I,” Kerouac Papers, 28.1. 67 Without mentioning Kerouac, Godard describes a filmmaking process that in a few ways resembles spontaneous prose: Jean-Luc Godard, “Interview,” in Godard on Godard, ed. Jean Narboni and Tom Milne (New York: Da Capo, 1986), 172–3. 68 In a letter to his agent Sterling Lord of June 11, 1965, soon after his return from France, Kerouac places the meeting with the prostitute in Montparnasse: Selected Letters, 1957–1969, 402. My point here is not to make a factual determination of where it occurred: the greater distance from his hotel to Montparnasse doesn’t mean he didn’t go there in the evening, and his writing “Montparnasse” to Lord isn’t definitive proof of the location. Rather, my interest is in signaling a decision on Kerouac’s part, while he worked on the manuscript, to say “Montparnasse,” and in assessing the implications of this decision—that is, in continuing my shift in emphasis from viewing Kerouac’s novels as primarily memoirs to considering their qualities as literary creations. 69 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957) (New York: Penguin, 1991), 259. 70 According to the Québec Institut de la Statistique, Fournier is currently the twenty-sixth most common surname in the province, borne by about one in 340 people: “Les 1 000 premiers noms de famille selon le rang, Québec,” www.stat.gouv.qc.ca/statistiques/population-demographie/caracteristiques/ noms_famille_1000.htm 71 Didier doesn’t figure among the 1000 surnames that the Institut de la Statistique lists. 72 Marc Picard, “Aspects synchroniques et diachroniques du tu interrogatif en québécois,” Revue québécoise de linguistique 21, no. 2 (1992): 65–74. 73 Kerouac reports this in his letter to Lord (403). 74 Bela Lugosi as Dracula, in Dracula, directed by Tod Browning, Universal Pictures, 1931; Al Lewis as Grandpa in the TV series The Munsters, CBS-TV, Kayro-Vue Productions, 1964–6.

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75 Jack Kerouac, Visions of Gerard (1963) (New York: Penguin, 1987), 24. 76 The classic study exposing this well-known myth is Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1943), 44–52. 77 Kerouac, Visions of Gerard, 64. 78 Maher, 408; Jack Kerouac, letter to Allen Ginsberg, September 22, 1960, in Selected Letters, 1957–1969, 266–7. 79 Pacini, 297. 80 “Chateaubriand, François René de,” in Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), vol. 5, 962. 81 Ibid. 82 Kerouac, Some of the Dharma, 389; cf. Grace, 148. 83 As Kerouac writes in his letter to Lord concerning the value of cultural patrimony, “But my big final decision was this: and I’m going to put it in the beginning of my book so don’t show this letter around: It doesn’t matter how charming cultures and art are, they’re useless without sympathy. All the prettiness of tapestries, lands, people:—worthless if there is no sympathy…” (403).

Conclusion  1 Ann Douglas, “‘Telepathic Shock and Meaning Excitement’: Kerouac’s Poetics of Intimacy,” in The Beat Generation: Critical Essays, ed. Kostas Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 21–36. Henceforth cited in the text.  2 In The Textuality of Soulwork: Jack Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), Tim Hunt sums up his account of this aspect of Kerouac’s technique, which involves addressing his texts to an imagined YOU, as follows: “That is, it is Jack/Sal who speak(s) to the projected figure of YOU while we, the actual mysterious reader, overhear the written record of the speaking as if YOU and as if Kerouac is an I speaking to us (this is why so many readers feel Kerouac is talking specifically to them and why his claims to sincerity are in some sense actual, not a fictional ploy, and matter for his aesthetic)” (59).  3 Listing the sources of his turn to spontaneous prose, in 1968 Kerouac said, “I remembered also Goethe’s admonition, well Goethe’s prophecy that the future literature of the West would be confessional in nature.…” “Interview” (1968) in Beat Writers at Work (The Paris Review), ed. George Plimpton (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 101.  4 Citing Michel Foucault, Daniel Belgrad characterizes Beat notions of confessionalism in literature as entailing a radical break with the Christian institution of involving an “authority who requires the confession,”



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emphasizing instead, in Kerouac’s words to describe the undoing of moral and aesthetic hierarchies in the accomplishment of IT, a “moment of rapport.” Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 61; Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody (1972) (New York: Penguin, 1993), 351; both qtd. in Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 205–6.  5 Timothy Hampton, “Tangled Generations: Dylan, Petrarch, Kerouac, and the Poetics of Escape,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 703–31. To those who would be skeptical of Kerouac’s knowledge of and engagement with Petrarch, my first response is that the problems of generational shifts that Petrarch (1304–74) takes up are widespread in Western literature, mainly since the collection by which he is most widely known, Rime sparse (mid-fourteenth century, though in “Tangled Up in Blue” Dylan places it in the thirteenth) was unparalleled as the most influential book of poetry in Europe for more than two centuries. Kerouac doesn’t need to have read Petrarch in order to respond to questions the latter raises. My second response is to say that evidence suggests he did: Hampton points out that Petrarch’s name figures in correspondence between Kerouac and Ginsberg (712 n. 19). Moreover, as I have signaled, Kerouac was an avid reader of Spenser, who translated and adapted Petrarch. In any case, Ginsberg seemed to think Petrarch was important to Kerouac: it was he who suggested to Ann Charters the title for the posthumous collection she edited, Scattered Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1971), which translates exactly the Italian phrase rime sparse. Charters, letter to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, December 8, 1970, in Lawrence Ferlinghetti Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, BANC MSS 90/30 c. I’m very grateful to Gerald Nicosia for locating this letter and, in an e-mail of September 9, 2013, informing me of its contents.  6 Hampton, 709 n.  7 Barry Miles, Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 281.  8 Rabelais mentions a breviary flask: Gargantua (1534), in Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 2006), 220; Gargantua, ed. Mireille Huchon (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 69. In his copy Kerouac heavily marked this chapter and in his writing he regularly alludes to it. Editors indicate that Rabelais owned one: Huchon, in Rabelais 2007, 68 n. 9.  9 Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Da Capo, 1999), 273–74. 10 Wallace Stevens, “The American Sublime,” in The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1990), 130–1. 11 Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody (1972) (New York: Penguin, 1993), preliminary pages. 12 Gilles Deleuze, “Sur la supériorité de la littérature anglaise-américaine,” in Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), 62. My translation. In the English edition, Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh

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Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 51. 13 Hassan Melehy, The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (Farnham, UK and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2010), 1–14. 14 Jacques Godbout, Knife on the Table, trans. Penny Williams (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968), 88; Le Couteau sur la table (Paris: Seuil, 1965), 113. 15 Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, Jack Kerouac: A Chicken-Essay, trans. Sheila Fischman (Toronto: Coach House, 1975), 166. Beaulieu, Jack Kérouac: Essai-poulet (1972) (Montreal: Typo, 2004), 214. 16 Jacques Poulin, Volkswagen Blues, trans. Sheila Fischman (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988), 31; Volkswagen blues (1984) (Montreal: LEMÉAC, 1988), 42. Both henceforth cited in the text, English pages followed by French pages. 17 Jack Kerouac, letter to Yvonne Le Maître, September 8, 1950, in Selected Letters, 1940–1956, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking, 1995), 228. See above, Chapter 1. 18 Karen E. H. Skinazi has written a fine article on Québécois rewritings of Kerouac: “Expanding Jack Kerouac’s ‘America’: Canadian Revisions of On the Road,” American Studies 51, no. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2010): 31–59. My own remarks here echo some I made in “Literatures of Exile and Return: Jack Kerouac and Quebec.” American Literature 84, no. 3 (September 2012): 604–11.

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INDEX

Alcoff, Linda Martín 73 Allen, Steve 55, 89–90 Amburn, Ellis 183 n.12, 192 n.19 Amram, David 72, 115, 205–6 n.10, 208 n.26 Anctil, Gabriel 46, 190 n.70, 200 n.41 Anctil, Pierre 183 n.12, 188 n.55, 189 n.63, 200 n.45 Anderson, Joan see Joan Anderson letter Apollinaire, Guillaume 177 Archambault, Gilles 179 Aristotle 17, 26–8, 97, 164, 213 n.62 Armstrong, Louis 207–8 n.20 Arnold, Matthew 169 Artaud, Antonin 123 Auden, W. H. 4 Auerbach, Erich 28 Augé, Pascal 98 Augustine, Saint 173 Autret, Jean 129, 217 n.93 Bakhtin, Mikhail 165, 216 n.85, 216 n.89 Baldwin, James 71–3, 92 Baraka, Amiri see Jones, LeRoi Barthes, Roland 55 Basie, William J. (“Count”) 207–8 n.20 Baudelaire, Charles 175, 177, 197 n.11 Bazin, André 99–100 Beardsley, Monroe 24 Beat Generation, the critical assessments of 6 Kerouac’s relationship to 2, 6, 63, 64, 86, 149 reception of, in U.S. universities 176

Beaugrand, Honoré 124, 130, 186 n.43 Beaulieu, Victor-Lévy 9–10, 131, 178, 179 Bellow, Saul 179 Benjamin, Walter 132–3, 205 n.3 Berliner, Paul 92 Bernier, Marie-Louise 161, 162 Bible, the 33, 79, 128 see also Catholicism Big Sur (film) 2 bilingualism Kerouac’s 1, 5–6, 15–19, 21–3, 42–3, 46–51, 58–62, 64, 94 in Québec 178–9 as theme in Kerouac’s work 113–17, 119–44 see also poetics Blake, William 126, 176, 213 n.62 Bloom, Harold 6–7 Bonaparte, Napoléon 131–2 Borges, Jorge Luis 97 Boyarin, Daniel 162 Boyarin, Jonathan 162 Breton, André 105–7, 164 see also surrealism Brossard, Nicole 179 Buddhism 4, 79 and Catholicism 122, 126, 139, 142–4, 145–9, 150–3, 171 in the United States 151–2 see also satori; Suzuki, D. T. Burroughs, William S. 5, 6, 59, 60, 89, 109–10, 124, 176 Calliope 121 Campbell, James 5–6 Cannastra, Bill 54

250 Index

Capote, Truman 6, 16–17 Carr, Lucien 57 Carroll, Lewis 175 Cartier, Jacques 178 Cassady, Carolyn 60, 112, 143 Cassady, Neal 54, 56–7, 59–61, 62, 97–8, 110–17, 126, 197 n.10, 204 n.91 Catholicism and Buddhism 122, 126, 139, 142–4, 145–9, 150–3, 171 Québécois 12, 34–5, 64, 115, 116, 33–5, 137–44, 123–7, 155–6, 161, 168 see also Bible, the Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 4, 115, 117, 182 n.9 Cendrars, Blaise 166 Charters, Ann 18, 183 n.12, 185 n.37, 190 n.71, 193 n.21, 197 n.3, 201 n.57 Chateaubriand, François René de 169–70 Christian, Charlie 91 Civil Rights Movement 67–8, 92 see also race; racism Cleaver, Eldridge 73 Cocteau, Jean 182 n.9 Cody, William F. (Buffalo Bill) 97–8 Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) 21 Columbia University 6, 52, 59, 95 communism 107 contact zone 61, 66, 67, 69, 73, 74–5 Coolidge, Clark 96, 102, 112, 213 n.61 Corso, Gregory 72, 176 Crawford, Joan 99 Cunnell, Howard 59, 199 n.25, 200 n.37 Dagier, Patricia 162–3, 166–8, 219 n.30 Dante Alighieri 58 Davis, Miles 207–8 n.21 Debord, Guy 198 n.21 Deleuze, Gilles 17, 49, 63, 98, 107, 177, 193 n.22, 195–6 n.39,

198–9 n.21, 211 n.49, 225–6 n.50 Dempsey, David 8–10 Derrida, Jacques 43, 209 n.28, 220 n.34 Deveaux, Scott 93 Dexter, Robert C. 15 diaspora studies 17, 77, 162 see also Québécois Diaspora Dickens, Charles 218 n.16 Dickinson, Emily 104–5 Dickinson, John 12, 186 n.45, 201 n.65 Dion-Lévesque, Rosaire 45, 46, 61, 119, 191 n.2, 192 n.11 di Prima, Diane 72, 216 n.92 Dos Passos, John 4 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 29–30, 182 n.9 Douglas, Ann 173, 177, 220 n.35 Duchamp, Marcel 166 Duluoz legend, the 41, 77, 132 Durham, John George Lambton, Earl of 11–12, 155 Durrell, Lawrence 182 n.9 Duvivier, Julien 124–5, 64 Dylan, Bob 174, 229 n.5 Eldridge, Roy 207–8 n.20 Eliot, T. S. 182 n.9 Ellington, Duke 80 Ellison, Ralph 91, 92 Encyclopædia Britannica 169 Engels, Frederick (Friedrich) 37 Faulkner, William 16, 107, 108, 176, 182 n.9, 185 n.27 Fellaheen global 76–80, 132, 133–7, 141, 143, 146–7, 148 Québécois as 78, 140, 160, 162, 169 see also Spengler, Oswald Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 229 n.5 Fields, W. C. 56, 125 Flaubert, Gustave 28, 104 Ford, Ford Madox 166 Foucault, Michel 55, 214 n.70, 228–9 n.4

Index

Francis I (François Ier), King 35 Franco-American culture history of 10–15, 16, 131–2, 155–6 in Kerouac’s work 1, 4, 5–6, 9–11, 15–16, 21–3, 30, 37, 41–3, 45–51, 58–65, 68, 80, 113–17, 119–44 passim, 148–71 passim, 174–5 race in 155–6 see also migration; Québécois Diaspora; survivance French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War), the 11, 128, 161 Freud, Sigmund 17, 88, 106–7, 214 n.70 see also psychoanalysis Freytag, Gustav 195 n.36 Frye, Northrup 16 Gabin, Jean 64 Gaillard, Slim 65 genealogy of Kerouac family 162–3 in Kerouac’s work 149–71 passim as Québécois cultural practice 16, 131–2, 155–6 see also Franco-American culture Genet, Jean 115, 117 Getz, Stan 207–8 n.21 Gewirtz, Isaac 15, 45, 54, 56, 190 n.70, 197 n.9, 199 n.25, 199 n.31, 205 n.93, 222 n.11 Giamo, Ben 222 n.7, 225 n.50 Gide, André 4, 182 n.9 Gillespie, Dizzy 93, 207–8 nn.20–1, 207 n.18 Ginsberg, Allen 31, 64, 89–90, 94–5, 96, 97, 102, 105, 108, 109–10, 119–20, 152, 157, 176, 195 n.39, 203 n.77, 212 n.58, 228 n.78, 229 n.5 Giroux, Robert 54, 95, 194–5 n.34 Godard, Jean-Luc 166 Godbout, Jacques 177–8 Goddard, Dwight 152, 221–2 n.4 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 17, 176 Dichtung und Wahrheit 121, 127–8, 173, 182 n.9

251

Faust 34, 121, 124, 131, 133–7, 139–40, 141, 142, 219 n.22 Grace, Nancy M. 15, 190 n.70, 203 nn.79–80, 218 n.22, 219 n.30, 223 n.14, 228 n.82 Grant, Madison 14–15 Green, Urbie 208 n.21 Guattari, Félix 17, 49, 63, 107, 195–6 n.39, 198–9 n.21, 225–6 n.50 Gysin, Brion 110 Hall, Calvin 106 Hamon, Edmond 187 n.52 Hampton, Timothy 174, 201 n.59 Harcourt Brace (publisher) 24, 54, 194–5 n.34 Hardy, Thomas 195 n.39 Hegel, G. W. F. 27 Heidegger, Martin 17, 96 Heller, Joseph 6 Hemingway, Ernest 166, 175, 179, 182 n.9 Hémon, Louis 63–4, 125 Heraclitus 32 Hinduism 76 Holmes, John Clellon 96–7, 157, 185 n.27, 216 n.93 Homer 17, 24, 25, 27, 121 Hrebeniak, Michael 15, 88, 98, 192 n.17, 217–18 n.11, 226–7 n.57 Hume, David 213 n.62 Hunt, Tim 6, 15, 45, 66, 89, 99, 190 n.69, 195 n.34, 199 n.27, 199 n.33, 209 nn.30–1, 212 n.59, 216 n.86, 228 n.2 Huxley, Aldous 182 n.9 imperialism British 11–12 and global culture 76–81 and language 50 Irving, John 179 Italian neorealism 99 James, William 107–8 jazz as cultural practice 90–3

252 Index

Kerouac’s relationship to 7–8, 83, 90–4 as model for spontaneous prose 83, 90–4, 103, 106–7, 110–11 see also poetics; spontaneous prose Joan Anderson letter 111 Johnson, Joyce 5–6, 18, 33, 45, 49–50, 54–5, 63, 98, 105, 157, 209–10 n.31, 185 n.36, 193 n.21, 193 n.24, 199 n.25, 215 n.84, 218 n.19, 219 n.20 Jones, James T. 33, 34, 192 n.15, 195 n.37, 219 n.19, 222 n.7, 226 n.57 Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka) 91–2, 93, 212–13 n.61 Joyce, James 107, 108, 109, 137, 153, 167, 176, 182 n.9, 185 n.27 Kafka, Franz 49 Kerouac, Jack “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose” 7–8, 102, 206 n.10 Big Sur 18, 176 Book of Dreams 106–7, 121–2 Book of Sketches 101 Desolation Angels 3–4, 17, 144, 145–9, 201 n.54, 210 n.35, 218 n.15 The Dharma Bums 2, 66, 142–3, 152, 154, 176, 207 n.18 Dr. Sax: Faust Part Three 9–10, 17, 34, 45, 90, 115–16, 117, 119–44, 148, 161, 176, 182 n.11 “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” 7–8, 102–7, 108, 110, 112, 116, 122, 206 n.10 “Father of My Father, The” 50, 94 Heaven and Other Poems 176, 210–11 n.42 Lonesome Traveler 24, 161, 176 Maggie Cassidy 9, 18, 120 Mexico City Blues 8, 18, 93–4, 178, 221 n.1 Nuit est ma femme, La 18, 46–51, 58, 59, 61, 120, 184 n.12 On the Road (1957 and scroll

versions) 2, 3, 4, 5, 6–7, 8, 10, 16, 17–18, 24, 40, 43, 45–6, 49–50, 53–4, 62–3, 51–81, 83–90, 95, 97, 103, 109, 110, 113, 119, 132, 133, 136, 138, 139, 168, 175–6, 178–9, 184 n.12, 196 n.39 “On the Road, écrit en Francais” 61 Pomes All Sizes 143 Satori in Paris 16, 17, 143–4, 196 n.39, 216 n.92, 229 n.5 Scattered Poems 176 Scripture of the Golden Eternity, The 79, 151, 152 Sea Is My Brother, The 46, 52, 135–6, 144, 197 n.8 Some of the Dharma 151, 152, 171 Subterraneans, The 2, 8, 16, 18, 24, 154, 176, 181 n.2, 193 n.22, 206 n.10 Sur le chemin 18, 58–61, 77, 120, 154 Town and the City, The 5, 17, 21–43, 45, 47, 48, 50, 54, 55, 57, 61, 62, 65, 89, 95, 98, 99, 108, 110, 113, 120, 123, 125, 129, 136, 144, 157, 196 n.39, 213 n.62 Vanity of Duluoz 18, 99, 144, 173, 192 n.19 Visions of Cody 9, 17, 54, 55, 83, 89–101, 103, 108–17, 119, 132, 155, 157, 164, 170, 171, 177, 197 n.8, 207 n.18, 228–9 n.4 Visions of Gerard 18, 115, 116, 120, 126, 164, 168 “Where the Road Begins” 52–3, 144 Windblown World 26–7, 29–30, 31, 45, 66, 70, 157, 195 n.38, 197 n.4, 203 n.77, 217 n.4 Kerouac, Joseph-Alcide-Léon (Leo) 14, 59, 63, 125 Kill Your Darlings 2 Lalime, Charles 14 Lankavatara Sutra, the 4

Index

LaRue, Monique 179 Lawrence, D. H. 88–9, 182 n.9, 195 n.39 Le Bihan de Kervoac, Urbain-François (LeBrice de Kérouack, MauriceLouis-Alexandre) 161, 162–3 Lebris, Pierre 166–8 LeBrix, François 161, 162 Le Guin, Ursula K. 80 Lelièvre, Sylvain 189 n.64 Le Maître, Yvonne 5, 21–3, 30, 33, 34, 37, 41–3, 46, 49, 58, 61–2, 68, 120, 181 n.2, 230 n.17 Lemire, Bernice 136 Lenrow, Elbert 194 n.33, 216–17 n.93 Lévesque, Gérard 162 Lewis, Al 168 Lewis, Jerry 160 Ligairi, Rachel 67, 204 n.82 Locke, John 213 n.62 London, Jack 185 n.27 Lord, Sterling 227 n.68, 227 n.73, 228 n.83 Louis XIV, King 163 Louis XV, King 163 Lowry, Malcolm 195 n.39 Lucretius 146 Lugosi, Bela 168 Lyotard, Jean-François 215 n.83 MacDonald, William 14 McGoogan, Kenneth 179 McLuhan, Marshall 113, 212 n.57 McNally, Dennis 4, 18, 185 n.30, 199 n.32 Maher Jr., Paul 18, 182–3 n.12, 185 n.35, 199 n.30, 219 n.23, 222 n.13, 226 n.56, 228 n.78 Mailer, Norman 71–2 Malcolm, Douglas 80, 90 Marlowe, Christopher 124, 131 Marx, Karl 214 n.70 Marx Brothers, the 160 Massey, Doreen 52, 201 n.61, 205 n.5 Melville, Herman 182 n.9 Mencken, H. L. 21 Michaux, Henri 182 n.9

253

migration French-Canadian 10–15, 45–51 as theme in Kerouac’s work 1–2, 5, 15–16, 37, 38–9, 41–3, 51–3, 131–2, 149–71 passim see also Québécois Diaspora; Franco-American culture Miles, Barry 174–5, 182 n.9, 183 n.12 Miller, David 99 Miller, Henry 166, 195 n.39 Millstein, Gilbert 8 Milton, John 33 Monk, Thelonious 207–8 n.20 Montcalm, General Louis-Joseph de 11, 131–2, 160, 189 n.63 Montherlant, Henri de 169 Moten, Bennie 207–8 n.20 Mottram, Eric 151 Muyumba, Walton 92 New York Public Library (NYPL) 45, 61, 119, 152, 161, 163, 165, 182 n.12, 216 n.88, 225 nn.46–7 Nicosia, Gerald 18, 64, 99, 157, 161, 183 n.12, 185 n.30, 193 n.21, 199 n.32, 204 n.89, 211 n.44, 222 n.13, 229 n.5 Nietzsche, Friedrich 17, 85, 88, 101, 104, 126, 175, 176, 182 n.9 O’Hagan, Andrew 5 Olson, Charles 101–2, 104, 214 n.69 On the Road (film) 2 Ovid 32, 194 n.33 Pacini, Peggy 169, 196 n.40, 225 n.49, 226 n.52 Page, Oran T. (“Hot Lips”) 207–8 n.20 Panish, Jon 7–8, 206 n.10 Paradise, Sal (character) 7, 10, 56–7, 58, 61, 63–4, 65, 66–71, 74–6, 78–80, 125, 175, 207–8 n.20 Parker, Charlie 93, 207 n.18, 207–8 nn.20–1 Paton, Fiona 136–7, 140, 218 n.18 Petrarch 174, 229 n.5

254 Index

Picasso, Pablo 166 Plato 163 Plutarch 164 Podhoretz, Norman 16, 19, 186 n.42 poetics Kerouac’s engagement with 15–19, 26–30, 32–3, 35–8, 39–41, 42–3, 49–50, 57–8, 80, 90–117 passim, 121, 173–4, 176–7 translation as part of 43, 49–50, 114–17, 123, 131–3, 158–60 see also bilingualism; jazz; spontaneous prose Pollock, Della 94 Poore, Charles 28 Poulin, Jacques 178–9 Pound, Ezra 166, 182 n.9 Pratt, Mary Louise 61 Proust, Marcel 4, 54, 96, 98, 154, 157, 167, 170, 175, 182 n.9 psychoanalysis 88, 105–7, 121–2, 139 see also Freud, Sigmund; surrealism Québécois Diaspora 1, 11–15, 21–3, 131–2, 149–71 passim, 177–9 see also diaspora studies; Franco-American culture; migration; survivance Quéméner, Hervé 162–3 166–8, 219 n.30 Rabelais, François 4, 114–16, 117, 154, 163–5, 166–7, 168, 171, 174, 175, 176, 177, 216 n.85 race and cultural contact 74–80 in Franco-American culture 155–6, 168–9 in Kerouac’s work 7–8, 67–73 see also whiteness racism against French Canadians 13–15, 68 in U.S. society 71–3, 91–3 Rancière, Jacques 27–8, 211 n.49 realism cinema as model for 99–100, 124–5

in Kerouac’s work 21–3, 25, 29–30, 95–102 spontaneous prose as 102–7, 113, 116 see also poetics; spontaneous prose Reich, Wilhelm 105–6, 107 Rexroth, Kenneth 8, 206 n.10 Ricard, François 19 Richardson, Dorothy 107, 108 Richardson, Mark 7 Rimbaud, Arthur 174, 175, 182 n.9, 197 n.11 Rivera, Diego 166 Robertson, Ray 179 Roby, Yves 13, 186 nn.47–50, 188 n.56, 196 n.1, 201 n.58 Routhier, Adolphe-Basile 186–7 n.51, 187–8 n.53, 201 n.58, 224 n.32 Roy, Gabrielle 179 Sainte-Marie, Père Anselme de 165 Sampas, Stella 143, 218 n.17, 222 n.10 Saroyan, William 26, 182 n.9 Sartre, Jean-Paul 166 satori definition of 150–3 as distinct from epiphany 153–4, 171 see also Buddhism; Suzuki, D. T. Sauvy, Alfred 81 Schelling, F. W. 27 Seven Years’ War, the see French and Indian War, the Shadow, the (radio character) 119, 124, 136 Shakespeare, William 4, 17, 24, 25, 27, 29–30, 56, 109, 121 Hamlet 22, 30, 146 King Lear 146–7, 182 n.9 Shearing, George 86 Silverberg, Robert (Chapman Walker) 179 Sinclair, May 107 Smith, Adam 213 n.62 Snyder, Gary 151 Sorrell, Richard 157 Spengler, Oswald 17, 76–8, 133–7, 141, 143

Index

Spenser, Edmund 194 n.33, 229 n.5 spontaneous prose and automatic writing 105–7, 108 jazz as model for 83, 90–4, 103, 106–7, 110–11 Kerouac’s development of 24, 25, 27, 28–9, 51, 55, 83–117 passim as realism 102–7, 113, 116 sketching as part of 94–6, 100–2, 120–2 and stream of consciousness 107–8 utopian space as object of 85, 86, 87 see also poetics Sterne, Laurence 104 Stevens, Wallace 175 surrealism 105–7, 108, 110 see also Breton, André survivance 11–16, 21–3, 41–2, 45, 62, 149–71 passim, 174 see also Catholicism; Franco-American culture; migration; Québécois Diaspora Susskind, David 16 Suzuki, D. T. 143, 151, 152–3, 221 n.4 see also Buddhism; satori Swartz, Omar 15 Taine, Hippolyte 105 Tanguay, Cyprien 155–6, 160, 161, 162 Thérèse of Lisieux, Saint (MarieFrançoise-Thérèse Martin) 33, 124–5, 142–3 Todras-Whitehill, Ethan 2–4 Tolstoy, Leo 29–30 Turrentine, Stan 208 n.21 Twain, Mark 174 Tytell, John 6

255

Valéry, Paul 104 Van Doren, Mark 25 Verlaine, Paul 175 Viking Press 54 Villon, François 115, 117, 165 Voltaire 169 Wade, Mason 157 Walker, Chapman see Silverberg, Robert Weaver, Helen 54 Weil, François 186 n.44, 186 n.48, 188 n.56, 188 n.61, 196 n.1, 222 n.6, 224 n.37 Weinreich, Regina 15, 89, 207 n.18, 211 n.50 Welles, Orson 99 Whalen, Philip 211 n.51, 216 n.92, 217 n.93, 222 n.13, 225 n.45, 227 n.64 White Jr., Edward D. 94–5, 98, 102 whiteness domination of 73 Kerouac’s relationship to 7, 10, 67–73, 80, 90–1 see also race; racism Whitman, Walt 174, 182 n.9 Williams, Raymond 220 n.35 Williams, William Carlos 182 n.9 Wimsatt, William K. 24 Wolfe, Thomas 27, 174, 182 n.9 Woolf, Virginia 108 Wright, Carroll D. 13–14, 202 n.66 Wyn, A. A. 89 Yeats, William Butler 105, 182 n.9, 213 n.62 Young, Brian 12, 186 n.45, 201 n.65 Young, Lester 207–8 n.20 Young, Stanley 89